A member of the U.S. Air Force receives the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea, on Dec. 29, 2020. (U.S. Air Force/Jordan Garner)

NATIONAL SECURITY

Military’s Recruitment Shortfall a Direct Result of Vaccine Mandate: GOP Lawmakers

By J.M. Phelps

 

0:005:46

Forty-seven Republican lawmakers recently expressed “grave concerns” about military readiness as a result of the Pentagon’s mandate in a letter (pdf) dated Sept. 15. The Epoch Times spoke to four of the lawmakers who signed the letter, which called on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the Department of Defense to withdraw its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for service members.

“As a result of [the vaccine] mandate, eight percent of the Army’s approximately 1 million soldiers face expulsion” the letter stated.

The Army has only met 52 percent of its fiscal year 2022 recruiting goal, the letter added.

“While we are primarily addressing the Army’s recruitment problem,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) said, “this issue is a problem across the board for all our uniformed services.” With no lack of respect for the other branches of service, he said, “the Army is the cornerstone of our military presence in the world.”

Higgins and other GOP lawmakers agreed that the Army’s failure to reach its recruiting goal is directly related to the military’s vaccine mandate that was put into effect by Austin in August 2021.

“This is clearly the case because 40 percent of men aged 18 to 24 have not taken the vaccine,” Higgins explained.

Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) emphasized that “the mandate clearly disincentivizes 40 percent of recruits.”

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) noted that “In the southeast, which is the area which has the most enlisted persons, that number is over 50 percent.”

“What that means is that the Department of Defense has disqualified nearly half of their recruitment pool right off the top,” he added.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on gun violence on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 8, 2022. (Andrew Harnik/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

In the history of the Army, Higgins said, “the country has never fallen so short on its recruiting goals.”

With growing threats from countries like China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, Johnson said, “we are in a very dangerous time in terms of our national defense, and we can’t afford to have shortfalls like this.”

And according to Higgins, “the readiness and deployability of our Army is the most significant factor in the discussion about the effectiveness of our Army around the world.”

Stauber agreed with the others, saying that the Pentagon’s mandate is “tyrannical” and “absolutely harms” military readiness and national security. “With the violent, uncertain, and complex world that we live in, we as a nation have to be in a position to project military strength around the world—and losing thousands of soldiers isn’t going to help that,” he said.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 14, 2022. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Necessity Questioned

“For the Department of Defense to continue the vaccine mandate is very suspect,” Johnson said. “We have a responsibility in Congress to provide oversight and to ask important questions and that’s what we did with this letter—and we’re going to get answers one way or the other.”

Johnson recognizes that “there’s a tendency with any federal agency or department to drag their feet” on responding to a Congressional inquiry, but he said he is anticipating that Republicans will be the new majority in the House after the midterms in November.

“Come January, I can’t think of a matter of oversight that is more important than our nation’s defense,” Johnson said. “We will be pressing, and we will be very aggressive.”

Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) in an interview on NTD’s Capitol Report on April 28, 2022. (NTD/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Stauber said that constituents have been pressing his office to help fight the military’s vaccine mandate.

“The facts about the unlawfulness and ineffectiveness of the vaccine are indisputable, and informed service members and their families are calling my office, asking that Congress do something to stop [Austin’s] tyrannical mandate,” he said.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said, “these families are crying out for the people who have devoted their lives to the military and defending the country.” And as a result, she said, “I had to be part of letting Lloyd Austin know this is unacceptable.”

Johnson and others called into question the necessity of the mandate given questions surrounding the vaccine’s effectiveness.

“As mentioned in the letter, the efficacy of the vaccine is in real question now,” Johnson said.

“Service members under the age of 40 have almost no risk and there’s nearly zero chance of death from the virus,” Johnson said, adding that “it’s irrefutable that natural immunity is better protection against virus when data is showing that COVID vaccinations aren’t effective against the most recent strain anyway.”

