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July
21
2020

Now We Have Proof Dr. Fauci Is Full of Crap and Can't Be Trusted
Matt Margolis

According to a recent poll, two-thirds of voters trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, not President Trump, when it comes to information on the coronavirus.

Well, if you think you can trust Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, you now have every reason to question his judgment. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Dr. Fauci, the trusted expert, actually lauded New York’s response to the coronavirus.

We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York,” he told PBS’s Judy Woodruff. “New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly.”

I used to have faith in Dr. Fauci’s judgement, but that faith has waned over the past few months, and is now completely gone. How exactly does anyone look at what happened in New York and say that’s a model example for fighting the coronavirus?

Let’s look at the evidence.

New York’s lockdown came late

President Trump issued stay-at-home guidelines on March 16, 2020. But Cuomo didn’t order a lockdown until March 22, which was six days after San Francisco shut down and three days after the State of California. California, which has nearly double the population of New York, hasn’t been hit nearly as hard. As of Saturday evening, New York has had 411,006 cases and 32,167 COVID-19 deaths. California, however, has had 380,487 cases and 7,660 deaths.

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, “leaders in states like California and Ohio acted quickly to contain the spread,” while Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio “delayed taking measures to close the state and city even as the number of cases swelled, despite warnings from doctors, nurses and schoolteachers.”

But Fauci thinks New York did things correctly?

Cuomo was clueless about New York’s needs

Cuomo was praised early on for his public rifts with President Trump, but when it came down to it, he was so grossly unaware of the situation in his state that he requested 30,000-40,000 ventilators to help see them through the pandemic—when they only needed about 6,000. It made for great drama when Cuomo accused Trump of not providing enough ventilators, declaring, “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die,” but eventually he admitted that New York had more than enough ventilators, and ended up giving extra ventilators to other states that needed them.

Cuomo was so completely unaware of the hospital needs in his state that when the Naval hospital ship USNS Comfort came to provide relief for New York City, it floated in the harbor for three weeks almost completely empty before he eventually realized it wasn’t needed. Cuomo’s estimates of New York’s need for hospital beds were completely wrong.

But Fauci thinks New York did things correctly?

Cuomo sent thousands of nursing home residents to their deaths

On March 25, New York state ordered nursing homes to accept patients regardless of their coronavirus status—a deadly mistake. Even then, it was known that the elderly were more vulnerable to the virus, so having patients who tested positive for the coronavirus in nursing homes allowed the virus to spread rapidly, killing thousands.

Cuomo nevertheless defended the policy, insisting that nursing homes didn’t have a right to object. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that,” he said.

Soon after Cuomo’s mandate was announced, a national association of nursing home doctors protested the policy, saying it posed “a clear and present danger to all of the residents of a nursing home.” A patient advocacy group called The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths also urged Cuomo to change the policy.

He did not. He repeatedly defended the policy, as did Howard Zucker, New York State’s health commissioner. As the death toll rose, Cuomo quietly changed the policy so that nursing home patients who died in a hospital were not counted as nursing home deaths, possibly to cover up the devastating impact of his policy.

It wasn’t until May 11 that he finally rescinded the order, but the damage had been done. Nursing home patients represent a mere 0.46 percent of the United States population but account for at least 43 percent of all coronavirus deaths.

But Fauci thinks New York did things correctly?

Cuomo kept the subways running, but waited months to clean them

New York’s subway system has continued to operate during the pandemic, but nightly closures and disinfecting cleaning weren’t implemented until May 6, 2020—nearly two months after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. Before that, they were only disinfected every 72 hours. While there’s been some debate about whether the virus can survive on surfaces, and for how long, New York allowed its subway to facilitate the transmission of the coronavirus for months virtually unimpeded.

But Fauci thinks New York did things correctly?

A Wall Street Journal investigation panned New York’s response

Last month, The Wall Street Journal spoke with “nearly 90 front-line doctors, nurses, health-care workers, hospital administrators, and government officials, and reviewed emails, legal documents, and memos, to analyze what went wrong” in New York, and identified seven missteps: improper patient transfers; insufficient isolation protocols; inadequate staff planning; mixed messages between state government, city government, and hospital officials; over-reliance on government sources for key equipment; procurement-planning gaps; and Incomplete staff-protection policies.

But Fauci thinks New York did things correctly?

As far as I’m concerned, Dr. Fauci has lost all his credibility. New York is one of the coronavirus hotspots of the world because they failed to flatten the curve. New York (or, more specifically, downstate) had the worst response to the coronavirus in the United States. Other states may be experiencing increases in cases now, but these states succeeded in flattening the curve while New York didn’t. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio failed their constituents, and I believe Dr. Fauci is failing us, because there’s no way anyone can say New York did anything right.

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News tips, praise, hate mail, and media inquiries can be sent to [email protected]. Matt Margolis is author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy, the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama and The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. He lives with his family on a vineyard near Buffalo, New York.

 

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