Dr. Fauci Probably Would’ve Preferred Shaking Your Unwashed Hand To This Laura Ingraham Interview
Dr. Anthony Fauci is a true patriot. He cares enough about public health that he doesn't just put up with Donald Trump on a daily basis but he also went on Laura Ingraham's white power hour Thursday and offered real-live facts to her viewers. Ingraham has slimed Dr. Fauci a lot on Twitter because all his fancy science talk gets on her nerves. She was a little nicer to his socially distant face and tried to get him to denounce Democrats who criticized Trump's mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis.
INGRAHAM: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of course, from CALIFORNIA called this plan of yours and the president's “vague and inconsistent" and this is what Joe Biden said about it just moments ago.
The former vice president, during an interview on CNN, said Trump's “plan" for reopening America wasn't actually a plan. The president had “punted" and left the decision to the governors on the front lines, despite his earlier, deranged proclamations of absolute power. The clip Ingraham aired ended with Biden stating that this crisis isn't over until we have a vaccine. Ingraham somehow believed Dr. Fauci would respond to Biden's comments as if he'd questioned his mother's virtue.
INGRAHAM: You punted? You punted all of you people working on this! Apparently, [Biden's] claiming you didn't listen to yourself because you are a scientist.
Burn! She's so cleverly manipulated Dr. Fauci into resenting Biden that he'll forget all about the coronavirus and spend the rest of the segment discussing Biden's obvious dementia. Or he might wonder what the fuck she's talking about.
DR. FAUCI: I don't know what you mean by I didn't listen to myself. You have to explain that to me, Laura.
INGRAHAM: He said that they're not listening to the scientists! They're punting! And it's not over until there's a vaccine. So your response to Biden.
DR. FAUCI: Well, there's truth to that. It's not going to be over to the point of our not being able to do any mitigation until we have a scientifically sound, safe, and effective vaccine. But that does not mean we can't approach a significant degree of normality.
A “significant degree of normality" in life was more than teenage SER ever dared to dream. Thanks, Dr. Fauci! Ingraham wasn't so grateful. Why do we have to wait around for a vaccine? We don't have vaccines for so many unrelated diseases that Ingraham proceeded to mention.
Dr. Fauci has to explain to Laura Ingraham why Coronavirus is not like HIV https://t.co/saYbY2Y5R9— Acyn (@Acyn) 1587089911.0
INGRAHAM: We don't have a vaccine. We don't have a vaccine for SARS. They got close in mice.
Yes, and those lucky SARS-infected mice are some of Ingraham's favorite snacks.
INGRAHAM: We don't have a vaccine for HIV. And life did go on.
I'm not going to let Ingraham “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" AIDS, which has killed almost 675,000 people in the United States, and even now, an estimated 13,000 Americans die from the disease each year.
INGRAHAM: So the idea that we're definitely going to have a vaccine. We didn't really approach much else in the same way as we're pegging going back to normal with a vaccine. Did we?
DR. FAUCI: Laura, this is different.
He politely keeps saying Ingraham's name in the hopes that he'll hit the right number that will send her back to her hell dimension.
DR. FAUCI: This is entirely different. We don't have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, but we have spectacularly effective treatment. People who would've invariably died years ago right now are leading essentially normal lives. SARS is a different story. SARS disappeared. We were in the process of going through the various phases. We showed it was safe. We showed it induced a good response and then SARS disappeared. And we didn't need to develop a vaccine for SARS. So I think it's a little misleading maybe to compare what we're going through now with HIV or SARS.
Ah, but Ingraham specializes in misleading. Hey, but if SARS disappeared like all those kids who visited Ingraham's gingerbread house in the Hamptons, maybe COVID-19 could vanish, as well.
INGRAHAM: This could just disappear! I mean SARS did pretty much disappear. This could as well, correct?
Dr. Fauci appeared to glance upward, as if seeking divine assistance, but God was like, "You're on your own, dude. She scares me."
DR. FAUCI: Anything could, Laura ...
INGRAHAM:RIGHT!
Not so fast there, Satan's stepmother, there's a "but" coming.
DR. FAUCI: But I have to tell you, the degree of efficiency of transmissibility of this is really unprecedented in anything I've seen. It's an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another. Those kinds of viruses just don't disappear.
These are just the facts ... sobering, pants-wetting facts but that is our reality. Dr. Fauci also rained on Ingraham's racist parade when he pointed out that most of New York's COVID cases were seeded from Europe, where white people roam free. He wouldn't even drag China when questioning the low number of reported deaths.
DR. FAUCI: That number surprises me. But again, it is what it is. It's behind us. Let's move ahead and address our own problem.
It was clear to Ingraham by this point that Dr. Fauci wouldn't be any fun so she ended the segment and let him leave with his soul.
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Stephen Robinson is a writer and social kibbitzer based in Portland, Oregon. He writes make believe for Cafe Nordo, an immersive theatre space in Seattle. Once, he wrote a novel called “Mahogany Slade,” which you should read or at least buy. He's also on the board of the Portland Playhouse theatre. His son describes him as a “play typer guy."
