Anatomy Of A Major Bungle

While the Right does it’s best to keep Tony Fauci at the front of their various print and cable news cycles, from Rand Paul’s accusation that Fauci is responsible for the global Covid-19 pandemic, to rehashes of the times Fauci has corrected himself on mitigation issues such as masking, the profound and perhaps even fatal wrongheadedness of one of their favorite physicians, Dr. Marty Makary, has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins, penned a controversial op-ed last February in the Wall Street Journal stating that the U.S. would reach herd immunity by April of this year. Makary followed up his opinion piece by openly criticizing Fauci a month later for Fauci’s alleged failure to acknowledge the level of natural immunity present in the US population.

And so confident was the good Dr. Makary in his ultimately flawed logic that he penned yet another op-ed. this time in the New York Post in late May of this year, making this startling statement: The truth is this summer will be spectacular. Americans will remember the fullness of life and reconnect with people and activities that they miss. There will be little to no COVID news this summer.” Yup. There will be little to no Covid news this summer. Oooops!

So what is the Covid news this summer? Yesterday from CBS: “Delta variant drives fourth wave of COVID-19 pandemic across the U.S.” or “New South Florida COVID-19 Test Sites Pop Up As Cases Increase At An Alarming Rate” or ” Missouri’s governor navigates a sea of COVID-19 troubles” or “Arkansas sees increase of 1,022 COVID-19 cases Sunday” or “13 hospitals in Mississippi have no ICU beds available due to COVID-19 Delta variant spike” . I could go on but I think you get the picture. There’s a lot of summer left and, unfortunately, there is going to be Covid news for the rest of it and likely precious little of it will be good.

While Fauci, Michael Osterholm, Deborah Birks and others have reversed themselves occasionally on the efficacy and necessity of various mitigation measures such as masking, social distancing, capacity limits, etc. none of them have made a blunder of this magnitude. From February through the end of May, Makary has been telling us that the pandemic is almost over because we’ve reached herd immunity through both vaccination and infection. It makes you wonder how many state, federal and local republican legislators have been listening to this guy. Republicans in Florida, Iowa, Texas and elsewhere have passed laws prohibiting mask mandates in schools, even as the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends universal masking in public schools this fall, even for the vaccinated. I mean, we don’t need masks if the pandemic is over via herd immunity, right?

So who will GOP leaders listen to going forward? The American Academy of Pediatrics, or Marty Makary, who told us just two months ago that there would be little or no Covid news this summer?

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