Quite possibly the biggest mistake President Trump made in 2020 was to trust Anthony Fauci. The career bureaucrat can be considered largely responsible for the nation’s confused response to the Wuhan virus that came from China. His advice was contradictory and often wrong, and he proved to be a vicious partisan who worked to undermine Trump. Now, he’s seeking to erase Trump altogether by claiming for himself responsibility for the vaccine.

From the beginning, President Trump relied on Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where Fauci has worked since 1974. This was reasonable because Fauci’s job calls for him to be the go-to person when it comes to infectious diseases, whether AIDS or Ebola. That doesn’t mean he’s good, though.

In late 2020, a startling video from the 1990s emerged showing Kary Mullis (1944-2019), who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry because of his invention of the polymerase chain reaction, talk about Fauci’s dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance. Mullis was an eccentric, but Fauci’s behavior in the past year supports Mullis’s charges.

Fauci has inundated the American people with mixed messages and constant fear-mongering. Moreover, basking in the glow of mainstream media adulation, he often says, really, anything. Like this:

Apparently, dear Dr. Fauci has never heard of suicidal depression triggered by an economic collapse or people not going to the Dr. because he has scare mongered us into staying home and not getting cancer treatments or checkups. https://t.co/dd6ohJfkAh

— Ellie Bufkin (@ellie_bufkin) October 12, 2020

Fauci’s had limitless pronouncements about masks. In the beginning, he dismissed them. Then he demanded them. Then he demanded two of them simultaneously. Then he talked about keeping them on people indefinitely.

He was equally inconstant about what constituted herd immunity, eventually joining the World Health Organization in abandoning the traditional idea (enough people develop a natural immunity that the disease can no longer gain a foothold) in favor of saying herd immunity can be achieved only through total vaccination.

There are whole web pages dedicated to counting Fauci’s constantly changing positions on all things COVID. Worse, Fauci manipulates science to commit fraud on the American public. No wonder Americans have finally concluded that Fauci is a self-serving liar.

While Fauci talked in 2020, Trump got things done. One of the things he got done was Operation Warp Speed, which was intended to facilitate developing a vaccine for COVID. The Trump administration announced it on May 15, although it had already been in place for months:

On Friday, the Trump Administration announced the appointment of Moncef Slaoui as chief advisor and General Gustave F. Perna as chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the administration's national program to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics (medical countermeasures).

Dr. Slaoui is a venture capitalist and, formerly, Chairman of Global Research and Development and Chairman of Global Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led the development of five major novel vaccines. As the four-star general in charge of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, General Perna oversees the global supply chain and installation and materiel readiness for the U.S. Army, including more than 190,000 military, civilian, and contract employees.

Among its other objectives, Operation Warp Speed aims to have substantial quantities of a safe and effective vaccine available for Americans by January 2021.

Trump made good on that promise. But in Fauci’s world, Trump no longer exists. It’s all about the little megalomaniac:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, appeared to claim credit for the decision to quickly develop vaccines against COVID-19 on Sunday - in comments that are sure to anger Donald Trump.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the comment in an interview with CNN for a special, diving into the details of America's pandemic response.

'When I saw what happened in New York City, almost over-running of our healthcare systems, and that's when it became very clear that the decision we made on January 10 to go all out and develop a vaccine, may have been the best decision that I've ever made with regard to intervention as the director of the institute,' Fauci said.

Fauci's remarks seemed to gloss over the key role played by pharmaceutical companies and Operation Warp Speed - the Trump administration's program to manufacture, test and deliver vaccines to the public in record time.

I’m beginning to wonder if Fauci is all there. By now, he seems to be a giant ego that’s abandoned any semblance of having an attached brain or moral compass.

IMAGE:  Anthony Fauci. YouTube screengrab.