The hearings have revived debate over lockdowns, government power, scientific authority, and who should be held accountable.
I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan famously joked that these were the nine most frightening words in the English language. Decades later, that quip has taken on new relevance. Few episodes better illustrate the dangers of unchecked government power than the cascade of failures, secrecy, and overreach that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.
By rights the status of high and mighty people should lie in tatters. It would do but for corrosive Dr. Anthony Fauci diverting the flak.
The octogenarian, retired technocrat and de facto head of America’s Covid response, is back hugging the limelight after years of quietude. Many State governors and Dem leaders, public health experts and epidemiologists, big pharma and union bosses will thank God that Fauci kept a diary which Senator Rand Paul obtained, released, and then summoned the scientist to appear at a hearing thirsting for blood.
If the Fauci diary demonstrated one big thing it was that misfits don’t have to slouch around in dark clothes and display tattooed biceps.
Fauci’s undoing was to forget that discretion is the better part of valor. Senators, keen to trap him into perjury, desired to nix Biden’s autopen pardon.
It’s a crying shame that getting rich while massive misery stalked the land is not a felony. Ditto for sending love notes to himself and logging media stories that really did make him the most famous and talked about celebrity on earth.
Yes Fauci, the vainest of men, disabled a whole generation of school-goers by locking schools. Yes, he lied that Covid came from bats in a wet market rather than a leak from a lab. Yes, he was among the first shutdown adherents. Yes he knew as early as February 2020 that the fatality rate was pretty low. There are the entries in the diary:
“This is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility.” The fatality rate is “more like 0.2-0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent.”
Yes, he deleted emails. Yes, lies tripped off his garrulous tongue. Yes, he approved aborted baby parts used in mice research. Yes and more yeses.
Even so, Governors Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo outdid Fauci by a long chalk in the havoc they sowed, the preventable deaths they caused, and in the business collapse they cold-heartedly supervised. They too should be grilled by Senators.
Though we spare a thought for the commoners, in their hundreds of millions, they weren’t exactly blameless. The greater part, poltroons who caved to PC, were enamoured with a limpid rule of thumb guaranteeing the apocalypse that was Covid: it is better to be safe than sorry.
To believe Lancet the Covid generation lacked the stoicism of bygone eras that met more deadly pandemics without fuss and bother.
Where we discarded common sense they kept their wits. Where our media sensationalized, theirs informed. Where our virus modellers sought fame by making dreaded pronouncements, their ordinary doctors learned lessons. Where today’s parents put coddling before schooling, those of old, though knowing that kids were at risk, packed them off to school. Where our elites played God, theirs let the medical fraternity handle issues. Where our elites closed down business and cut off cross border trade, theirs grasped that committing economic suicide would make no impression on a virus.
All told, twentieth century people did not go berserk.
By contrast we tolerated insane judgment calls. Remember that our elect put their money on the likes of Britain’s “Professor Lockdown.” Neil Ferguson gained notoriety by making a doomsday prediction that Covid would cause 1 million British deaths. By him the fire was lit under lockdown mania. We weren’t entitled to be shocked when Professor Lockdown broke his own mandate by smuggling a married lover into his London home.
Comparatively, was Fauci so evil? A soft underbelly made him infatuated with fame, which made his appetite for risk-taking reckless.
Not with shutdown mandates, however. The lockdown, if you prefer to call it that rather than a bazooka to kill a cockroach, zapped everything except the pest. But compared to his ilk Fauci acted soberly.
How infectious disease was treated in the Middle Ages may well have informed the way he treated shut down as a mitigation device for rapid short-lived surges. In 1529 the “sweating sickness” dropped Londoners like flies. In Hilary Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall we read: “The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of straw outside the door as sign of infection, then restrict entry for 40 days and go out as little as possible.”
The tyranny of safety uber alles which our overlords dragooned us into went hand in glove with policing our every move. Was that why Covid controllers turned cartwheels in order to scapegoat inanimate Covid.