Higgins said, “the Department of Defense refuses to recognize natural immunity, but instead, they keep pushing a vaccine that’s incredibly dangers with virtually no benefit.”

Rep. Diana Harshbarger. (Official photo)

According to Harshbarger, “when Biden said the pandemic was over [in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sept. 18], it demands the immediate reversal and withdrawal of the mandate.”

But instead of ending the mandate, she said, “they’re willing to lower recruiting standards, which is only going to make things worse and create a bigger problem in the end.”

To that end, Higgins said, “even if you had a one million strong standing army, it does you no good if you can’t deploy them to fight or they are not capable of fighting.”

“It’s also incumbent upon our Army and our military leaders to protect our soldiers so they can maintain and grow their health in a fashion that keeps them deployable,” Higgins said.

Harshbarger said, “the bottom line is this: our service members didn’t volunteer to fight for our freedom just to have their own freedoms taken away,” adding that “they must be kept strong so they can be strong for all of us.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Defense for comment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/militarys-recruitment-shortfall-a-direct-result-of-vaccine-mandate-gop-lawmakers_4746896.html?utm_source=News&src_cat=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-09-22-3&src_cmp=breaking-2022-09-22-3&utm_medium=email&est=62RasyeNdaZhmiAD6OMNtovbVEEz03VRBaQWrcbZ5XMDrx7vLFJEs40HSAuA

CNN Columnist Admits Progressives Have a Problem With School Closures

Rebecca Downs

School closures due to COVID-19 absolutely devastated students in this country, something only confirmed even more so by the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress study showing math and reading scores at their lowest. Democrats, including and especially the Biden administration, shamelessly, tried to divert blame, just as they do on virtually every other issue.

In her opinion column for CNN, Jill Filipovic managed to be more clear-headed on the issue. "America has a problem. We, my fellow progressives, must admit it," the column from Tuesday now reads. Its previous title, "Before we can help students, liberals must admit school closures were a problem," was even more direct. 

Filipovic's opening paragraph is strongly worded, as she mentions "unprecedented learning losses" and warns "for many students, it may simply be too late to make up such significant setbacks." This kind of stark tone continues throughout her piece. 

Later on, for instance, she acknowledges that "It did not have to be this way." Although Filipovic claims that "the partisan finger-pointing that is already in full effect isn't particularly helpful," in the same sentence she writes that "progressives can look squarely at the harms that came from our own policies."

Of the long-term effects this study points to, Filipovic also writes that "it is a dark cloud looming over future generations."

Particularly worth highlighting is how schools in this country fared worse compared to European countries, and that black and Hispanic students also fared worse than white students:

But by the fall of 2020, when we knew much more, the US remained a global outlier in keeping schools shuttered, particularly for the youngest students who were at very low risk of serious illness from Covid-19 and were the least able to learn remotely. Many European countries sent children back to the classroom and found that even short school closures were remarkably disruptive and resulted in significant academic and social-emotional setbacks. In the US, our closures extended for much longer, and it seems our setbacks may be far worse.

...

Unsurprisingly, the students whose schools were remote for the longest periods -- disproportionately Black and Hispanic students, in part because those students are more likelyto be enrolled in the urban school districts that kept up remote learning far longer than their rural and suburban counterparts -- experienced the most significant learning losses. This is one of the many ways in which the pandemic response has further cleaved apart already-sprawling inequities.

...

The costs of school closures weren't just student learning losses. They included a mass exodusof women from the workforce, setting many of those women back financially and consigning many of them to an impoverished future. They included Black students who, according to a McKinsey analysis from last year, stand to lose $2,186 every year over 40 years in the labor force -- compared to $1,348 per year for White students.

Though Filipovic did not name names, there's no reason not to, especially when it comes to Democrats running for office this November. 

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) who is facing a surprisingly tight race in running for re-election, had quite the response while on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. As Madeline highlighted, Murray not only expressed no "second thoughts" about school closures, but claimed she was "proud" of what Democrats have done.

