After envy, the most self-destructive emotion is the desire to be on TV, destroying the reputations of, among others, Michael Avenatti, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Swalwell and — since the release of his diary — Anthony Fauci.

Except in Fauci’s case, his fame-mongering was less self-destructive than simply destructive, as demonstrated by David Zweig’s amazing book, “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions” (MIT Press).

As Zweig demonstrates, Fauci had to know the restrictive COVID measures he pushed would do enormous damage to the country — to little kids, dying patients, cancer victims, college students, restaurants, the travel industry, budding careers, the theater, symphonies, professional athletes, etc., etc., etc. Unless he’d had his brain removed, Fauci knew that his directives served no purpose, other than making him, as he wrote in his diary, “the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”

Zweig, a liberal freelance reporter, was in good standing with the MSM at the beginning of the shutdowns. In April, he had the most read article in The New York Times about a couple stranded abroad by the pandemic. But he became persona non grata the moment he began submitting pieces to the Times with hard data about the virus.

What explains this? Only one thing: Fauci was the left’s most promising silver bullet to take out Trump. As such, the media would brook no dissent from his COVID edicts. Liberals would not only destroy the economy, but countless lives, in order to slay a pestilence worse than the virus: Donald J. Trump.

Fauci performed as expected and was rewarded with extravagant praise, “A-list” parties, undeserved riches and celebrity friends — all meticulously documented in his diary.

Perhaps the cruelest of Fauci’s decrees was his demand that the schools remain closed until a series of impossible benchmarks were met, e.g., no “community spread,” no students with sick family members, no unvaccinated kids, and so on. And yet, he insisted that his “default” position was to open them. But only if all eight major planets aligned in a straight line on the same side of the sun.

Fauci’s stance on the schools could not have been at more odds with the data, devastatingly presented in Zweig’s book.

As early as April 2020, the very outset of the pandemic, the CDC published the results of a massive analysis of 1,482 Americans hospitalized with COVID from March 1 to March 28 in 14 states, including California and New York. Only 0.04% of kids ages 0–17 were hospitalized.

And deaths? Fewer children died from the virus in any of the 3 years of the pandemic than died during several flu seasons in the previous decade.

The CDC’s own report in the spring of 2021 found that 35.2 % of pediatric “COVID deaths” had nothing to do with COVID at all, but rather were attributable to obvious things like suicides, car accidents and murders. It’s bad enough that the media wholly ignored the CDC’s shocking discovery about the fudged “COVID deaths” among children. But Fauci? Lobotomy or pure evil.

And there’s more! Throughout the spring of 2020, kids across Europe were back in school. After what The Atlantic would call “Europe’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” on May 17, 2020, EU education ministers announced the results: There had been no significant increase in COVID infections among children, parents or school staff despite millions of students in 22 countries being back at school for months.

A few weeks after the report from Europe, the Times ran an article with the promising title, “How to Reopen Schools: What Science and Other Countries Teach Us.” But instead of telling readers “what other countries teach us,” as the headline suggested, the 2,200-word article did not even mention the EU report. It consisted mostly of random anecdotes and quotes, leaving the impression that it would be sheer madness to open the schools.

The first quote, for example, was from a school nurse in Camden, N.J. (yes, exactly the sort of “expert” RFK is sidelining!): “I’m just going to say it. It feels like we’re playing Russian roulette with our kids.” (I wonder if school nurses have to go to work when the schools are closed.)

It’s one thing for lazy, biased reporters to pretend they didn’t notice what happened when Europe opened the schools. Surely our heroic director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases took note of “what other countries teach us” in making his recommendations.

Nope! Nearly two months after the EU ministers’ announcement about their success in opening the schools, Fauci wrote in his diary: “Trump wants to open the schools at all costs. Clearly he does not care about the safety of the children.” He added, “CNN continues to quote me in opposition to Trump and as the only person telling the truth.”

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER