Just hours after CDC Director Rochelle Walensky unveiled the agency’s new indoor mask mandate, Dr. Anthony Fauci was dispatched to MSNBC, his favorite network, to push the Biden Administration’s narrative for reversing course and tightening federal restrictions despite repeated promises not to.
He also tried to shift the focus to the risk to children, who remain largely unvaccinated, laying the groundwork for the inevitable battle between federal public health officials and skeptical parents.
Central to his argument is that the delta variant is responsible for “as much as 90%” of new infections in the US. Because of this, the nature of the virus has changed.
“The Delta variant is the totally dominant variant now in this country, 88% as much as 90%+…but increasingly now people who are vaccinated are getting infected with the delta variant.”
Pressed about the reason why masks in particular are necessary once again, Dr. Fauci offered a highly technical explanation that noneless doesn’t really make sense when one considers the rates of new cases and hospitalizations in the highly vaccinated states.
“The data are clear … that when a person gets infected who has been vaccinated … and they get infected with the Delta variant, that the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the Alpha variant.”
New data like these are the reason why the CDC decided to pull the trigger on the new federal mandate, and why President Biden may soon require all federal employees to get vaccinated. But Dr. Fauci insisted that the agency didn’t “flip flop”, but rather that “something has changed.”
“Something has changed. And what has changed is the virus. The CDC hasn’t changed, and the CDC hasn’t really flip-flopped at all. What’s happened is that when that earlier recommendation was made, we were dealing predominantly with the Alpha variant.”
What has changed is that across the country, deaths and hospitalizations have plunged. And unfortunately, the ultra-liberal jurisdictions where mask and vaccine mandates will be the most strict are the areas that least need these precautions. Notably, deep blue California is in the deep red category, while Texas isn’t. Only the deep red and orange states need to observe the new mask guidance.
Watch the interview in its entirety below:
Both Dr. Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky also tried to shift the focus to children by claiming that COVID is “not a benign disease” for kids.
On morning TV today, top health care officials seem to shift on covid risks to kids.
Fauci on MSNBC: With new mask mandate, “we need to protect the kids”
Walensky on CNN: Covid more deadly for kids in last year than flu in typical years; “not a benign disease” for kids— Caitlin Webber (@caitlinwebber) July 28, 2021
Dr. Fauci even offered a number:
“We have about 400 deaths among children right now with Covid-19. So we shouldn’t make the false assumption that it’s okay for kids to get infected. … We need to protect the children.”
400 deaths of children since the start of the pandemic, a number that has reportedly grown more rapidly since the delta variant first emerged.
Those deaths represent just 0.0005% of the 73MM American children, and just 0.07% of all COVID deaths.
But Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky are insistent that this represents an emerging crisis. Will COVID soon become a “crisis of child mortality?” The way things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised…
While it probably doesn’t matter to Dr. Fauci, research published by the Lancet back in March showed that children and young people remain “at low risk” for COVID. That may have been before delta became so widespread, but there’s no new data to suggest that child mortality has increased since then.