Then there's Karla Hernández-Mats, the running mate for Charlie Crist, who is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. Among Hernández-Mats' many terrible qualities, she denounced Gov. DeSantis for reopening schools and the economy.

Recommended

Teachers Are Refusing to Return to Work Despite Extorting Billions From Taxpayers

Madeline Leesman

Speaking of Hernández-Mats, who is the president of United Teachers of Dade who heads the largest teachers union in the Southeast, there's no mention of teachers unions in Filipovic's columns, despite how much they've fought to keep schools closed. 

Filipovic concludes her column on a hopeful note. "Liberals can win on education. But we have to get in the fight. And to do that, we must first admit that improving our nation's badly damaged educational outcomes is a battle worth fighting," she writes in her concluding party. 

She can keep dreaming. Education was the major issue in the Virginia statewide elections last November that resulted in a Republican sweep, and it could very well be this year as well nationwide as Democrats appear to not just be of the mindset that school closures were not their fault or they did nothing wrong, but that their students belong to them rather than their parents.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/09/08/cnn-columnist-admits-progressives-have-a-problem-with-school-closures-n2612832

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

By 

Becket Adams, Contributor

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated.

They warned the closures would cause serious, possibly irreversible, developmental retardation. They warned of severe learning loss.

Alas.

The critics were not just ignored, they were also maligned by a vicious cabal of politicians, news media personalities, and education professionals, most notably American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The critics were called monsters and "grandma killers." They were accused of not "trusting" the science.

"Children are resilient," the pro-closure camp smugly asserted. (No, it’s not that children are resilient. It’s that they don’t yet have the words to describe the ways in which you are harming them.)

Now, a little more than two years after the pandemic first came to America, new data confirm the mass school closures, which, by the way, Democratic politicians and teachers' unions enforced with a religious fever even long after the restrictions were shown to be little more than superstitious hocus-pokery, caused serious harm to young students.

"American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 1. "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades," the report reads , citing the first "nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."

It adds, "Math scores dropped seven points during that period, marking a first-ever decline, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called 'the nation’s report card.' The students who took the tests — given from January to March in 2020 and in 2022 — were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade."

At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the story is the same.

Who could’ve predicted this? Quite a few people, actually.

"There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic," Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, said in a 2020 paper arguing in favor of school reopenings.

However, he added, "there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home."

His and similar recommendations were rebuffed quickly by lockdown enthusiasts and teachers’ unions alike, both of whom characterized the effort to re-open schools as dangerous and even lethal.

Frustratingly enough, a not-insignificant number of parents also supported the closures, embracing the belief that in-person learning would jeopardize greatly the life and health of everyone involved. But ask yourself this: Where, exactly, do you suppose these parents got this idea? They got it from partisan state and local leaders, from grossly politicized public health agencies and teachers’ unions. They had fear pumped directly into their veins. They watched in 2020 as the Democratic National Committee ran ads claiming, among other things, that then-President Donald Trump was "risking teachers' and parents' lives" is his supposedly "desperate" push to reopen schools.

"[Trump is] ignoring how the virus spreads... going against the advice of experts," the ad said. "Do you trust him to do what’s best for our children?"

"One cannot overstate what a large role the political reaction against Trump, and his early failures on the pandemic, played in the extended closures in blue states and cities," ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis rightly observed last week. "Democrats saw a political opportunity in fanning the flames on school reopening, and it came at a cost."

Indeed.

Check this 2020 headline from the New York Times: "How Trump’s Push to Reopen Schools Backfired." The subhead reads , "Distrust of the president and his motives hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe, helping drive union opposition."

On Thursday, after the learning loss data were released, AFT president Weingarten responded.

"Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 [million] Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive," she said. "This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics."

The gall of this woman.

