Anthony Fauci’s limitless publicity thirst is undermining the war on COVID

It was said of the late actress Sylvia Miles, who spent her nights going from event to event in New York, that she would “attend the opening of an envelope.” US government virus guru Anthony Fauci has very little in common with Sylvia Miles: He wasn’t nominated twice for an Oscar, for example, and he has never, to my knowledge, appeared in the nude. But he has become as ubiquitous a public presence over the past year in all media as Miles was at every party.

Every day, and it seems for hours a day, Fauci pops up on cable shows or in interviews with major journalists, and the blue-check Twitterati amplify his messages through social media. He is inescapable. And the problem with his inescapability is that, unlike Sylvia Miles, it matters deeply what he says and does — and it’s now clear that our epidemiologist general can’t restrain himself from speaking and speaking and speaking, even when he doesn’t have anything much to add and when his contributions muddy and confuse and dishearten, rather than reassure and rally, the public.