Dr. Anthony Fauci is retiring at the end of the year. Yea! Fauci is doing media interviews on his way out of the door full of talk about his legacy and how politics should be kept out of investigations into the origins of COVID-19. Ugh.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, St. Anthony told Democrat operative Chuck Todd that he doesn’t align himself with either political party after Todd played a clip from Mike Pence saying Fauci aligned himself with Democrats. The conversation was about the lockdowns and restrictions that were supported by Fauci and other advisers. Remember when we were initially told the medical community needed two weeks to flatten the curve and get a handle on overcrowded hospitals? Then that turned into indefinite lockdowns and mandates. Before we knew it, we were living in an authoritarian country, not living as free Americans. The more power the administration got, whether it was Trump or Biden, the more it wanted. If Trump carries through with his plan to run for president in 2024, he will have to answer for his decisions on national lockdowns and mandates (like face masks and social distancing) the same as Biden will.

Politics reared its ugly head early on in the pandemic. To his credit, Trump cleared red tape and eased as much bureaucracy out of the way as he could to get things done. We were grateful when a vaccine was available in record time, though now it is looked upon as a mixed blessing, due to reports of side effects and even deaths due to reactions to the vaccine. But to act as though some decisions were not political in nature is ridiculous. Remember when prominent Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and others said they were hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine because it was produced during the Trump administration? It was as though they thought Trump himself was creating and manufacturing the vaccine, not career scientists and drug manufacturers. A presidential election was on the horizon and Democrats were determined to use the pandemic to their political advantage.

And, they did. Joe Biden campaigned from the basement of his Delaware mansion and every time Trump held a rally, he was trashed in the press for doing so, exposing supporters to the virus.

So, for Fauci to now sanctimoniously say that politics shouldn’t enter the discussions on the origin of the coronavirus is worthy of ridicule. Fauci is hesitant to point a finger at China for launching the pandemic on the rest of the world yet he criticizes China for using draconian measures against its citizens with its zero-COVID policy. Protests have broken out over the draconian measures, which is almost unheard of in China. Fauci notes that China only uses its own vaccines and they are not particularly effective. Plus, China does not appear to focus on getting the most vulnerable – its elderly citizens – vaccinated. “Even when there is nothing to hide, they act in a suspicious, non-transparent way, ” Fauci told Chuck Todd. A transparent, open interaction between Chinese scientists and Americans is needed to get to the origin of the pandemic.

President Biden’s outgoing chief medical adviser told CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that he’s keeping an open mind but that the scientific evidence so far is that the virus occurred naturally. He actually defends the Chinese Communists.

“They’re very suspicious of anybody trying to accuse them,” Fauci said of the Chinese government. “We need to have an open dialogue with their scientists and our scientists, keep the politics out of it.”

“All of my colleagues, keep an absolutely open mind,” Fauci said on CBS. “We’ve got to investigate every possibility because this is too important not to do that. That’s not incompatible with saying the scientific evidence still weighs much more strongly that this is a natural occurrence. You must keep your mind open that it’s something other than that.”

But Fauci pushed back on the notion that the Chinese Communist Party covered up the pandemic’s origins.

“Not necessarily the scientists that we know and we have dealt with and collaborated with productively for decades, but the whole establishment — a political and other establishment in China, even when there’s nothing at all to hide — they act secretive, which absolutely triggers an appropriate suspicion,” Fauci said.

He went on to criticize former President Trump’s accusatory comments against China during the early months of the pandemic, although Fauci acknowledged a need for more data.

“What happens is that if you look at the anti-China approach, that clearly the Trump administration had right from the very beginning, and the accusatory nature, the Chinese are going to flinch back and say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we’re not going to talk to you about it,’ which is not correct. They should be,” Fauci told Brennan.

There it is. Dr. Keep Politics Out of It slams Trump for pointing to the obvious – the coronavirus came from China.

Funny how nothing came up in either of these two network interviews about the damage done to school children during mandatory online learning because schools were shuttered for over a year. The teachers unions and school boards across the country put the next generation at an unconscionable disadvantage. Teachers were put at the front of the line to receive vaccines, along with medical professionals and first responders, yet they insisted that schools be shut despite the data that showed young children were not at risk from COVID-19. The unions took it further and many, especially in large cities, demanded all kinds of things before schools re-opened that had nothing to do with the children’s safety in the classroom. Their power grabs were breathtaking and certainly woke up a lot of parents who were unaware of the damage being done to their children. It was all politics. Fauci was not exactly a profile in courage – he went along with the school shutdowns.

Fauci fell prey to his own ego. He enjoyed being treated as a celebrity and given the red carpet treatment. He’s been on the government payroll for over five decades and will retire with the largest pension of any former government employee. He’s long past retirement if you ask me. As it turns out, he and his colleagues were wrong about COVID-19 more than they were right. He and his co-workers did not prove to be the best and brightest to deal with the pandemic. The pandemic is still with us and is something we have to live with, it won’t be eradicated. It’s like the flu in that way. It morphs into other variances and remains with us.

I don’t hold out much hope in getting to the bottom of the origins of the coronavirus. Fauci and his apologist attitude toward the Communist Chinese is disturbing. Was it deliberately created in a lab in Wuhan to create havoc in the world economy and in the 2020 presidential election? I don’t know and neither do you. We likely never will.