Dr. Fauci needs a dose of reality
“He allowed the communications department of the White House to send out a list to all of the media, all of the networks… all of the print press, about all of the mistakes I’ve made, which was absolute nonsense because there were no mistakes.”
— Dr. Anthony Fauci, in an interview with Britain’s The Telegraph, referring to how Donald Trump treated him.
Maybe it’s because “Dr. Fauci” is a household name around the world. Maybe it’s arrogance borne from becoming the nation’s “goto” guy on coronavirus. Or maybe it’s political payback.
Whatever the reason, Dr. Fauci is certainly warranted to hold Mr. Trump in disdain. However - and this is a huge however - that doesn’t entitle him to revise history to a narrative of his liking, where mistakes are conveniently ignored and the truth becomes subjective.
In that light, here’s a much-needed dose of reality:
1) To be clear, this author respects Dr. Fauci, believing that, overall, he has done an acceptable job as the government’s top infectious disease expert. This assessment is made without political prejudice, but, sadly, that isn’t the case with many on the Right. For the last year, some Trump supporters have unfairly demonized him, to the point where he and his family continue to need armed protection. If you want to disagree with Dr. Fauci on the merits, fine. This column is about to do just that. But bashing him under the premise that his strategy was motivated by
“anti-Trump” sentiment misguided.
Let’s not forget that Dr. Fauci has advised presidents since 1984, so trying to paint him as a leftist anti-Trumper is disingenuous. To succeed in his role, he must be scientist, bureaucrat, and yes, sometimes a politician. Through his actions, Dr. Fauci made it clear that his primary focus was not, and is not, politics.
2) With that said, Dr. Fauci’s most recent mistake was mentioning Donald Trump in the interview. Was the doctor treated poorly? Yep. But so what? It goes with the territory. Donald Trump is gone, and Dr. Fauci is still there, so the case should have been closed, especially given the challenges that lie ahead.
But in teeing off on Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci made an unforced error in the battle against coronavirus. Those who viewed him with suspicion feel vindicated in their belief that he “had it out” for President Trump. Perception is reality, and the reality is that millions will now ignore anything Dr. Fauci says about combatting COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci should have been smart enough not to reference Donald Trump, and instead focus only on the fight ahead. But in letting things become personal, he created a needless setback at the most critical juncture to date. When will people learn that viruses don’t care about turf battles, and that stupid mistakes cost lives?
3) As this column has repeatedly discussed, the most important weapon in fighting a pandemic is credibility. If you lose that, your
is road back to respectability is long, arduous, and full of body bags.
So it was incomprehensible that Dr. Fauci tried to rationalize, instead of apologize for, a big mistake he made last year. After throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, he was sitting in the empty stands directly next to his wife and friend - with his mask off. Sitting by his wife is obviously acceptable. But Dr. Fauci justified being next to his friend because he had gotten tested the day prior and was negative. Really? And what if he, or the friend, had contracted COVID in the intervening time period? If so, and if Dr. Fauci had become infected (or worse), the reverberations would have been titanic.
Yet the controversy could have been avoided had the Doc followed his own advice: Wear his mask and sit 6 feet from his acquaintance. By ignoring the very same guidelines that he had been hammering home to the American people - while calling the critics “mischievous” - Dr. Fauci struck out big time and lost tremendous credibility.
4) Dr. Fauci made a number of other questionable calls after the pandemic began.
The outbreak originated in China in November 2019, which should have caught the attention of America’s top infectious disease officials. It began ripping through China to such an extent that news reports alleged China was burning thousands of bodies in crematoriums. Then, on Jan.
23, 2020, China enacted the largest lockdown in human history. The cat was out of the bag: It was uncontrollable, and with 100 percent certainty, would soon be smashing upon America’s shores. Yet:
- On Jan. 21, Dr. Fauci stated, “This is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
- On Feb. 17, he said that the danger to Americans was miniscule - and that people should be more worried about the flu.
- On Feb. 29, Dr. Fauci told the American people: “Right now, there is no need to change anything that you are doing on a day-by-day basis. The risk is still low.”
