Analysis: Fauci’s new 2022 timeline for Covid fight could be a

“As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely reassuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing,” Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Most Americans, encouraged by Biden himself, had already expected that kind of normality to be restored and may be in no mood to contemplate months more of deprivation. The spike in Covid-19 cases that has hit many areas of the country has already turned what was sold as a summer of freedom from the virus into a replay of some of the worst parts of the pandemic as hospitals throughout the South are overrun by Covid patients. And conservatives have already long ago turned against Fauci, one of the world’s most respected public health experts, and he is a top target of right-wing media.

The last 17 months that changed the daily fabric of American life have been far from predictable. And there is some data from abroad — albeit in more vaccinated nations like Britain and Israel — that suggests the current Delta variant wave of the virus could ease or may not produce the same level of deaths as earlier surges. If so, its political impact could be mitigated.

But even the prospect that the end of the battle against Covid-19 could be many, many months away represents a nightmare political scenario for the President and his Democratic Party, already facing historic headwinds in trying to keep control of Congress. They will now face the possibility of having to do so in a nation even more exhausted by a crisis that has already cost more than 620,000 lives and that has become more politically divided by the virus every month it rages on.

A new challenge for the President

A pandemic that spans the early months of 2022 would make it even harder for Biden to keep up public morale and commitment to the kind of precautionary measures like masking — a toxic political fault line — that are needed to stem the further spread of the virus.

If the emergency does go on that long, it will offer an opening for Republicans who are seeking to brand Biden’s presidency as a failure — and who are seizing on his chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan to paint a broader narrative of political decay.

The latest surge of the virus, powered by the more infectious Delta variant, was able to take hold because Americans in more conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science — declined in larger numbers than their more liberal compatriots to get vaccinated. If such skepticism, fanned by conservative political leaders and conspiracy fueled right-wing media, were to ultimately boost Republicans in next year’s congressional polls it would be a bitter irony…