The fallacious Anthony Fauci — for fallacious read “lying” — spoke at length with New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells about his reign of error during the Covid epidemic. The Times has posted Wallace-Wells’s account of the interview in “Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong.’” Eric Boehm condenses Fauci’s denials and deflections into the Reason column “Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures.”

At one point in the interview Fauci says this: “You are hitting on some terrific points. Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there. But if you ask the person in the street, they may say, ‘Oh, yeah, elderly are more vulnerable, but everybody’s really vulnerable’ — which is true, but to a much lesser extent.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz declared a public health emergency and commenced one-man rule for the next year-plus on March 25, 2020. I started sitting in on the daily Minnesota Department of Health press briefings on April 11. A little over two weeks later I submitted this question by email following the briefing that day: “Referring to the 286 total deaths to date, [I note that] every decedent under age 70 has died in long-term care or similar setting. The youngest person to die outside long-term care was in his 70’s. Why is it necessary to close the schools and shut down the state to protect the at-risk population?”

That was the question that prompted Walz and the department to expel me from the press briefings. Did Fauci ever say word one to mitigate the harms inflicted by the the shutdowns implemented on his advice? Boehm recalls (links omitted):

From the start, Fauci pushed for the Trump administration to tell states to lock down. “No bars, no restaurants, no nothing. Only essential services. When you get a place like New York or Washington or California, you have got to ratchet it up,” he told Science magazine in an interview in mid-March 2020.

Fauci also pushed back against evidence that lockdowns were causing unintended (though totally predictable) problems. A group of epidemiologists and other public health experts in October 2020 signed The Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a focus on protecting the vulnerable and letting everyone else resume normal life. Soon after it was published, Fauci denounced the document as “nonsense and very dangerous.”

And so on — there is much more to make a reasonably knowledgeable person in his right mind insanely angry in the interview. What an insidious clown he is.