Rubio vs. Fauci Is Amazing
Marco Rubio inadvertently told us what he thinks of Republican voters.
In the course of his young political career, Marco Rubio has been a Tea Partier, a Reformicon, and a neoconservative. Now heās auditioning for the role of MAGA FAN #7 by trying to paint Anthony Fauci as the real villain of the pandemic. His strategy seems to be: Dazzle the Trumpenproletariat so completely that they adopt him as their new king.
Itās adorable. The political equivalent of leaving your husband in hopes of catching the eye of pharma bro Martin Shkreli.
Over the weekend, Rubio paused from tweeting Bible verses in order to suggest . . . well, I donāt want put words Liddle Marcoās mouth. See for yourself:
Of course, being āeliteā is really a state of mind. If you went to the University of Pennsylvania and live in a private, oceanside, gated club, youāre not elite. If you went to Harvard and own a tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, youāre not elite either. And if youāre a healthy 49-year-old with no risk-factors who jumps to the head of the COVID vaccine line just because youāre a U.S. senator?
Thatās not being elite either. The poor guy was tricked into getting the shot. By that awful Fauci guy. Probably.
For guys like Rubioāand Joni Ernst, who also jumped to get the vaccine ahead of front-line healthcare workers after claiming that she thought COVID was NBD and that the real number of deaths from the virus was under 10,000āthis is all just kabuki theater. They belong to a party that is populated by people who hate āelites.ā So they have to hate āelites,ā too. And since the definition of who or what is āeliteā is infinitely elastic, Rubio tries to butch up whenever thereās a clear target.
And since Donald Trump hates Anthony Fauci, then Fauci is, ipso facto, an elite. Period, the end.
Nothing else matters.
For instance, Fauci did not ālieā about wearing masks.
At the very beginning of the arrival of the virus, Fauci counseled against wearing masks before spending the next ten months urging people to wear them.
Why this change? In mid-February, there were few cases of COVID-19 in America, and Fauci has said he thought it would be best to save the masks for the first responders and medical professionals dealing with the sick, since masks were, at the time, in very short supply. You can try to lawyer this basic truth seven ways to Sunday if you want, but thatās all it is: lawyerly word games.
And these word games are done in bad faith. Because youāll notice that there are still peopleābig, famous, Republican peopleāwho ostentatiously refuse to wear masks in high-risk situations. And Marco Rubio, who is absolutely outraged that Fauci didnāt command every American to go out and buy up N95s in February, has absolutely nothing to say about them.
Itās also bad faith because calling Fauci a liar purposefully ignores how little was known about SARS-Cov-2 in February and March. For instance, remember how much time and energy was spent worrying about dealing with transmission through fomites early in the pandemic? But it turns out that the virus does not spread easily through surface transmission.
In the same vein, our understanding of asymptomatic transmission of COVID has changed as well. As Fauci told the Washington Post in July, āWe didnāt realize the extent of asymptotic spread. What happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasnāt a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on thatās plain clothā¦so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.ā
No matter how Team Red Hat wants to categorize Fauciās statements, this is not a ālie.ā This is changing oneās position based on new information as it becomes available.
Ditto Fauciās statements on the proper level America needed to obtain to achieve āherd immunity.ā In an interview with the New York Times, Fauci acknowledged that he has slowly been adjusting the necessary herd immunity rate upwards, from 60 percent to 70 percent, then to 75 percent, then to ā75- to 80-plus percent.ā
Fauci noted he changed his projections āpartly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.ā
A group of prominent epidemiologists supported Fauciās position when they told the Times the early range of 60 to 70 percent was almost āundoubtedly too low,ā and with the virus becoming more transmissible, āit will take greater herd immunity to stop it.ā
Again, contra Rubio, this was not a ālie.ā For one, Fauciās estimate is essentially meaninglessāit is an estimate of something that will actually happen, independently, in the real world. We will achieve āherd immunityā when the number of people who have developed antibodies, either through infection or immunization, slows and then stops the spread of the virus in the population. We will find out what it is when we get there, but even that final tally will be a statistical construct based on approximations and surveys. Will the final number for āherd immunityā be 68 percent? Or 72 percent? Or 74.684021 percent?
No one knows and further, it does not matter. To claim that an epidemiologist is ālyingā when their ballpark estimate of what it will take to reach herd immunity for a novel coronavirus slides around by a few percentage points is blinkered.
Actually, thatās not true. Because Rubio isnāt doing this because heās stupid. Heās doing it because heās an ambitious coward desperate to earn the approval of a deranged man who still has a chokehold on the Republican party.
And it only serves to sow distrust among the segment of the population which already views scientific expertise as a marker of the evil āelites.ā
Since the pandemic began, Donald Trump has belted out falsehood after falsehood, downplaying the virus and costing Americans their lives by the hundreds of thousands. For months, Trump claimed the cases were only going up because testing was being increased. He continued to hold superspreader campaign events in states where cases and deaths were surging.
In early February, Trump literally told Bob Woodward he knew how dangerous the virus was, but was downplaying it to the public āin order to reduce panic.ā Does Marco Rubio have anything to say about this ālieā?
Of course not. Trying to undercut Fauci is simply a tactic meant to appeal to the most deranged voting bloc of the GOPāthe QAnon-friendly conspiracy theorists who bought into the āPlandemicā hoax that suggested Fauci had created the coronavirus as a money-making scheme.
And when Rubio beats up on Fauci, what heās really doing is signaling that he thinks those people are in charge of his party.
Which, if you squint real hard, might be a public service. Of a sort.