Really? Given his knowledge of how infectious diseases spread, and the spiking cases in other countries, how could he have possibly said that? Sure, he added that things could change “when you start to see community spread.” But when people are told not to change behavior, and, as mentioned below, when testing is almost non-existent, and mask use is discouraged, by the time community spread is detected, it’s far too late.
- And on March 9, he mindbogglingly stated: “If you are a healthy young person…if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship.” How could he suggest doing that when young people were the biggest spreaders, and often asymptomatic?
Yes, Dr. Fauci said that the coronavirus could become a global pandemic. But after watching COVID ravage China, and start surging in other countries, Dr. Fauci still allowed for the possibility that it was something that could be “reasonably well-controlled.” Well-controlled? Sure, and pigs might be able to fly. Come on, Doc! If the
most authoritarian regime in the world, with its limitless resources, couldn’t stop it, how could anyone possibly think America would, especially when people were being told to live in a business-as-usual way?
There are things called airplanes, and they transport millions of people into America each year. To think that COVID had not gained a foothold by February especially given that our testing capability was almost nil due to monumental mistakes by the CDC was naïve at best, dangerous at worst.
5) Perhaps Dr. Fauci’s biggest mistake was initially dismissing the use of masks for the general public. For the top infectious disease expert in the world’s preeminent nation to feel that way was simply ludicrous, as it created huge confusion nationwide.
Of course they are effective! Masks were widely used during the 1918 pandemic to help mitigate the spread of the Spanish flu. And many Asian countries routinely encourage mask use to deter viral transmission, because doing so works.
But things
Fauci.
You don’t have to be a doctor to understand that masks provide benefits for both infected and non-infected somehow, were lost
those on Dr.
people, as they catch and protect against a significant portion of exhaled respiratory material. The discouragement of mask use was a huge mistake, because it contributed to countless people transmitting the virus - with dire consequences.
There were plenty of other mistakes made by the Administration, from unloading a coronavirusstricken cruise ship with no social distance between passengers, to not having a single government official screen incoming passengers from overseas, including Hong Kong in February (as this author witnessed first-hand). Yet Dr. Fauci said nary a word.
The purpose of assigning blame is to learn, so that when another virus (or more C19 variants) rears its head, we will be better prepared. If we don’t call out those mistakes, right here and now, and instead wait until the pandemic passes, no one will care, and nothing will change.
Just goes to show that the best vaccine is an injection of common sense.
WEST CHESTER » Expressing some reluctance at being asked to do so, a Chester County Court judge on Tuesday accepted a probationary sentence agreement for a former Main Line man accused of handcuffing and suffocating his then-girlfriend in their bedroom more than two years ago.
But for the agreement of the victim in the case, said Common Pleas Court Judge Patrick Carmody to defendant David Bookstaber, “I might have rejected this plea, frankly.
“I think what you did was harmful, but I don’t think you thought that you did anything wrong,” Carmody said as Bookstaber listened over a video conference call from his home in Idaho. “I think you did it because she was irritating you,” not that he was protecting her from hurting herself during an emotional melt-down the night of the incident.
Bookstaber had admitted at his trial in November — which ended with a hung jury and a set of acquittals — that he and his girlfriend, Alicia Rosato, had been drinking that night and began quarreling. When he thought she would hurt herself because of her highly agitated state, complicated by a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs, he said he put a set of handcuffs he had in the house on her wrists and sat atop her for several hours while the two were unclothed. She eventually was able to convince him to free her and called Tredyffrin police.
“I find it appalling to handcuff anyone,” Carmody said, noting that had he been found guilty at the trial he had considered ordering Bookstaber held in handcuffs for five hours. “I just found that what you did was very inappropriate.”
The judge said he accepted the resolution to the case because Rosato had agreed to forgo a retrial on the remaining charges involving the handcuffing incident — unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, and simple assault. Bookstaber was found not guilty of felony strangulation and another count of simple assault.
As part of the resolution to the case worked out between the prosecution and Bookstaber’s defense attorney, he pleaded guilty to a summary charge of disorderly conduct and was placed on non-reporting probation for 90 days. He was also ordered to have no contact with Rosato, with whom he had restarted a relationship after the incident in December 2018, which ended in late 2019.
