There is a new pandemic, and it is called “Fauci fatigue,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said on Tuesday following Dr. Anthony Fauci making waves by denying that he ever advocated for lockdowns.
“It seems absolutely impossible that we have Dr. Fauci back at it again,” Blackburn said in a video posted on Tuesday.
“And the revisionist history that is taking place is astounding — didn’t call for masks, didn’t call for lockdowns. I could go on and on,” Blackburn continued.
“But I think the larger point is this: There is a new pandemic. It is called Fauci fatigue, and the American people don’t want to hear any more of this contradictory advice from Dr. Fauci,” the Tennessee senator added:
Blackburn’s remarks follow a shocking denial from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) chief, who this week denied his role in pushing mass lockdowns.
“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down, you’re asking me questions, you’re talking about — the CDC’s the public agency that uses their epidemiologists and their science-based approach to make recommendations,” Fauci said during an interview on the Hill‘s “Rising.”
That is demonstratively false, as Fauci bragged in October 2020 about recommending lockdowns.
“When it became clear that we had community spread in the country … I recommended to the president that we shut the country down. That was a very difficult decision, because I knew it would have serious economic consequences, which it did,” Fauci said during the October 2020 conversation with Holy Cross students, months after the start of the pandemic.
“There was no way to stop the explosive spread that we knew would occur if we didn’t do that,” he added. “And unfortunately, since we actually did not shut down completely—the way China did, the way Korea did, the way Taiwan did—we actually did see spread even though we shut down.”
This is not the first time he has changed his tune, offering opposite positions on both vaccine mandates and masks. On the latter, Fauci privately acknowledged that typical drugstore masks are “not really effective,” and he said in a March 2020 interview that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”