The Reason Roundtable is back! After a week off from being affected by the pandemic one way or another, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the new COVID-19 variant and their predictions for 2022.

Discussed in the show:

1:44: The new COVID-19 variant and the latest policy changes.

19:50: Weekly Listener Question: Help me understand something. Anthony Fauci is in charge of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As such he has almost no statutory authority. He can't make anybody do anything. In his role as White House adviser his job is to dispense advice. That's it. He has the moral authority of someone who led his agency through the AIDS crisis and the intellectual authority of someone who has done actual science in service of human health, but he can't give an order that anyone has to obey. So why has Reason (maybe not all of its writers, but I'm lookin' at you Mr. Soave) jumped on the bandwagon to cast him as a comic book supervillain? There are people and agencies of the government that bear direct responsibility for obstructing solutions to this crisis and exploited it for political gain. Good on you for calling them on it. But why has this man become the target of choice for vilification, when really all he can do is make suggestions?

31:05: 2022 predictions!

57:34: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)

This week's links:

• "CNN's Leana Wen: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than Facial Decorations,'" by Robby Soave
• "Against Faucism," by Robby Soave
• "Fauci Wants To Kick the Unvaxxed Off of Airplanes," by Matt Welch
• "RIP, 'Pandemic of the Unvaccinated,'" by Matt Welch
• "We Don't Know Why Murder Rates Spiked in 2020," by Brian Doherty
• "What's inside Tyler Perry's new $250M Southwest Atlanta movie studio?" by Sean Richard Keenan
• "The Matrix Resurrections Is Less a Sequel and More a Bizarre Thinkpiece About The Matrix's Legacy," by Peter Suderman

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Regan Taylor
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

The post What We Got Right and Wrong About 2021 (and What We Predict for 2022) appeared first on Reason.com.