Once prominent on virtually every media outlet available, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, seems to have disappeared without a trace.

He was seemingly last spotted a week ago, giving an interview to Reuters, which reported that Fauci says that it’s time to start “inching” back to normal.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. health officials said they were preparing new COVID-19 guidance on many aspects of the virus response as the Omicron surge in cases declines.

That followed announcements by several states including New Jersey, New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware and Oregon that they were lifting mask mandates for schools or other public settings in the coming weeks.

“The fact that the world and the United States and particularly certain parts of the United States are just up to here with COVID – they just really need to somehow get their life back,” he said.

“You don’t want to be reckless and throw everything aside, but you’ve got to start inching towards that.”

After the interview, Fauci appears to have put on his cowboy hat and ridden off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

Fauci’s made a name for himself over the last year as a promoter of the worst kind of panic porn, which the media that was so eager to have him on was more than happy to play into. Conflicting messaging on masks, vaccines, and mitigation efforts, as well as overhyping less dangerous variants, all severely diminished the amount of trust people have in our health arrogant and unapologetic authority figures.

The United States has made it through a very brutal omicron wave (brutal in terms of infection numbers, not necessarily severity) and even Democratic-led states are abandoning masking protocols. The polling on the government’s handling of COVID-19 is possibly even more brutal, and so the Democrats are jumping ship.

At the same time, what’s happening in Canada with the trucker protest, which is ostensibly about the virus and vaccines, has become more of a cultural war than anything. Other than the vaccines, that fight has become a fight over how much power a government can and should have over its people.

And then you have the Russia/Ukraine situation in Europe, which is completely distracting everyone to the point that COVID-19 is barely getting one percent of the coverage it was getting just a week or two ago. A full-scale international crisis has taken all the wind from the sails of the virus to the point where you almost have to remind yourself it’s out there. Possibly waiting for a lull in the news cycle to rear its flu-ish head again.

We’ve gone through a ton of news cycles since Fauci made his last major media appearances, and it seems that just about everyone in America has moved beyond COVID-19 and Fauci.

Meanwhile, if you see an older gentleman wandering the streets, muttering about COVID testing for Easter, please alert your local authorities so they can get him back to the NAIAD.