Republicans needed a scapegoat to distract voters from supported research that led to effective Covid vaccines and urged Americans to take initial Covid vaccines and Covid boosters. Their effectiveness was overwhelming. Indeed, the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund found that COVID vaccines likely prevented 1.1 million deaths.
Trump’s abysmal Covid record, so they picked on Dr. Anthony Fauci.
To start with, Trump ignored two years of warnings that America was not equipped to handle a pandemic and that his neglect would lead to the loss of lives.
At the end of Trump’s first administration, America, the world’s richest country with the strongest economy, had more coronavirus cases and deaths from Covid than any other country, including China, whose population is more than four times larger.
The U.S. then accounted for just 4.2 percent of the world’s population but a shameful 30 percent of COVID-19 cases and 19 percent of COVID deaths. The virus’s spread had slowed in 12 other countries and China was already returning to work while the U.S. remained shut down.
Just like today’s Republicans are scouring irrelevant documents, such as Fauci’s diary, to find the slightest Fauci transgression in order to distract voters from Trump’s dismal Covid performance, Trump tried to shift the blame for failing to stop the spread of Covid cases and deaths to Obama, state governors, all sitting Democrats, the media and, most bizarrely, the WHO.
Republicans intensified their war on Covid vaccines by blocking vaccine mandates. All 27 states that asked the Supreme Court to block vaccine mandates were Republican-led, and 12 of them had already banned them at the state level. The outcomes of their attacks, ironically, proved that the vaccines saved lives. Even the Department of Health in Texas — a solidly Republican state — concluded that the unvaccinated were 20 times more likely to die from COVID.
In counties that voted heavily for Trump, monthly COVID deaths per 100,000 peaked at 35; seven times the peak in counties that voted heavily for Joe Biden. Every Senate Republican voted to overturn Biden’s vaccine mandates. Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill to block Covid vaccine mandates for public schools.
Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn warned that Biden’s door-to-door vaccine efforts could morph into a door-to-door confiscation of guns and Bibles. And Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “People … don’t need … medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.” Tucker Carlson at Fox News called the Biden vaccination plan “the greatest scandal in my lifetime.”
Trump shamefully abandoned the leading global role America played over the seven decades in fighting infectious diseases. Instead, he told governors they were on their own to find the equipment needed to fight Covid, admonishing them that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.”
Yet, in all these headwinds, Dr. Anthony Fauci supported research that led to effective Covid vaccines and urged Americans to take initial Covid vaccines and Covid boosters. Their effectiveness was overwhelming. Indeed, the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund found that COVID vaccines likely prevented 1.1 million deaths.
Tragically, these Republicans forced Dr. Faci to take the Fifth Amendment — not because he had something to hide – but because it was the only way to avoid fabricated charges and to protect himself and his family from the violence Trump has greenlighted against the people he falsely accuses.
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