It will take years if not decades for researchers to document the totality of the cruel harms of the pandemic lockdowns. Whatever the damage, it could have been much worse. With the hindsight of a blind man, and the depravity of a despot, Anthony Fauci said this week the restrictions should have been more draconian than they were. He’s a national headache that just won’t go away.
“If I knew in 2020 what I know now, we would do a lot differently,” Fauci said Monday in an interview on The Hill TV.
“The insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm, and there would have been much, much more stringent restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy encouragement of people to wear masks, physical distancing, what have you.”
Fauci didn’t reference lockdowns by name, but “what have you” is the same as “all of the above,” so don’t think he didn’t have tougher lockdown rules in mind. What else could “much more stringent restrictions” mean? Double-masking and triple-physical distancing? Fauci’s claim that he was nothing more than a bystander who “didn’t recommend locking anything down,” is a “blatant attempt to revise history,” said Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, whose focuses include infectious disease epidemiology.
“Dr. Lockdown owns the school closures and their attendant collateral harms.”
Maybe Fauci forgot that he “recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” More likely he wants the public to have forgotten.
Fauci is the guy whose mug appeared on mugs, some sold by a child of grand privilege at $52 a shot, T-shirts, and in his home office. He has been worshiped by the left for no other reason than he didn’t share Donald Trump’s ideas about the pandemic. The rest of us recognized for what he is: an arrogant, imperious and meddling bureaucrat.
Economist Donald Boudreaux, whose sharp insight we’ve always appreciated, said Monday’s interview is yet another instance in which the “doctor” “again proves that he has the heart, soul, and mind of a dangerous fanatic.”
“He focuses obsessively on one goal; all other considerations are ignored or treated with disdain. And he has no qualms about using as much coercion as is necessary to further as much as possible his lone goal. … No such fanatic should possess any power or influence.”
A doctor who offered a far more humane response to the coronavirus outbreak piled on with a fully warranted biting, sarcastic tweet.
“If only we had had Shanghai style drones on our streets reminding people to control their ‘desire for freedom’ while people run out of food, locked into their apartments. Then the laptop class could have had zero covid,” said Bhattacharya.
Just last week Fauci announced that he is retiring – then said maybe not (a dizzying backpedal consistent with his flip-flops and lying) – which is a development that couldn’t come too soon. Better that he had not ever made his way to Washington, D.C., at all. But he did and there he found “his power trip” that’s put him in position to control “the lives of millions of people.”
Of course he excuses his excesses because they’re for our own good. He’s America’s chief busybody, tormenting us without end and with the approval of his own conscience, C.S. Lewis would say. Fauci classed us “with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals” while in his mind he’s a god. Donald Trump should have fired him before he had lunch on Inauguration Day in 2017.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Dr. Birx is also on a mission to change history in the hope no one will recall her incompetence. Fortunately we have not only Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to remind us, but also Dr. Scott Atlas’s book — A Plague Upon Our House, to remind us that “Public Health” somewhere along the way became a propaganda operation, honed to a fine edge by the time of COVID, with operatives who worked more with their minions in the press than with data or reseach.