Dr. Anthony Fauci has never been muzzled by President Trump, as the lamestream media often charged, but maybe he should have been and should be still. Before his tour de farce before the Senate Health Committee, the shy, modest, and unassuming Dr. Fauci emailed a New York Times reporter with a preview of his testimony,  an apocalypse now prediction if we don’t hang on to and follow his sage and expert advice:

Dr. Anthony Fauci emailed New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg Monday night with a preview of his message for a Senate hearing on Tuesday in which he warns of “needless suffering and death” if the country opens “prematurely” from the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus lockdowns…

Stolberg posted Fauci’s message to Twitter:

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Or we could just sit here and wait for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not work while our economy atrophies and people turn to drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and even suicide as their nest eggs dreams, livelihoods evaporates. Many would argue, and I count myself among them, that Fauci’s consistently wrong advice using consistently wrong computer models has led to needless suffering and death.

Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show recently asked Dr. Marty Makary, professor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. what he thought of Fauci’s performance thus far and his assessment was not good:

He's a good laboratory virologist. But you know, in terms of preparing this country, he missed it…

For two months from January 15th when we had our first case confirmed walking around in the United States on U.S. oil until March 15th, with the country latching on to every word he says, he never once prepared this country with anything beyond simple hygiene and basic virology lessons.

He went on the media every day, on every show. Never once did we hear, let's get ready with more PPE. Let's build up our stockpiles. Let's stop nonessential travel. Let's get more swabs. Let's build up capacity with reagents and testing.

So, that was a big miss, and I don't know whether or not to blame him because we all make mistakes, or the entire country putting their faith and stock in one doctor.

Ouch.  His pronouncements have been dangerously and consistently inaccurate, as when he asserted that the coronavirus was nothing to worry about and we should just get on with our lives. As The Hill reported on January 26::

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said Sunday the American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” Fauci said during an interview with radio show host John Catsimatidis.

“But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.”

Or how about his sage advice on masks and the now-you-need-them now-you-don’t flip-flop on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on March 8: 

When it comes to preventing coronavirus, public health officials have been clear: Healthy people do not need to wear a face mask to protect themselves from COVID-19.

"There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes. 

While masks may block some droplets, Fauci said, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.

Coronavirus was nothing to worry about. There was no need to wear face masks. Fauci has been the Pied Piper of economic and medical misinformation. After he changed his mind and decided that we needed to shut down the world’s greatest and booming economy, he did so on the basis of bogus models.

First Fauci and Birx used the discredited Ferguson model to persuade Trump to lock down the economy. A New York Times reporter wrote on how apocalyptic nonsense from researcher Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College was used to dupe the White House Coronavirus Task Force and influence President Trump to accept Fauci’s draconian lockdown:

Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.

To curb the epidemic, there would need to be drastic restrictions on work, school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was available, which could take 18 months, according to the report, compiled by British researchers…

…Asked at a news conference with President Trump about what had led to the change in thinking by a White House task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, one of the task force leaders, said new information had come from a model developed in Britain.

We are trapped in this suicidal national lockdown because Fauci relied on and believed a report from the same doofus who in 2005 predicted that as many as 200 million people would die from the bird flu and in 2009 that British deaths from the swine flu would number 500,000 annually. Deaths numbered 500.

Even Fauci must have realized the absurdities of such numbers, for he soon turned to another model from the University of Washington. But that model’s projections on cases and deaths changed enormously and frequently as new data came in, making accurate projections unreliable. Even Fauci noted:

“As we’re getting more data and seeing the positive of effect of mitigation, those numbers are going to be downgraded, as you’ve said,” Dr. Fauci said on Fox News. “I don’t know exactly what the numbers are going to be, but right now it looks like it’s going to be less than the original projection.”

In an article in the Washington Post quoting Dr. Fauci on computer models, he said

…there are too many variables at play in the pandemic to make the models reliable: “I’ve looked at all the models. I’ve spent a lot of time on the models. They don’t tell you anything. You can’t really rely upon models.”

Who elected Dr. Fauci President? Fauci keeps moving the goalposts. First COVID was not a threat. Then it was. We didn't need masks. Then we did. This is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.  Now he tells us we have to wait for a vaccine for his permission to educate our children, worship our God, or visit our doctor?

Home of the brave and land of the free? Thanks to Fauci, we empty our jails so we have room for nail and hair salon owners wanting to feed their children. Fauci warns of needless suffering and death from a premature reopening of the economy he shut down. We are already miserable and dying.

We are dying from conditions not being treated because the hospitals and doctors are limited to so-called essential treatments and services. We are dying from suicide and depression and hopelessness in an atrophied economy. We are dying from vanished nest eggs, retirement plans, and dreams. We are dying from jobs that will never come back and businesses that will never reopen

We are dying in an economy whose upward curve your advice has flattened. You have destroyed the American dream almost singlehandedly and done what no foreign adversary ever could -- brought America to its knees.

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul rightly took Dr. Fauci apart for his apocalyptic Senate testimony:

“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year,” Paul said.

Paul rebuked Fauci, saying: “I don’t think you’re the end-all. I don’t think you’re the one person who gets to make a decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.”

I don’t think he’s the end-all either. To Dr. Fauci the U.S. is one big clinical trial and we are lab rats in his experiment. As America dies from bureaucratic asphyxiation, it's time we got a second opinion

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.