Bombastic claims proliferated. For a sniff here’s a selection. “The Covid pandemic forced people apart.” Or the rabbi after banning communal events, treating Covid as a mischief-maker with a will of its own. “We could never imagine that our synagogues would be closed” he said, leaving the guilty creature to our imagination.
A particular blame-shifter told us that, “The whole world is reeling from the virus and the economic crisis that inevitably followed.” It was as if politically imposed mandates had nothing to do with the world reeling and the economic crisis it made inevitable.
Not to forget the scapegoats in chief, hardy elements in the population that obstinately wouldn’t “Follow the science.” They knew that following it meant following some picked advisors of the opinion that shutdown, masking, and vaxing would lull the virus into slumber. But how mercilessly the resistors were crucified. Media treated the unvaccinated like lepers. The New York Times turned into a tabloid posting demonizing opinions. “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated.” Or a column in Washington Post that “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.” Noam Chomsky wanted the unvaccinated to remove themselves from society and be “isolated.” Asked where they’d get food he answered, “Well actually, that’s their problem.” Piers Morgan won’t like reminding that he vindictively suggested denying the unvaccinated access to the National Health Service. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exuded hatred: The unvaccinated “are very often misogynistic and racist.” When he was President, Joe Biden said that his “patience was wearing thin” and we need to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” The terminally ill were denied organ transplants, while probation hearings and child custody cases discriminated against unvaxed moms and dads. Covid took no notice. It proliferated in countries with vaccine passports and other draconian restrictions in place.
The pandemic was thus one part public health and one part palaver.
Anthony Fauci got a lot wrong not due to being inept but to being arrogant. Disagree with him and he’d respond disdainfully: “You are really criticizing science because I represent science.”
There’s that masterful Dostoyevsky book, Crime and Punishment:
What is so offensive? It’s not the fact that they’re lying; one can always forgive a man for telling lies; lying is a harmless activity because it leads to the truth. No — what’s offensive is that they’re lying and making a fetish out of their own inventions.
What made the experts abhorrent was their lack of contrition for destructive protocols.
Disdain for unbelievers was reminiscent of medieval times. How is cancelling them and closing Twitter accounts any different to the church excommunicating Copernicus.
But drugs were science? Drugs were politics. Drugs were dirty business. If you voted Democrat then hydroxycloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc were quack meds because Trump took them. If you voted Republican the same protocol, if taken in the early stage of the virus, was a life-saver. Thus drugs were markers of political identity.
Well then — PPE was nonsense-free. Or wasn’t it? There can’t be any politics in equipment.
Not much science either. The authors of a scientific paper moaned about, “the increasing polarized and politicized views on whether to wear masks in public during the COVID-19 crisis.” One thing there was a lot of in PPE, and that was profit.
Beware too of one-upmanship. That’s when the religious boast that, “we value life more than you do.” And that all-encompassing issue, not of where’s the science but where’s God. Does the bible instruct us what to do about collateral damage from shutting down? If the mayor declares that saving one New Yorker from Covid is worth destroying the lives of millions of New Yorkers, what does canonical law have to say?
Well – schooling then. Where is dogma or PC narrative or groupthink in locking school gates? Both Fauci representing the National Institute of Health and Robert Redfield Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention were emphatic: school closures were a grievous error.
To be sure whether to make kids go to school or keep them homebound was, like meds, an ideological marker. Radical teachers protested in Washington D.C. by dumping fake body bags at the education department and waiving posters, “RIP your favorite teacher,” or “Killed in the line of duty.”
Well — there had to be a snatch of science in the lockdown. Maybe so … Somewhere. Controlling people by edict could be a science. Allowing you to stay in a hotel on a business trip but not on holiday could be scientific. Or a dozen riddles like that.
If the Fauci diary demonstrated one big thing it was that misfits don’t have to slouch around in dark clothes and display tattooed biceps. As often as not they wear white coats and have “Dr.” or “Professor” on business cards.
https://spectator.org/what-the-fauci-diaries-reveal-about-americas-covid-response/
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