In the wake of the clear failure of all the covid pandemic policies to stop the spread of the disease, as well as the significant social problems that have occurred because of prolonged lockdowns and media hysteria, the complicit American media has endeavored to push “pandemic amnesty” for the policymakers who were the authors of this disaster.
To that end, The New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells interviewed former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci. The basic premise: Fauci had an impossible job…so, sure, mistakes would be made.
Let’s forgive, forget, and move on! Besides, it’s all our fault.
It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.
The NYT then treats us to incoherent ramblings that mix blame deflection, gaslighting, and cognitive dissonance. Let’s start by looking at Fauci’s opinion on masks and how hard it was to get a “coherent message out.”
Fauci: The divisiveness was palpable, just in trying to get a coherent message across of following fundamental public-health principles. I understand that there will always be differences of opinion among people saying, “Well, what’s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?” But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not — that is extraordinary.
Early in the course of the pandemic, Fauci initially indicated that masks were ineffective and unnecessary. Then, based on a combination of political messaging and poorly designed experiments, he asserted that masks would protect the wearer and help halt the spread of the disease.
Then, Fauci began advocating for double masks. This guidance earned him a rebuke from infectious disease experts.
Not only was this messaging incoherent, but the mask mandates likely had negative health consequences that could only be fully realized now.
Face masks may raise the risk of stillbirths, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline in children, ‘explosive’ new research suggests.A review of dozens of studies on face coverings suggested they can cause mild carbon dioxide poisoning when worn over long periods….Alluding to the surge in stillbirths during the pandemic, the German researchers said: ‘Circumstantial evidence exists that popular mask use may be related to current observations of a significant rise of 28 percent to 33 percent in stillbirths worldwide.”[And] reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance of two full standard deviations in scores in children born during the pandemic,’ the researchers wrote in the paper, published in the journal Heliyon.
One of the other topics in this interview was the school lockdowns. Fauci avoids any accountability for this policy.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” Fauci said when asked about the consequences of “heavy-handed” public health policies in a New York Times interview published Tuesday. “I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”
True, he did not order the lockdowns directly. However, he pushed covid hysteria and dire predictions related to the consequences of infection hard so that teacher unions demanded lockdowns and long-term mask mandates. An excellent example of this tactic is Fauci’s ginning-up worry as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis prepared to open the state’s businesses and schools in April 2020.
“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during the daily news briefing of the White House coronavirus task force.
Fauci blamed the poor policy results on American political divisiveness and achieved only a 68% vaccination rate. He then switches gears when Wallace-Wells points out that many other nations also failed to contain and control the virus.
Yeah, you’re probably onto something there, David. I remember a public conversation I was having about the importance of a very effective degree of preparedness — how much it will allow you to escape significant damage from an outbreak. And I remember saying, depending on the transmissibility, morbidity and mortality of a particular pathogen, that sometimes no matter how well you are prepared, you are going to get a lot of hurt. This was one of those outbreaks.And you’re absolutely right. When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries. Most everybody did poorly. Even those countries that had no political divisiveness the way we had, they did poorly. There were gaps and inadequacies in both preparedness and response that varied among different nations.
Perhaps the most chilling part of the interview comes when it is suggested that shutting down the nation sooner and tighter would have led to better results.
Fauci: I don’t know. It is conceivable that we would’ve ultimately been in the same situation. And would we have been able to shut down the economy? Would the country have accepted it, when you had a handful of cases and one death? I’m not saying that’s a reason not to do it — we should have, probably, if we knew what we know now. But with just a few cases, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten the country to shut down.
Unfortunately for the NYT, Fauci, and others who crave “pandemic amnesty,” many of us have all the receipts and will counter the attempted revisions to history.
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