When footage went viral of Dr. Anthony Fauci and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser going door-to-door in a futile attempt to hawk their COVID-19 vaccines, public sentiment ranged from outrage to derision. Watching the hapless duo get doors slammed in their faces like pedestrian salesmen was sweet justice for many, and not just the reliable Fauci antagonists. The entire episode offered a telling window into the minds of millions of Americans who are sick and tired of the misinformation peddled by the powers-that-be.
Vaccine critics now span the political spectrum, and for good reason. Just this week, socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders slammed Moderna for its “corporate greed.” Moderna’s CEO is now worth over $4 billion dollars, a fortune built almost entirely around the vaccine on the backs of the American taxpayers. That eye-popping number is poised to shoot even higher once Moderna hikes its price tag from $15 to $130 a shot later this year.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the federal government has shelled out $30 billion dollars for COVID vaccines that fell well short of their promise to stop transmission.
Residents’ cold reception to Fauci and Bowser makes sense, especially given their location: Ward 8 in Washington D.C.’s Anacostia where 91 percent of the residents are Black and where Biden won 94 percent of the vote in 2020. In other words, hardly the “Republicans” that Fauci sneered will “keep the outbreak smoldering” because “they don’t like to be told what to do.”
Yet as public health officials continued their “vaccine or bust” campaign, they lost more than just Republicans. Despite the COVID threat to kids and young adults being minimal, the nation’s capital was one of the last holdouts to abandon its ill-advised vaccine mandate for schools. In a city where nearly 60 percent of the school age population is Black, such a policy was incredibly reckless. Last fall, in lead-up to the implementation of the vaccine mandate, almost one in four D.C. students were not in compliance and faced the prospect of being barred from school.
With one in four Ward 8 families earning less than $15,000 annually and an average household income less than half of D.C. as a whole, being told that a vaccine produced under the umbrella of “warp speed” was a requirement for school attendance was bad. Worse were the performance makers put forward by the vaccine promoters that its product failed to meet.
In March 2021, CDC director Rochelle Wallensky told Rachel Maddow that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” By January 2022, the agency head conceded, “what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
Turns out the D.C. woman who said the vaccine “doesn’t cure it, and it doesn’t stop you from getting it” was on to something.
Of all the hard truths delivered in the documentary, the resident who took Fauci and Bowser to task for “inciting fear in people” stood out. During the last three years, we have been told that the health threat of a virus was worth shutting down the economy. We have been told that masks and vaccines would prevent illness. We have been told that the virus was a result of a wet market, not a Chinese lab.
Everything we have been told by government bureaucrats has been wrong, and yet they refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways. Fauci continues his endless tour of fawning media interviews, maintaining his status as a demigod among the smug ruling class in places far away from Anacostia.
Meanwhile, children have fallen further behind in school, once-great city downtowns have hollowed out, and medical professionals who dared speak out have had their livelihoods threatened. Even doctors like me, a longtime Democrat voter who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020, have been targeted.
So while it’s all good fun seeing Fauci and Bowser face the music, the policies they have pushed these last three years are anything but. We will all be living with the consequences for years to come, and it’s up to all of us to hold them to account.
Pierre Kory, M.D., is President and Chief Medical Officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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