Fauci, Weingarten’s shameful ‘don’t blame us’ lies

What weasels: Anthony Fauci, who repeatedly misled the nation on COVID, and Randi Weingarten, who played a key role in forcing destructive school shutdowns, refuse to take any blame for America’s pathetic pandemic response.

“When people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy,’ it wasn’t Fauci. The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] . . . made those recommendations,” the doc fumed in a New York Times interview. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did.”

Pure bull.

In an era when Americans were instructed to “follow the science,” Fauci openly declared that he was the science. To defy his recommendations — all basically in favor of maximum restrictions — was to defy science itself.

And, in the end, no one did more to destroy trust in public-health officials more than Anthony Fauci.

Now he admits something “went wrong” with the nation’s COVID response, yet blames “political divisiveness,” “the culture wars,” a failing “local public-health and health-care delivery system” and “racial and ethnic health disparities.”

Anything, that is, but his own horrendous advice.

That includes not just unavoidable mistakes in dealing with an unknown virus, but a host of intentional lies, coverups and flip-flops on key issues. Among much else, he:

• At the outset, deemed the threat of a nationwide pandemic “miniscule.”
• Told the nation not to wear masks, then reversed himself — insisting they were essential. (Turns out, mask mandates actually don’t work.)
• Urged excessive and prolonged lockdowns.
• Discounted the risk of “breakthrough” cases.
• Mocked the idea that COVID escaped from the Wuhan lab, dismissing it as mere a “conspiracy” theory. Now that a consensus is emerging that a lab leak is the most probable source, he claims he always had an “open mind” about it.

Even now, as the nation tallies up the social, economic and even public-health damage from Fauci-backed policies, he claims his hands are clean: “I’m not an economist,” he pleads. “It was for other people to make broader assessments.”

Yet in May 2020, he publicly warned that letting his public-health advice be overruled for economic reasons carried “a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control” and so “set back” progress to “economic recovery.”

In contrast, American Federation of Teachers boss Weingarten at a Wednesday hearing claimed that one reason schools stayed closed was that “the economy was prioritized” in the US pandemic response.

That, somehow, is why Europe’s schools suffered far fewer restrictions.

She took zero responsibility for pushing medically needless, prolonged school closures that led to historic learning losses for kids.

Even as a new report showed that she and her union were key to Biden-era Centers for Disease Control directives that restricted so many kids to the farce of “remote learning” for so long.

Heck, she even admitted at the hearing that she has top-level (better than most in Congress) access to CDC decision-makers: “Yes, I have Director [Rochelle] Walensky’s direct number.”

The damage is done; now those who misled the nation hope to dodge responsibility.

Shame on them, and shame on all who empowered them.