The Blame Game

The President and senior health adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Will he be fired?

There is light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel. Indications are that our mitigation efforts are working to reduce the rate of increase. We may be ‘over the hump’ and will hopefully begin to see an actual sharp decline in the incidence of this illness. But it is a very long tunnel with no particular date where that light can finally become a reality.  A reality that will very likely not look anything like what we had before.

In the meantime, people are still getting sick and dying. So for all these reasons we must continue our mitigation efforts in full compliance with the directives of health officials.

That being said, there is a troubling component of this pandemic that has reared its ugly head. I call it the blame game.

It is legitimate to note that had things been handled differently and early warnings by public health officials and been taken more seriously by our political and religious leaders, we would be in a lot better shape the we are in right now. Less sick people and less death. That is surely a lesson we can learn for the future.

But what about the people who refused to listen to the early warnings and failed to act quickly enough. Does that does make them evil? Not at all. Does that make them stupid? …or arrogant? …or lacking in wisdom? My answer to that is also no. What it does do is make them all human.  

There are 2 groups that are nevertheless currently being vilified along these lines. And in both cases it is wrong to be doing this. Blaming people for having reasonable counter reactions to dire predictions is not always done in arrogance. Sometimes it is just a belief that the experts might be unnecessarily over-reacting to a situation. 

It would not be the first time dire predictions been made by experts never came to fruition. This does not make the reactions of political and religious leaders right. But it does not make them evil, wrong, or stupid either. It makes them human. And they should not be judged harshly either way. It is easy to believe that had we been in their shoes, we would have been smarter and acted more quickly. But 20/20 hindsight is always perfect. But nobody in our day has 20/20 foresight.

A lot has been made of President Trump’s reluctance to accept the early warnings of his health experts. It is true that he treated the early news about the virus casually. He saw a few cases breaking out in early February in one nursing home in one state and never thought it would spread so widely and quickly all over the country. 

How many of us did think that? Even after we heard some of those same warnings reported in the media. I recall one health official saying back then that it wasn’t a question of if… it was a question of when! And yet very few people if any decided to socially distance themselves until the pandemic somehow reached into their own neighborhood. 

That’s how it was for me. I Davened with a Minyan for the last time when I was apprised that someone in our neighborhood had contracted the virus when he was in New York for Purim. It was at about that time that the President started taking things more seriously. As he does now. 

Should he have been more serious before? Of course he should have. But it was not was not that unreasonable to believe that all those early warnings were just his experts being overly and unnecessarily cautious. It is easy to say had another leader been there he would have acted differently. But we have no real way of knowing that. Assuming that is pure politics.

Rav Chaim Kanievsky

The same thing is true with Charedi rabbinic leaders who at first thought the same thing. They also thought that fullstop Shul and Yeshiva attendance was going way overboard. 

Charedi rabbinic leaders are not stupid either. Nor do they deny medical science. They go to the same hospitals, doctors, and specialists the rest of us do when they need to. They just believed that we did not have to go as far as recommended since there were so few cases at first. Still, they did some form of social distancing even then. 

But when people starting getting sick so fast, some of whom started dying, they did a quick 180 and to the best of my knowledge they are on the same page all the rest of us are right now… fully on board with closing down the Shuls and yeshivas - and staying home until further notice. In fact many Charedi leaders Both here and in Israel accuse violators of Retzicha – murder.

It is indeed true that the high numbers of infections are disproportionately Charedi. The late start to mitigation surely contributed mightily to this sad fact. But there are other factors as well. Including dense population areas, the fact that customs of religious Jews involve congregating a lot more often in places like Shuls, Yeshivas, weddings, and Bar Mitzvahs. There are also the few outliers in any community that refuse to listen to their leaders. In the case of Charedi communities they end up infecting a lot more people simply by dint of their more crowded neighborhoods. 

The point is that Charedi leaders are not to blame for their circumstances even though they came late to the party. They too are human. Just like politicians. I truly believe that in both cases they are well meaning even if they did not have the kind of foresight we all wish they would have.

Just like our politicians will hopefully take a lesson from this – so too will the Charedi rabbinic establishment. And if God forbid anything like this ever happens again. They will both react a lot more quickly. The one thing that I hope also changes is the blame game. It is just too easy to place blame on people with 20/20 hindsight. Especially when there is politics and religion involved.

There is however one thing that is disturbing if it happens, the firing of Anthony Fauci.

As most of us know, the President does not take kindly to criticism. Anthony Fauci is his top health official and was recently interviewed by the mainstream media. He said that had we taken this virus more seriously a lot sooner, we would be a lot better off. When he at the time advocated that we should implement the current mitigation polices, there was push-back by the administration to not do anything that drastic. 

Like I said, I don't really blame the President for being human and seeing what we all saw as a low risk of infection in this country at that time - not seeming to warrant any special protective measures. He probably thought that his health advisers were just being unnecessarily overcautious. 

He was wrong of course. We all know that now. But if he reacts to Dr. Fauci the way he usually reacts to his critics - and ends up firing him, (as a recent tweet seemed to indicate) that will be one of the most irresponsible things he’s ever done in office. An act so outrageous and harmful at so many levels that it will surely assure his defeat in the polls come November. I hope he does not react this way. If he does, I’m not all that crazy about his likely replacement come November.

Update
My apologies to the President. He has been following Dr. Fauci's recommendations from the very beginning. He did NOT pushback on any of them at any time. It was others in his administration that tried to do that. But, said Fauci, the President went along with every single one of his suggestions every time he made them. From the very beginning. Fauci's comments on CNN were in answer to a hypothetical question about 'had they done things sooner'... which he answered correctly by saying things would have been better. he sadi he never meant to imply that the President went against his suggestions.

Also, the tweet #FireFauci was not written by the President. He only retweeted it. Why he did that is puzzling but perhaps he just saw it retweeting someone defending him against all the ciritcism in the media generated that interview on CNN.

I'm happy that Dr. Fauci cleared things up. And I'm even happier that Dr. Fauci is still running the show and that the President is till on board with his advice.

All of the attacks against the President are therefore clearly biased by the politics of the individuals and members of the media doing the attacking. Which has been par for the course since Trump rode down that elevator announcing his candidacy.