Dr. Anthony Fauci is under congressional scrutiny following an appearance before a Senate committee last week, in which the former National Institutes of Health immunologist was grilled by elected officials over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has not been shy about his scorn toward Fauci, who led the pandemic response in the first Trump and Biden administrations. Paul floated conspiracy theories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, was leaked from a Chinese lab and that Fauci covered up this info. There is no conclusive evidence that the virus leaked from anywhere but nature, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from promoting such theories.
Seemingly at the advice of his lawyers, Fauci declined to entertain this political side show. Nonetheless, he serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing public health failures under President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As unfortunate as this sounds, COVID did not go away. The virus that sparked a global pandemic still regularly infects, disables and kills hundreds of people per week. Although it’s not anything like previous waves, right now cases are rising slightly across the country, especially in Alaska and Missouri, but also in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Waning immunity, viral mutations and a refusal for some people to stay up on vaccines are part of the reason why COVID is returning.
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This isn’t a pandemic anymore, according to experts, but that’s because the virus is now endemic — it’s a part of our daily lives like flu, HIV and other infectious diseases. Even once-eradicated diseases like measles are now all too common. COVID is also now a preventable disease. Vaccines, masking, improved indoor air quality and acquired immunity have all kept the virus at bay so that morgue trucks no longer fill the streets. Still, even a “mild” infection these days can be devastating and lead to long-term health problems.
But a big part of the reason COVID is endemic in the first place is because it wasn’t controlled early, like MERS and SARS-1 were, related viruses that never became pandemics. The first Trump admin completely botched its response to containing COVID, but now they can deflect from their past and current failures — including letting things like the cyclospora outbreak slip or allowing Ebola to balloon into the second biggest outbreak in history — by attacking Fauci and plugging baseless conjecture about COVID’s origins. Unfortunately, for some people, this strategy seems to be convincing.
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