Weingarten acts as if the pandemic alone is responsible for the learning loss -- as if the restrictions she and her ideological allies promoted and enforced played no significant role. It's utterly shameless. Indeed, her comment is nearly as shameless as when National Public Radio declared this month, "Resistance to nuclear power is on the decline worldwide — and environmentalists helped lead the push. Here's why it's gaining support."

Yes, like Weingarten’s response this week, this actually happened. NPR actually said this.

And, yes, like Weingarten’s response, it’s a malicious, self-serving rewriting of history.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/critics-of-the-pandemic-school-closures-have-been-vindicated

CASE STUDY IN LEFTIST IDEOLOGY PATH DEPENDENCE

CASE STUDY IN LEFTIST IDEOLOGY PATH DEPENDENCE

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN HEALTH CARE, IDENTITY POLITICS

Cast your mind back to the early 1980s for a moment, and the early innings of the AIDS epidemic. It was widely understood that AIDS was predominantly spread through high-risk or unprotected homosexual contact, and public health authorities, even in San Francisco, initially said that gay bathhouses that were venues for casual and largely unprotected sexual encounters should be closed down.

In those days, however, the ethic of “liberation” and “sexual freedom” was riding high, and to be sure, homosexuality was still stigmatized by large portions of the population, such that San Francisco was an oasis for gays celebrating coming out of the closet at long last.

The furious protests of gay activists shouting that they would not be “shoved back into the closet” caused public health authorities to do an immediate about face and retreat from the common sense step of closing the bath houses. Read the Randy Shilts book And the Band Played On for a honest narrative of this shameful response—Shilts was gay himself, and died of AIDS in 1994.

And then the head of the of the infectious disease division of the NIH, a certain Dr. J. Edgar Fauci, declared that heterosexuals were just as much at risk as gays (which was not true), and thus everyone should just wear full-body condoms all the time—only a slight exaggeration, inspired by Naked Gun.

In other words, the leftist politics of liberation trumped sensible public health measures, and thousands of people died because of this political correctness. If ever there was a case of shutting down to “stop the spread,” it was then.

Fast forward to the present moment, and the outbreak of Monkeypox. It is well known that Monkeypox is spread predominantly in much the same way as AIDS, but our public health bureaucracy, now thoroughly politicized partly because of the AIDS epidemic, did cartwheels to avoid directly saying “AVOID unprotected gay sex. Oh, and by the way, can we please change the name of the disease because ‘Monkeypox’ is racist or something. . .”

My hunch was that it’s not 1983 any more, and that straight talk (no pun intended) to gays about the risks of Monkeypox would not summon forth an ideological reaction. Times have changed, and the ideology of sexual freedom uber alles is no longer the primary principle of the gay community.

And sure enough, UPI reports today:

Survey shows gay men cutting back on sex to avoid monkeypox

A survey conducted among American gay and bisexual men in early August found about half saying they’d cut down on sexual activity — including one-night stands and app-based hookups — in response to the global monkeypox outbreak.

The survey, conducted online Aug. 5-15, was led by Kevin Delaney, of the Monkeypox Emergency Response Team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These findings suggest that men who have sex with men are already taking actions to protect their sexual health and making decisions to reduce risk to themselves and their partners,” Delaney’s team reported.

The timing of the survey — and its finding that America’s gay male community reacted swiftly to the monkeypox threat — coincides with a recent global decline in monkeypox cases.

Who’s living in the past now? Leftists who learn nothing and forget nothing. And now allowing outdated political correctness to damage the gay population once again.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/case-study-in-leftist-ideology-path-dependence.php

FACING THE TRUTH ABOUT LOCKDOWNS

FACING THE TRUTH ABOUT LOCKDOWNS

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CORONAVIRUS, LIBERALS

In my opinion, the responses of governments to the covid epidemic represent the worst failure of public policy since, at least, the Vietnam War. In fact, the covid responses were probably more destructive than Vietnam. You would likely have to go back to the perverse reactions of the Hoover/Roosevelt administrations to the Great Depression to find their equal.

