THE PATRIOT POST - DOUGLAS ANDREWS - NOV 23, 2022
It was his final White House media briefing, but The Man of Science didn’t get the send-off he expected.
Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid bureaucrat in the entire federal government, held a farewell presser yesterday in the White House Briefing Room.
Yes, the man whose great humility, whose consistency of message, whose apolitical approach to public health, and whose unswerving allegiance to data-driven decision-making saved all but 1,085,753 Americans from the deadly NIH-funded China virus offered a few parting words for what he assumed to be an adoring and supplicant mainstream media press pool.
It didn’t quite go according to script.
Fauci, 81, plans to embark upon an outrageously lucrative retirement next month after having served as the nation’s senior-most infectious disease “expert” since 1984 and as Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser since last year.
“If there are oversight hearings, I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” promised the tiny technocrat. “You may not know, but I’ve testified before the Congress a few hundred times, okay, over the last 40 years or so, so I have no trouble testifying. We can defend, and explain, and stand by everything that we’ve said, so I have nothing to hide.”
Okay, thought The Daily Caller’s Diana Glebova, we’ll bite: “What have you done to personally investigate the origins of COVID?”
Glebova has been a fixture at coronavirus briefings since March 2020, so it would seem that she, at least as much as any other journalist in the room, had earned the right to ask the $417,608 question.
So it would seem. But White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who’d been serving as the gatekeeper for Fauci’s brief Q&A session by calling only on state-controlled journos, jumped in and stopped the briefing to scold Glebova — which caused a handful of other intrepid journalists to press Fauci on the single most important and most avoided question concerning the pandemic that has, to date, killed 6,621,772 people worldwide.
Namely: Where did it come from?
“Hold on one second,” said a faux-indignant Jean-Pierre. “We have a rigged process here. I’m not calling out on people that yell. And you’re being disrespectful to your colleagues, and you’re being disrespectful to our guest.”
Our guest? Does she mean the arrogant imp who once said, “If you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science”?
That falsely authoritative guest?
Does she mean the double-masking dolt who only a few months ago finally conceded that those vaunted COVID-19 vaccines — the ones that he and Joe Biden have been using like a cudgel against the American people — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be?
That sanctimonious and lavishly compensated guest?
Does she mean the guy who finally said, two years too late, that COVID “is not going to be eradicated, and it’s not going to be eliminated, and what’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk that they want to take”?
That government-employed guest?
Those in the briefing room appeared to have had enough. As the New York Post reports: “Other news outlets, including Al Jazeera and The Post, put in their own requests for Fauci to answer. Other reporters said the interruption was disrespectful, arguing that final briefings are usually emotionally sensitive forums.”
“Emotionally sensitive forums”? Since when are journalists more concerned about emotional sensitivity than they are about getting to the truth? (That’s a rhetorical question, since the answer depends entirely upon the political nature of the subject matter.)
“Can we get an answer?” Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett chimed in.
“We need an answer, Dr. Fauci, on the COVID origins,” the Post said to Fauci.
“Why are we still funding the EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Fauci? Why are they getting millions of more dollars?”
Things were really starting to heat up when a desperate and clearly rattled Jean-Pierre said as she looked down at her prepared remarks, “Dr. Fauci has always led with the science, and our country is stronger and healthier because of his leadership.”
So says the Ministry of Truth.
For all the damage that Anthony Fauci caused our nation, and for all the smugness and evasiveness that he showed along the way, we can only hope that the door — and a few dozen steel-toed boots — hit him hard in the arse on the way out.
LEIA MAIS >