August 23, 2022
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most public figure associated with the government’s COVID-19 strategy of government lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates, announced on Monday that he will leave his post in December.
The 81-year-old Fauci touted his 38-year career under seven U.S. presidents, whom he advised on their response to such public health threats as “HIV/AIDS, West Nile virus, the anthrax attacks, pandemic influenza, various bird influenza threats, Ebola and Zika, among others, and, of course, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic.” Fauci — who acts as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — stated he is not retiring but moving on “to pursue the next chapter of my career.” Fauci leaves office as the highest-paid official in the U.S. government. His retirement salary will come to $375,211 a year, according to calculations by Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of the government watchdog OpenTheBooks.com.
In a statement later in the day, Biden called Fauci “a dedicated public servant and a steady hand with wisdom and insight honed over decades.” Biden congratulated himself for following Fauci’s “advice as we’ve tackled this once-in-a-generation pandemic” and leaving America a “stronger, more resilient, and healthier” place.
Biden said that the doctor “has touched all Americans’ lives with his work” — a statement embraced by Fauci’s friends and foes.
“I think the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of children have been harmed in ways that they’ll pay the cost for the rest of their lives. Businesses are gone, and nevertheless, we’ve had an incredible spread of COVID everywhere,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm Monday. “I think it was the single biggest public health disaster of all time.”
“The net of his actions during the last two-and-a-half years has been tremendously damaging to the health and well-being of Americans — and, in fact, people around the world who followed his policy direction on lockdowns. And I think will be an enormous part of his legacy,” he said.
During the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx lobbied for “15 days to slow the spread,” which Bhattacharya called a “lockdown-focused strategy that closed schools, closed businesses, closed churches, mosques, and synagogues; disrupted American life and continues to disrupt American life; and did not protect people against COVID.”
Birx confessed in her recent book, “Silent Invasion,” that she knew messaging about a temporary closure was misleading. “No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. ‘Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread’ was a start, but I knew it would be just that,” she admitted.
Continue reading at https://washingtonstand.com/news/anthony-fauci-was-a-total-disaster-leading-scientist-responds-to-faucis-retirement
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Citizens Journal
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