Even though they don't often see eye to eye in the continuing saga of the coronavirus – President Donald Trump and Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) still managed to work together.
After all, Fauci continues to be a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, set up by Trump early in the year.
However, the same courtesy of allowing a difference of opinion on this increasingly, and in view of the looming US presidential elections, irrevocably politicized issue, does not appear to extend to members of Fauci's own team over at the NIAID.
According to reports, the agency's public affairs specialist William Crews is now out of a job after 13 years working at NIAID because he chose to express his opinions, apparently under a pseudonym, on the conservative website RedState.
His summed up view of this unprecedented crisis is that, at its core, it is a fraud orchestrated in order to “fundamentally change the way the country lives and is organized and governed.”
Crews was talking about his own country – but the consequences are the same across the world.
And now, officially, it was Crews who pulled the plug to retire from the job after the Daily Beast “outed” him for presenting this dissenting voice, standing against the agency's own recommendations. Those, of course, just like Crews' commentary, varied and changed considerably over the course of the last half a year, as the virus – and all its consequences and accordingly ever-changing reactions – still remain not properly understood.
In another time, glimpses and insights from people working in an organization might be welcomed as coming from insiders that we like to think of as whistleblowers; however, not now, as the criticism expressed by Crews is said to be “conspiratorial misinformation.”
Other than referring to Fauci as “a mask Nazi” (i.e., “a mask fanatic”), Crews is named and shamed for his outspoken criticism of the approach to the virus, but the dive is no less deep into his history as a supporter of Trump – as if a person's legitimate political preference should be a valid point of contention in a democracy.
Not to mention that, as the reports puts it – “The Daily Beast could not definitively determine whether Crews was writing for RedState, or posting to his Twitter account, while on the clock at his government job.”
