One aspect of post-pandemic analysis that sets my hair on fire is the folklore that in the early stages of the Covid outbreak, health experts were “trying to explain the latest public health advice to a frightened public even as scientists were struggling to learn about the new virus.” That publications like Time and the Atlantic have persisted with this “we didn’t know” memory-holing is to be expected. But when I read a similar take in The American Spectator last Friday — albeit in the context of an article I generally agreed with — I admittedly blew a fuse.
Fauci and Birx lied to Americans that the “science” behind these guidelines came from research out of Australia…. No, it didn’t.
In reference to the lockdowns and social distancing edicts, writer Debra J. Saunders said this: “I understand why these quick-draw policies were hatched. It was panic.” She went on: “When COVID-19 first appeared on U.S. shores, the public faced an unknown threat of dubious origin — and people were dying. Americans were desperate for information from authoritative sources.” Yet even The New York Times observed on the first anniversary of “fifteen-days-to-slow-the-spread,” that in early 2020 scientists knew pretty much everything there was to know about the virus: “how it spreads, who among us is more vulnerable, and what simple precautions can be taken against it.” (READ MORE from Carina Benton: Meloni Must Stop the Boats)
If you zero in on the critical period from mid-February to mid-March, 2020, one point becomes glaringly obvious: although the “experts” knew this novel disease didn’t pose a threat to most people, they recommended unprecedented and severe containment measures, which we now know weren’t based on science but “sort of just appeared,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it. That’s not “panic.” It’s malfeasance.
Let’s retrace the timeline.
In mid-February, 2020 a team of 25 international experts led by Senior Advisor to the WHO-Director-General, Dr. Bruce Aylward, embarked on a two-week fact-finding trip to Wuhan. The WHO-China Joint Mission’s February 28 report praised China’s “ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort” in the face of a “highly contagious” and “rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.”
However, the numbers buried within the document provided crucial context. The report found that “approximately 80 percent of laboratory confirmed patients [in China] had mild to moderate disease [and recovered].”
In children under 19, Covid was mild and constituted around 2.4 percent of reported cases; only 0.2 percent of children infected with the virus developed “critical disease.” Aylward later confirmed that children did not appear to be major spreaders of Covid and there had been very few examples of outbreaks in schools.
The report stated that asymptomatic spread (i.e. people with no symptoms spreading the disease) “appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.” Dr Aylward told a session organized by Dr. Craig Dalton for the Health Protection Officers of Australia on March 6 that widespread asymptomatic spread was an “urban myth.”
Nevertheless, a schizophrenic narrative quickly emerged and was replicated over the first two weeks of March in press briefings, media releases, and interviews across the globe.
On the one hand, there was consensus that the disease was mild for the vast majority of people. We heard this almost verbatim on March 4 from Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, on March 12 from French President Emmanuel Macron, and on March 6 from Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly. On March 16 Kelly emphasized that “for most people, it is a minor disease and we’re finding that wherever it has developed in the world … that’s pretty standard.”
Fauci stated in a March 4 White House Coronavirus Taskforce press briefing that “the risk of infection throughout the [U.S.] is … low…” and “the risk for a young person who gets infected [of] getting into trouble is really low.” Dr. Robert Redfield, then Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), echoed this. He explained that the recommended mitigation strategies, including washing hands, covering sneezes and coughs, and staying home when sick, were “absolutely no different than what we ask the American public to do for the flu.”
On March 8 U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams reassured Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that “most people who get the coronavirus are going to have a mild disease,” that “very few will actually need to be hospitalized” and that “the average age of people who are dying from coronavirus is 80 plus.” On March 11, Fauci, Redfield, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Assistant Secretary of Human Services for Preparedness and Response, testified to the House Oversight and Reform Committee that “the immediate risk of this new virus to the American public is low” and that “our nation’s healthcare system is better prepared than it has ever been.”
Yet at the same time, there was fear mongering and an unmistakable drive towards replicating China’s unprecedented lockdown strategy. Aylward supported implementing extreme social distancing (the WHO was at the time arbitrarily recommending 2 meters) and restricting freedom of movement. In a Feb. 25 telebriefing, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and early incident manager for the Covid response, warned Americans of “severe disruption” to everyday life as she braced the public to expect “school closings, workplace shutdowns, and the canceling of large gatherings.” On February 27 Fauci was privately encouraging former “Dallas” actress and AIDS awareness advocate, Morgan Fairchild, of all people, to prep her social media followers for eventual “behavioral adjustments” including “social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools.” Dr. Deborah Birx later admitted to advocating full lockdowns under the euphemism of “flatten-the-curve guidance.” (READ MORE: To Win the ‘Culture War,’ We Need Fewer Conservatives and More Counter-Revolutionists)
Hence on March 9 the groundwork for lockdowns was officially laid via the earliest CDC guidelines. As I previously reported, Fauci and Birx lied to Americans that the “science” behind these guidelines came from research out of Australia (authored, funnily enough, by the very Dr. Dalton who had interviewed the WHO’s Dr. Aylward on March 6.) No, it didn’t. Fauci had never even contacted the Australians. Their paper had been published online only days before and wasn’t peer-reviewed, which Fauci knew. In any case, it was hardly “science.” The paper relied on a combination of dodgy Chinese data and pandemic influenza research that actually found no proven benefit from the most common social distancing measures.
What followed next is best described in Birx’s own words :
The White House had handed down guidance, and the governors took that ball and ran with it …California was first, doing so on March 18. New York followed on March 20.… In relatively short order by the end of March and the first week of April, there were few holdouts. The circuit-breaking, flattening-the-curve shutdown had begun.”
No, she wasn’t panicked; she was elated.
I have low expectations of jail time for these sociopaths and sadists. But let’s at least cut the fables and acknowledge a historical fact, very much on the public record, and right in front of the nose of anyone who bothers to look: they knew the disease wasn’t dangerous to most people, yet they locked us up anyway.
