In 2020, a set of oppressive restrictions were imposed on the American people in response to COVID-19 that had never before been so much as suggested, let alone witnessed, in all of human history.
Our businesses, schools, churches, and even doctors’ offices were peremptorily shut down by government fiat.
We were forbidden from leaving home for activities deemed inessential and from commiserating with friends and family in groups deemed too large.
When, after months, a return to some skeletal semblance of normal human life was finally permitted, for many it was only on the condition that they never appear in public with their faces unmasked.
A lot of Americans still find themselves living under some of these burdensome rules. And many more are hearing from those who’ve assumed the power to regulate every aspect of their lives that, any day now, they’re likely to be living under them again.
Of course, any fool could see that the measures being proposed were sure to have a lot of very nasty consequences.
Yet, somehow, the medical experts insisting on the necessity of this punishing course of treatment behaved as if the question of unwelcome side-effects had simply never crossed their minds.
The man who the media anointed as perhaps the greatest medical mind in all of history somehow didn’t realize that shutting down diagnosis and treatment for cancer and other serious ailments would cause an enormous death toll of its own.
Nor did it somehow ever occur to Anthony Fauci that the social isolation and economic hardship he was so keen to inflict on the American people would drive countless already struggling under the weight of depression and chemical dependency to kill themselves or overdose on drugs.
But Fauci’s incomparably brilliant mind didn’t merely overlook the common-sense idea that a prolonged state of isolation and fear was likely to weaken our immune systems. His encyclopedic knowledge of medicine somehow didn’t include the decades of research establishing that his crushing restrictions would leave us all more vulnerable to—not just COVID-19—but every single disease that exists, as uncontroversial scientific fact.
Fauci also somehow neglected to consider that locking down our nursing homes and depriving residents of all human companionship was bound to vastly accelerate the progression of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Nor did he anticipate the obvious fact that the frailest among us would wither away and die feeling alone, abandoned, and unloved.
And, as hard as it is to fathom, to this day, Anthony Fauci still insists he can’t think of a single novel cause of death apart from COVID-19 that might have besieged us this year.
But it wasn’t just the blind eye turned to all the misery, hardship, and death lockdowns were sure to cause. The benefits accrued were just as purely theoretical as the catastrophic consequences were inexorably real. Indeed, the idea that lockdowns were going to accomplish anything at all depended on a number of assumptions there was every reason to think were false!
For one thing, there was never a shred of scientific evidence that putting healthy people in quarantine would do anything to ameliorate the spread of COVD-19. Moreover, everything we knew about viruses made the idea of quarantining people who aren’t sick completely absurd.
Even the CDC’s most recent pandemic planning guide from 2017 admitted that “direct evidence for the effectiveness of these measures is limited.” And by “limited” they meant non-existent. There wasn’t a single study that supports the idea that quarantining healthy people was going to do a damn thing to stop a virus from spreading.
The European Centre for Disease Control’s summary of the research was more honest. They noted that “there are few, if any, empirical data underpinning” the assumptions that workplace closures do anything to stop viruses from spreading. Indeed, they found no evidence for the effectiveness of any social distancing measures. But, unlike Anthony Fauci and CDC director Robert Redfield, they were very clear on all the misery they cause, labeling the direct costs “major” and the deleterious secondary harm “massive.”
Another review of the research published in the journal, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, concluded:
There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza.
And the reason they mention influenza specifically is that every single study that has been done on the subject was narrowly focused on whether isolation is effective against the flu. So, even if any of them had shown that locking down would accomplish anything—which, again, NOT A SINGLE ONE DID—it still wouldn’t have proven anything about some mysterious new virus we were constantly assured was nothing like the flu.
