Fauci Claimed Covid Would Feast on College Football (It Didn’t)

BUCK: Clay, on the Fauci conversation around college football, I’m just… Has everyone from a college football game tested positive for covid? Because I think we were led to believe that it was (Fauci impression) “a supuh-spreaduh event.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Not the Emmys, though, the Emmys is exempt from covid.

CLAY: The Emmys, Barack Obama’s birthday party, I think what we’re finding out, Buck, maybe is that it’s a really sophisticated, educated crowd that is showing up for the college football games. So I want you to listen to this audio here from MSNBC, Dr. Fauci.

We’re gonna discuss his response to being invited on our program at the top of the hour 3 — and, trust me, you’re gonna want to get your popcorn for that discussion. But Dr. Fauci had the time to go on Joy Reid, probably the most dishonest person with a television show anywhere in the country right now.

And that’s saying something when you consider who’s got shows on CNN and MSNBC. But listen to Joy Reid talking about how appalled she was at the crowds of college football fans, and then Dr. Fauci talking about how he was incredibly troubled himself based on those crowds. Listen.

REID: What was your, uhhh, sort — sort of immediate thought when you saw all of those fans packed into stadiums in Texas, Wisconsin, and elsewhere? As soon as I saw it, I thought, “Covid’s about to have a feast.” What did you think?

FAUCI: I thought the same thing. I think it’s really unfortunate. I would hope that most of the people in that stadium were vaccinated. And if they were, the close congregate setting, they should have been wearing masks.

BUCK: (impression) “The congregate setting.” It’s amazing, Clay, this guy on cue tells not just MSNBC hosts and CNN hosts and their audiences what they want to do hear all the time. That’s how I know he is the worst. You know how much I despise…? Apparently, I can say it now ’cause he’s definitely not coming on our show. Flat-out turned down.

CLAY: All right. So I think it’s important. You just heard Dr. Fauci say that college football crowds were going to be “a feast” for covid. That’s what he said, “a feast,” and that that was because people weren’t wearing masks, they were tightly packed. I went and looked at the data because it’s now been over two weeks.

Everybody said, “Just wait two weeks!” It’s now been over two weeks since the college football opener. Okay. Here’s the data. In Florida, after Dr. Fauci said, “It’s gonna be a feast” in big stadiums — Florida State, Florida, Miami, Central Florida, South Florida.

Millions, probably, of fans that have gone to games all over the Southeast. Well, in Florida, cases dropped 44%, Buck, in the two weeks since the season started. In Tennessee — this is from the New York Times covid data, by the way. In Tennessee, there’s been a 43% decline in covid cases since the season started over the last two weeks.

There’s been a 35% decline in Georgia, 32% decline in South Carolina, 30% decline in Mississippi, 22% decline in Arkansas, 23% in Alabama, 9% in Texas. Every single SEC state where millions of people have gone to college football games has not led to a feast of covid as doctor Fauci predicted. Every single SEC state, Buck, is in fact down. And, by the way, that’s NFL stadiums now too.

BUCK: You want to wonder. Are they putting some kind of anti-viral in the IPAs or something? What’s going on here?

CLAY: Maybe football cures covid. That’s one hypothesis.

BUCK: If Fauci’s gonna go on TV and say stuff like that, we all have to remember that he picks and chooses who he will throw political spitballs at.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: It’s very clear he’s a little totalitarian fraud. I don’t just say this because I disagree with some of his policy prescriptions. I see the way he has maneuvered the entire time in such a way that he would be in keeping with what the Beltway set wants to hear, with what the apparatus of left-wing Democrat control in the Biden administration expects him to say.

He always, Clay, plays the part. That you have never, in this entire pandemic, seen a true critical article or monologue about Fauci on a single left-leaning outlet tells you everything you have to know. This guy is not some medical genius. He’s a bureaucrat — does-anything-to-get-ahead leftist — and that’s it.

People that don’t see that yet. I don’t know what else has to be provided to them because otherwise why take a shot at college football, Clay, but not say, “Yeah, but you know the U.S. Open tennis, that happened recently.” Because Fauci’s fancy friends, his cocktail party buddies go to see tennis at the U.S. Open, he doesn’t think it’s quite the same thing when it comes to SEC football games.

CLAY: That’s right. And, again, I think it’s the duty of people like us but reasonable, honest, direct people in the media to hold the, quote-unquote, “experts” accountable for what they say when it’s proven to be untrue. And this is significant for people out there because it suggests that you can go to outdoor events at a minimum — tightly packed outdoor events at a minimum — and not have to worry about covid.

You don’t have to wear a mask. You don’t have to worry about six feet, which we all know is totally map in terms of the social distancing impact. In other words, we’ve been saying for a while, “The emperor, Fauci, is wearing no clothes here,” and the data doesn’t in any way support what he is trying to argue. We can’t just let him say that covid’s going to feast on all these college football fans, and then most people are going to forget it and pretend that it was never an argument.

BUCK: If there was really going to be accountability here, Fauci should go to TV, which he does every five minutes —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: He’s on TV more than either of us, and we work in the media, Clay. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. This guy, you think he’s with “the scientists” figuring out new cures and treatments and helping NIAD under the NIH umbrella do great things. No. Instead he’s showing up and high-fiving Chris Cuomo and hanging out with Maddow, and this is what this guy does all the time.

CLAY: Writing books!

BUCK: Writing books — or having books written for him he puts his name on. You would think that he would at least be willing to come out now and say, “Wow, I think we overstated the risk at these college football games,” but he never admits he’s wrong. It’s always, “That’s what the data said then, and the data evolved.”

The only exception to this is when he flat-out admitted — or, rather, I actually don’t believe he admitted this. I think this is another lie on top of the admitted lie that he said masks don’t work ’cause he didn’t want us to take all the good masks in the beginning of the pandemic. It was for our own good.

The notion, Clay, of the noble lie from the left on covid is something we’re gonna hear a lot more of. They actually now embrace pretty openly that if they have to mess with the numbers, if they have to exaggerate, if they have to lie about the risk to kids, they’re doing it for our benefit. So it’s okay. There’s no accountability baked into the system.