The centerpiece of governments’ efforts to “fight” the covid virus was lockdowns of businesses, schools, churches, and social life generally. No one ever doubted that these lockdowns entailed terrible costs, and it pretty quickly became clear that they conferred few if any benefits. But many governments around the world, including our own with the collaboration of tech magnates, ruthlessly suppressed debate over their advisability.

That is finally changing, as more and more observers are willing to say what pretty much everyone knows: the shutdown emperors weren’t wearing any clothes. See, for example, former British Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption in the hyper-establishment London Times: “Little by little the truth of lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster.” The whole thing is worth reading. Here are some excerpts:

Lockdown was an extreme and unprecedented response to an ancient problem, the challenge of epidemic disease. It was also something else. It marked one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times. In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part.
***
Lockdown was a policy conceived in the early days by China and the World Health Organisation as a way of suppressing the virus altogether (so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, except Sweden, eagerly embraced lockdown, ripping up a decade of pandemic planning that had been based on concentrating help on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.

Likewise in nearly all American states.

At first Britain stood up against the stampede. Then Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published its notorious “Report 9”. Sunak confirms that this was what panicked ministers into a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the assumptions underlying it, it might have been less impressed. …

And, as Report 9 pointed out, lockdown would not destroy the virus. It would come back as soon as the restrictions were lifted. …

It was always obvious that you could not close down a country for months on end without serious consequences. The shocking thing that emerges from Sunak’s interview is that the government refused to take them into account. There was no assessment of the likely collateral costs of lockdown. There was no cost-benefit analysis. There was no planning. In government the issues were not even discussed. Sunak’s own attempts to raise them hit a brick wall. Ministers took refuge in evasive buck-passing, claiming to be “following the science”.

Same in the U.S. But of course, “science” could never tell us whether slowing the spread of the covid virus–assuming that could be done–was worth destroying hundreds of thousands of businesses, devastating the lives of our young people, planting the seeds of future illness and death due to foregone “non-essential” medical checkups and procedures, and so on. Politicians, with few exceptions, took the coward’s way out.

We are still paying for this negligence, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for it for decades to come. In 2020, UK GDP fell by nearly a tenth, the biggest hit to the economy for at least a century. According to Treasury estimates, 460,000 people left the workforce never to return. The policy took a wrecking ball to the public finances. The IMF estimates that government spending rose by more than £400 billion, or about £6,000 for every man, woman and child. Most of this was unproductive spending. It went on paying people for not working and supporting businesses forced to cease operations. …

Then there are the non-financial costs. Other mortal conditions went undiagnosed and untreated. In October 2020, after four months of lockdown, the Office for National Statistics reported more than 25,000 excess deaths at home from conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia. A year after the last lockdown ended, the NHS still has a vast backlog. Excess deaths, 95 per cent of them due to conditions other than Covid, are running at about 1,000 a week. There has been a huge impact on mental health, with children and the poor worst affected.

The numbers would be different in the U.S, but the conclusion is the same.

The lockdown was an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime.

My own governor issued an order that said no one in the state could leave his or her house except as permitted by the governor. Is there a word for this kind of high-handed, unconstitutional authoritarianism?

Ministers and scientists responsible for a policy that has inflicted untold misery on an entire population naturally find it hard to admit they may have been mistaken. But closing ranks against the public interest usually fails in the end. There will be more embarrassing disclosures after this one. The official narrative is beginning to unravel.

Let’s hope so–here in the U.S., as well. As the official narrative does unravel, the last to know will be those who depend on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for their news. I have a feeling that ignorant tech employees will keep fighting the shutdown battle long after the war is over.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/facing-the-truth-about-lockdowns.php

Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career

Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career

By 

John Tierney

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he will be retiring in December.AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File

Whatever comes next in the pandemic, we all have cause to rejoice at the best news since the arrival of the COVID vaccine: Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has announced his retirement. His long and singularly disastrous career ends in December.

Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health. Whether or not he actually helped start the COVID pandemic — by funding dangerous research in the Chinese lab that may have created the coronavirus — he promoted a series of policies in America and the rest of the world that did even more damage than the virus.

Except possibly for the Great Depression, the lockdowns were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America.

Fauci warned that AIDS could be spread through “routine close contact” in the 1980s.

Deanne Fitzmaurice/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Fauci got away with it by invoking the authority of science while violating its fundamental principles. Before COVID arrived, the world’s leading epidemiologists had warned that lockdowns would be futile and cause catastrophic collateral damage, but Fauci simply ignored that advice.

As evidence mounted of the policies’ failure, he persisted by deploying the skills honed during five decades in Washington: bureaucratic infighting, media manipulation and fearmongering.

In the 1980s, he made national news by warning that the AIDS virus could be spread by “routine close contact” among family members, becoming one of the early prophets of the AIDS “heterosexual breakout” that would supposedly decimate the general population. That prospect needlessly terrified the public for more than a decade, but it boosted public funding for AIDS research, including a long and costly Fauci project to develop an AIDS vaccine.

Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield served on former President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 task force.

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The vaccine venture failed, but it enabled Fauci and two of his collaborators, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, to develop a relationship that they exploited during their service on the White House COVID Task Force. Birx, the task force’s coordinator, and Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined with Fauci to bully the Trump administration into following their dictates on COVID.

The three secretly agreed to all resign if any of them were fired, and they never disagreed with one another at the task-force meetings, as Scott Atlas recounts in his Washington memoir, “A Plague Upon Our House.”

SEE ALSO

Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci

Atlas, a health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, tried getting his colleagues at the meetings to consider the evidence that lockdowns and mask mandates were not working, but the three bureaucrats had no interest in debating it — or bothering to read the studies. To his amazement, they made no pretense of conducting any sort of cost-benefit analysis of their policies and never deigned to even discuss the vast social and economic collateral damage.

They were bureaucrats solely focused on compelling the public to follow their arbitrary rules. There was no reason to force vaccinations on people who had already acquired natural immunity to COVID, but the bureaucrats were determined to punish anyone who defied their authority — and silence any scientist who criticized them.

Early in the pandemic, prominent virologists expressed concerns by email that the virus had been created in the Wuhan laboratory, but they publicly dismissed that possibility after a teleconference with Fauci and other officials who had been funding research at the lab.

MORE ON:ANTHONY FAUCI

• Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci

• ‘Disastrous tenure’: House GOP vows to hold Fauci ‘accountable’ after stepping down

• Dr. Anthony Fauci to step down from his post in December

• Fauci and other health ‘experts’ are messing up monkeypox just as they did COVID, Ebola and AIDS

When eminent researchers from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford issued the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a traditional public-health policy focused on protecting the vulnerable instead of shutting down society, Fauci dismissed it as “total nonsense,” and the mainstream media, as usual, parroted his smears and claims.

Fauci owed much of his success to decades of cultivating the right journalists — always quick to return a phone call or email, always available for a TV appearance, always happy to provide an authoritative quotation when he had no idea what he was talking about. Above all, he was always ready to satisfy journalists’ need for scary news and doomsday predictions.

Terrifying the public was good for business. The journalists were rewarded more clicks and higher ratings; Fauci and his fellow bureaucrats amassed more power and bigger budgets.

Fauci became the highest-paid federal employee, earning more than $400,000 per year, and stands to collect a pension estimated at $350,000 a year. That’s an appalling sum, considering the lasting harm he has done to children and adults in America and the rest of the world. But it’s a small price to be rid of him.

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal and a co-author of “The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.”

https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/good-riddance-to-fauci-and-his-calamitous-costly-career/