We’re continuing to see the fallout from President Joe Biden’s declaration on 60 Minutes Sunday night that “the pandemic is over.” This pronouncement has clearly upset nearly everyone on the left who are loathe to see the government’s “emergency” restrictions on normal behavior lifted. That’s kind of a shame because even though I rather doubt that Joe Biden even remembers saying it at this point, it was probably one of his most prescient remarks since taking office. Of course, in the name of party unity this close to the midterms, few in Biden’s party or their dutiful servants in the media want to call him out too harshly. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is simply accepting it as gospel either.

The person who claims to be “the science” when it comes to COVID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is among the people gently disagreeing with Biden. Before he rides off into his lush retirement from being the highest-paid person in the federal government, Fauci had a few more words of warning. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies last night, Fauci said “we are not where we need to be” in terms of dealing with the virus heading forward. He complained about the lack of coordination in dealing with new variants that may still arise and chastised the unacceptably large number of people who have stubbornly refused to take the vaccines or who haven’t gone for a sufficient number of booster shots. In other words, it was pretty much the same schtick he’s been peddling from day one. (The Hill

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Monday that the U.S. is not where it needs to be regarding the coronavirus pandemic, the day after an interview with President Biden was broadcast in which Biden said that the “pandemic is over.”

In a talk with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Fauci, Biden’s top COVID-19 adviser who last month announced his pending retirement from the government, said that much depends on how the country handles future virus variants.

“How we respond and how we’re prepared for the evolution of these variants is going to depend on us. And that gets to the other conflicting aspect of this — is the lack of a uniform acceptance of the interventions that are available to us in this country where even now, more than two years, close to three years, into the outbreak, we have only 67 percent of our population vaccinated and only one-half of those have received a single boost,” Fauci said.

Expanding on the comment about not being where we “need to be,” Fauci spoke in reference to claims that we’re just going to have to learn to ‘live with the virus.’ He went on to admit that we were never going to totally eradicate the virus as we did with smallpox. He also pointed out that smallpox doesn’t mutate every year so we didn’t have to keep adjusting.

That’s certainly true from what I understand, but we learned to “live with” the flu, which Fauci also brought up. Researchers fine-tune the flu vaccine every year based on the mutations the virus exhibits. They are already starting to do the same thing with COVID, as shown with the latest round of boosters that were approved in what some might consider a far too rapid fashion.

Those who want to take the vaccines will take them. Those who don’t will take their chances and the vast, vast majority of them will survive and come away with a fresh round of antibodies against the latest variant in their system. Again, this is pretty much exactly the way we’ve been dealing with the flu for years.

It might be more comforting if Saint Fauci’s complaints could be backed up with at least some sort of effort to answer the frequent questions coming from all of the commoners around the country. These latest remarks provided yet another example. Fauci complained that we have “only 67 percent of our population vaccinated” and barely 30% have been boosted. But if that’s such a dangerous situation, why have the daily deaths fallen into the hundreds across the entire country? Why are the intensive care units not overflowing? People aren’t even wearing masks in the vast majority of cases and the world has stubbornly failed to end.

Perhaps Anthony Fauci doesn’t care to publicly discuss such questions. It’s possible that facing those queries might suggest to the public yet again that our government most likely massively overreacted to the arrival of the novel coronavirus and crashed our economy while delivering not much different in the way or results than if we’d done none of that. Of course, that sort of admission would likely end the careers of far too many swamp creatures in D.C. so we’ll never hear those words spoken aloud.