Dr. Fauci's COVID Christmas Threat Must be the Final Straw | Opinion

Jason Rantz , Host, "The Jason Rantz Show"
On 10/5/21 at 7:30 AM EDT

Opinion Coronavirus Anthony Fauci Public Health

Put the Dr. Anthony Fauci Christmas tree ornament away. America's inconsistent COVID expert may want to cancel Christmas.

On Sunday's edition of CBS's Face The Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked Fauci if "we can gather for Christmas, or it's just too soon to tell?"

"You know, Margaret, it's just too soon to tell," Fauci answered.

No, it isn't.

Fauci and the Biden administration keep indulging in authoritarian impulses that are turning COVID from a public health threat into a civil liberties one. This is all going too far.

For the last several weeks, hundreds of thousands of sports fans have met at stadiums across the country to watch college and professional football. Heading into the season, media outlets and public officials focused on the COVID threat of these large crowds. They said the games could become super spreaders.

Yet there were no notable follow-ups from those outlets, politicians or public health officials—because the games were not super-spreader events. Despite the more contagious Delta variant, and a significant lack of social distancing and masking, COVID was not the inevitable threat we were told it was.

How often have we been told the threat is real or warned not to engage in a specific activity, only for the danger to never materialize and no one follow up to explain the lack of health consequences?

With 56 percent of the country fully vaccinated and almost 65 percent with at least one shot, the COVID messaging makes no sense. It's not merely contradictory—it's sending the message that vaccines do not successfully keep you out of the hospital or out of a body bag.

We are told that the vaccinated must be protected from the unvaccinated. Why is that? What's the threat from COVID to the vaccinated if the data show high levels of protection against the virus? Breakthrough cases occur—at rates almost certainly higher than the vaccines' manufacturers initially suggested—but the chances of hospitalizations or death remain low. So either the data are misleading, or there's a non-health reason for the government to exert this amount of control over us. Neither politicians nor public health officials seem willing to answer the question directly.

Fauci and the Biden administration claim COVID is more serious now than it was a year ago, so we need to mandate vaccines for a large portion of the working public. But how can it be more serious now, with so many vaccinated, than a year ago with zero vaccinations?

Last year, we were warned not to go trick or treating for Halloween. It was just too dangerous. This year, with a more contagious COVID variant? It's safe! Trick or treat to your heart's content.

We are told that wearing a mask isn't necessarily about protecting ourselves but protecting someone else.

But if that someone else refuses to get the jabs, why is it our responsibility to police their health outcomes? The vaccines are widely available and free of charge. If people want the vaccine, they should get it in consultation with their doctor. If they don't, then they're assuming the risk. The ones at risk—the unvaccinated—aren't asking for protection from the vaccinated. The reverse is certainly true, as well.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, responds to questions by Senator Rand Paul during the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on July 20, 2021. J. Scott Applewhite / POOL / AFP/Getty Images

COVID can be very serious, no doubt. But the risk of death or even hospitalization from COVID remains very low. It can be lower (or higher) based on one's age or underlying health issues.

Yet the messaging around COVID treats a roughly 98 percent case survival rate (and it's likely higher than that, given the number of unreported COVID cases) as if it's the rate of mortality. And rather than directness and honesty about the data, we get spin.

"We can't predict which people with COVID-19 will recover quickly and which people will end up in the hospital or die," Emily R. Smith, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Washington University, told USA Today. "At the population health level, we can say that less than 1 percent of people who catch COVID die from it. But at the individual health level, I can't tell you if you will be that one person in 100 or not."

But Smith's position is no different than that of someone dealing with scores of other diseases, whether more deadly than COVID or less.

The flu can kill someone, but overall, it has a very high survival rate. Still, can we be absolutely sure how an individual will deal with the flu if he or she has an underlying health condition? Yet, we don't treat the flu the way we're treating COVID. Why is that?

Meanwhile, public health leaders ignore data on natural immunity of those who have already recovered from COVID. Fauci was recently asked about the issue on CNN after Israeli researchers found significantly better protection from natural immunity than from vaccines.

"I don't have a really firm answer for you on that. That's something that we're going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response," Fauci explained.