Fauci plays spin doctor for veep

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday downplayed last week’s comment by Vice President Kamala Harris that the White House “didn’t see Omicron coming,” insisting the Biden administration was blindsided only by the “extent of the mutations” of the new strain.

Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” about Harris’ remark, the White House’s chief medical adviser said, “We definitely saw variants coming. I think what was referred [to by Harris] . . . was the extent of the mutations and the amino-acid substitutions and Omicron, which is really unprecedented.”

Harris told the Los Angeles Times on Friday: “We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming.

“We didn’t see Omicron coming,” she added. “And that’s the nature of what this awful virus has been, which, as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”

But Fauci said on Sunday that the administration was “anticipating that there were going to be variants because we have so many viruses, so much replication going on in the community.”

“If you give a virus enough opportunity to replicate, you know, it’s going to ultimately mutate, and sometimes those mutations wind up being a new variant, and that’s exactly what happened with Delta, and certainly, that’s what happened with Omicron,” he said.

Still, Fauci acknowledged that scientists were less prepared for the Omicron variant’s high number of mutations.

“It kind of came out of nowhere . . . To me, that’s really quite unprecedented,” he said.