by Jeffrey A. Tucker, Ron Paul Institute:
Now that we can talk to our friends and neighbors about it, the reality is sinking in. What our public-health experts and politicians did to this country was egregious. Inspired by the totalitarian lockdowns in Wuhan, China, and urged to replicate that policy by the World Health Organization in a report that Fauci’s National Institutes of Health approved, all constitutional rights were thrown out.
The churches were shut. The schools were closed, in some places for as long as two years, thus sacrificing the education of a whole generation. We faced restrictions on house parties. We could not visit the elderly in homes, not even sons and daughters who were paying the rent. There were even restrictions on travel between states: quarantine rules made it impractical.
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Health authorities specifically demanded the need to close ALL venues where people congregate. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Once people were allowed to crawl out from their domestic holes, they were forced to mask up (even though we had zero evidence that this would achieve anything!) and eventually get shots that everyone said would end the pandemic but obviously did not.
It’s been nearly three years of imposed hell. We now live with the after-effects, which include terrible inflation, learning loss, drug addiction, rising crime, cultural nihilism, and wholly justified public fury that is driving the Democrats to doom on Tuesday because it was the Democrats who leaned in and perpetuated all these policies long after they obviously failed.
So sure, people are upset. The right answer would be for our health authorities and politicians to apologize and beg forgiveness. But nothing like that has happened. They just keep on pretending that all of this was fine. There has been no repeal of the CDC’s claimed power to quarantine you next time, and the Biden administration’s own pandemic planning scheme is to prohibit states from opting out the next time around.
So let’s discuss Dr. Emily Oster’s piece in The Atlantic, in which she claims that everyone needs immediately to comply with some kind of amnesty she has declared. We are supposed to forget it all and move on. And why is this? Because, she says, there was so much uncertainty. They just didn’t know about the virus. It was the fog of war, after all, and everyone did their best.
“We didn’t know,” she says, and then keeps invoking the supposed “uncertainty” of the times, a word she deploys five times. Why if she (or they) were so uncertain did they so quickly decide to wreck all liberty in the United States? The so-called precautionary principle would suggest that government should undertake no such policy due to the obvious harms it would impose. They did it anyway.
Here’s the problem. This is complete rot. We knew from February of the risk stratification of the disease’s serious outcomes. It was in all the papers. We had the data. We knew from the Diamond Princess experience in February 2020 that there were no deaths under the age of 70 on the ship. That comported with every bit of information we had at the time. Based on what we knew at the time, there was absolutely no case for locking down at all and every reason not to do this.
For that matter, Professor Oster could have merely read the news. MSNBC on Jan. 30, 2020 reported that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s Health Advisor said, “Everyone in America should take a very big breath, slow down, and stop panicking and being hysterical. We are having a little too much histrionics on this.”
On March 4, 2020, Slate reported: “There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless. … Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower than current reports suggest.”
The same day, Psychology Today reported: “Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know …. It’s scary to think that an invisible enemy is out there to make you sick. But your doctor is not panicking, and you don’t need to, either.”
We can even turn to Dr. Fauci himself, who wrote as follows on Feb. 20, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine: “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1 percent) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10 percent and 36 percent, respectively.”
On March 17, 2020, the legendary epidemiologist John Ioannidis broke it all down: “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco …. One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health.
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