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Yet it’s not the lab-leak question and the real, widespread confusion surrounding those early days of hysteria that is the scandal here. What we lived through was a seasonal respiratory outbreak converted by an unaccountable bureaucracy and a compliant press into the largest episode of mass hysteria in modern American history. The pathogen was not a significant part of the covid story. The panic and hysteria that resulted in civilizational disruption is.

Agree with my premise or not, but on top of that, Fauci’s “mitigation” record is still indefensible, and Fauci has already admitted it under oath.

In January 2024, in a closed-door transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from. His answer, released in full that May: “I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.” Asked whether he had seen any studies supporting six feet, he said he was not aware of any, and that such a study would be very difficult to do. He called it an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data, or even on data that could be gathered. Asked whether he recalled reviewing any studies on masking young children, he could not.

Now remember what six feet actually did.

That number, pulled out of thin air by government bureacurats, was the load-bearing number of the entire American shutdown apparatus. Six feet set restaurant capacity. Six feet determined whether a gym, a salon, a bar, or a church could open at all, and at what fraction of full capacity. These catastrophic government edicts dictated classroom layouts. A number that “sort of just appeared” was used to reorganize the economic, educational, and social life of 330 million people.

Then the masks. In January 2023, Cochrane published an updated review of physical interventions against respiratory viruses, pooling 78 randomized trials. On community masking it found little or no difference in influenza-like or COVID-like illness across nine trials and some 277,000 participants. Masks never work, but Fauci didn’t care. He found them a useful mechanism to control his sycophantic followers, like a cult leader insisting upon uniforms to showcase compliance.

Quite infamously, in November 2021, Fauci told CBS that his critics were really criticizing science itself, “because I represent science.” Four days after three courageous epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, Fauci and high level government health bureaucrats waged a smear campaign against the truth tellers. NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published takedown” of what he called “three fringe epidemiologists.” No, not a rebuttal. A “takedown.” The federal government’s two most powerful “public health” officials used their authority to discredit the people asking questions about the legitimacy of their policies.

Between February and April 2020, the number of working business owners in America fell from 15.0 million to 11.7 million. That’s a loss of 3.3 million, 22 percent, the largest drop ever recorded. Many of those businesses never recovrered. The Great Recession, by comparison, took 730,000 over its entire span. Yelp alone logged 163,735 closures by that August, and roughly 60 percent of them became permanent. Peer-reviewed work using California’s full sales-tax filing universe found permanent-closure rates spiking, with small firms hit far harder than large ones.

There were also devastating results for America’s youth. After decades of sustained progress in math and reading, The Nation’s Report Card recorded the largest math decline in its history. Twelfth graders tested in 2024, which is the first cohort to spend all four high school years after the closures, were still way below normal levels. Despite tens of billions in federal dollars infused into the system, the money did not close the gap. Studies showed that the schools that stayed remote longest lost the most.

The hysteria was infinitely worse than the claimed disease itself. From April 2020 through the end of 2021, Americans died of non-covid causes at an annual rate 97,000 above trend. Heart disease, diabetes, drug overdoses, alcohol, homicide, car crashes, etc all went way up. All-cause mortality rose 26 percent among working-age adults versus 18 percent among the elderly. Among children, who were never threatened by a mild respiratory virus, there were essentially no aggregate excess deaths at all. We shut the schools for a supposed viral threat that was not impacting the students whatsoever.

In a just world, Anthony Fauci would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Not because of some massive, hard to track, intelligence agency sourced foreign conspiracy involving Wuhan, China. But because he used his credentials to insist again and again that his devastating authoritarian dictates were absolutely necesssary, and backed by real science. Fauci is a negligent and despotic criminal of the highest order, and it would be a shame if he got away with it. I do hope that he will face some type of real criminal prosecution in the coming days and months while Republicans are still in power.

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