Don’t Let Them Rewrite the Pandemic

 The Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the elderly and the sick in this country. It inspired or terrified us into huge social, governmental, and economic experiments. “Lockdown” stopped being just prison jargon. We have long since entered an appropriate period of reflection and investigation. Fights about masks, social-distancing, quarantines, and closures of churches, parks, and other amenities disfigured the normal rhythm of human life, marring funerals and delaying weddings. We are now uncovering years of learning loss and missed developmental milestones in children who were deprived of needed socialization, structured play, and face-to-face learning for speech development.

These particular maladies and the way America was an outlier in them are at the feet of our institutions and their leaders. Which is why they are lying so much about their records.

This week in his interview with the New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIAID and the most prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, gave his latest assessment of the efficacy of masks. “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent,” he explained. “But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”

Maybe 10 percent? That’s it? That is what justified years of miserable public-policy fights, and of impaired schooling? He then blamed the “culture wars” — New York Times code for “intransigent conservatives” — for the fights and agonies about masks and mask mandates.

In fact, it was the contradictory, dishonest, and — as it turns out — entirely false assurances of public-health authorities that made masks into such a controversy. America became a global outlier for masking young toddlers and children during the pandemic, and was for years, based on falsehoods and sometimes outright lies. Lies Fauci told.

To review: In March of 2020, on 60 Minutes, Fauci said, “Right now people in the United States should not be walking around with masks.” This was a defensible suggestion according to the best studies available. But later, he explained this and other mask-denigrating statements in his emails were noble lies meant to protect supplies. As a pro-masking consensus formed, Fauci claimed implausibly that the science had changed. By October of 2020, Fauci was back on 60 Minutes to say that meta studies had changed his mind. “It became clear that cloth coverings, things like this here” — he pulled out a jersey mask to demonstrate — “and not necessarily a surgical mask or an N95. Cloth coverings work.” He would continue to say in interviews that “if CDC says they are effective, in fact they are” until January of 2022. Public-health officials knew the truth the whole time, and Fauci sometimes inadvertently betrayed this in statements in which he referred to masks as a “symbol” rather than as a tool of mitigation. But this knowledge also makes them culpable. Once it was clear that the spread in schools where cloth masks were the norm was an acceptable risk, public-health officials could have justified moving to maskless schooling, as much of Europe did by that time. They didn’t.

Fauci defied anyone to prove that he closed down a single business or school. But, in fact, he is on the record as having told President Trump to “shut the country down.” He went on television countless times to warn against red states reopening their schools too soon or at the wrong time. He went on television to condemn people attending Texas Rangers baseball games, or SEC football — outdoors when Covid was in seasonal decline. His words and his position carried weight with the public, but they seem to have made no impression on him, as he tossed them away the moment they became inconvenient.

Fauci is not alone. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in testimony before Congress, is also rewriting her part. “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” she said. “We know that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

To put it mildly, this is not true. In the fall of 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Every few days during the spring and summer of 2020, Weingarten would give more reasons why schools must remain closed. Affiliated unions said even more bizarre things. The Chicago Teachers Union, in December of 2020, said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

The AFT aggressively lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even suggested language for the agency’s influential school-reopening guidance, language that would make it easier to seriously delay or halt reopenings. Two of the union’s suggested emendations were adopted verbatim.

That a union head like Weingarten relentlessly advocated for the narrow interests of dues-paying members should not surprise us. It should only warn the public against ever again treating her as an authority on what’s best for students or schools as institutions.

The shocking thing is that Dr. Fauci, head of NIAID and one of the nation’s most celebrated physicians, acted in much the same way — tirelessly torturing the available evidence to protect the day-to-day, hour-by-hour reputation of public-health agencies, rather than the long-term reputation of publicly funded science, and scientific expertise itself. His unwillingness to accept responsibility for public confusion on masks is lamentable and discredits his reputation as a leader. His calculation that blaming half the country for noticing his contradictions is probably shrewd, but definitely shameful. Physician, heal thyself.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/dont-let-them-rewrite-the-pandemic/