Bookstaber, after answering Carmody’s questions about his decision to enter the guilty plea with terse yes or no response, did not address the underlying accusations in the case, or the facts that the prosecution put on the record — that he created a “hazardous or physically offensive condition which serves no legitimate purpose” — except to say he agreed with them.
Assistant District Attorney Kaitlyn Macauley, who had prosecuted the case with Assistant District Attorney Michelle ThurstlicO’Neill, told Carmody that she had spoken with both Rosato and the police involved in the case, and had discussed the “pros and cons” of retrying the case. They agreed that rather than going back in front of a jury, a proper resolution could come through a summary plea from Bookstaber. Rosato, she told the judge, had approved the plea arrangement.
Carmody acknowledged that a retrial might have ended again with a second hung jury, as the panel wrestled with questions about Bookstaber’s intent the night of the quarrel and Rosato’s inconsistent and changing statements as to whether Bookstaber was trying to help or harm her.
“That has been beaten around for two years,” Carmody said with a sigh. “I just want the two of them to go their separate ways.”
Also involved in the proceeding was the decision by the prosecution to drop charges of hindering apprehension and destroying evidence and intimidation of victims and witnesses, tied to accusations by Rosato that Bookstaber pressured her into recanting her original complaints and maneuvering to get the charges against him dropped. Carmody noted that he thought that a “weak” case primarily because of Rosato’s inconsistencies, and text messages between the two that showed them essentially collaborating on what she might say to authorities.
Bookstaber’s attorney, Joseph P. Green Jr. of West Chester, said after the proceeding the matter had eaten up far too much time and effort over the past two years.
“The expenditure of resources over the years of this unfortunate debacle is really difficult to understand,” Green said as he left the courtroom. “The amount of energy expended on the allegations of obstruction in particular was discouraging.”
The case — essentially accusations of domestic violence that, while serious, might not otherwise have created much of a ripple in the Chester County legal world — drew attention because of the connection the defendant has to another, yet unresolved, crime.
A Yale graduate and former marksman with the U.S. Air Force, Bookstaber has been identified in court documents as a “person of interest” in a homicide investigation involving a 62-year-old widow, Denise Barger, who was found dead in her Tredyffrin home in June 2016. She lived alone, in a house next to where Bookstaber and his family lived at the time.
In a search warrant issued by Chester County Detectives at the time, police said they found a trail of blood from Barger’s bedroom on the second floor of her home, down a set of stairs, out a rear door, and across a yard towards Bookstaber’s home on Heatherstone Drive. He has not been charged with any crime in the case, which is still under investigation.
Bookstaber, 44, had had confrontations with Barger in the months leading up to her death, partially over her complaints about gunfire coming from the woods behind his house.
Green addressed that matter on Tuesday by defending Bookstaber against any notion that he was involved in Barger’s death.
“He is innocent of that,” Green said. “He hasn’t been charged with that and the reason he hasn’t been charged is that there is insufficient evidence to show that he did anything.”
Bookstaber was arrested
on Dec. 5, 2018, after Rosato called Tredyffrin police to say he had handcuffed her when she began berating him for neglecting him on their “date night,” restrained her on a bed for about six hours at his home on West Golf Club Lane, and held a pillow over her mouth causing her twice to pass out.
At his trial, the two sides presented their conflicting versions of the events that occurred the night of the handcuffing, but also argued over Rosato’s credibil
ity, which the defense said was so conflicted that the jury could not believe her testimony about what happened that night.
Green presented Rosato with multiple instances in which she lied to police and told friends that she was intending to file a lawsuit against Bookstaber to get money from him.
Green maintained that Bookstaber was justified in handcuffing and restraining Rosato the night of the incident in order to protect himself from her assaults — he sustained a bite on the back of his neck during the confrontation — but also to keep her from hurting herself.
But Thurstlic-O’Neill said the defense was attempting to take the focus off Bookstaber’s own behavior, which he acknowledged in police interviews, and to blame Rosato, who was the “perfect victim” of his violence.
“We didn’t choose Alicia to be the victim in this case,” Thurstlic-O’Neill said. “Mr. Bookstaber did. She was weak, able to be manipulated, and if all else failed he would be able to make her look crazy. This case is about Mr. Bookstaber’s conduct, not hers.”