Never Forget What They Did to Us Five Years Ago – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Five years ago, the scientific “community,” the public health complex, and politicians failed. They responded to the outbreak of the COVID pandemic with hysteria, domination, and deceit. Driven by a quasi-religious fanaticism that maximum isolation — “social distancing” — was a moral imperative, they did everything within their power to keep citizens siloed away in their homes — quiet, complacent, and obedient.

Shut up about wanting to worship God in church. Shut up about wanting your children to be educated in school. Shut up about wanting to go on a walk in a park with your family. Shut up about wanting to serve customers at your business in an altered way. Sit in your house and wait. Sit around for two years and don’t leave. You have a job where you can just type on your laptop from your dining room table, right? Your kids will be fine just watching videos on a laptop for a few years.

Completely absent in the public health complex’s response was any acknowledgment that tailored responses were appropriate to mitigate the negative consequences of forcing people, particularly children, into virtual house arrest.

It was obvious from the beginning that the elderly were endangered by the virus to a much greater degree than children and young people, and yet the idea that we should respond to this circumstance by encouraging children and young people to continue living their lives and warning the elderly to minimize close indoor interaction was consigned as a right-wing conspiracy and lie. (RELATED: Standing Up for Bureaucracy Is Not Standing Up for Science)

On March 16, 2020, a number of infectious disease experts published a letter demanding the closure of all schools and businesses in the United States. Science magazine glowingly reported that such a move “would go beyond the spotty closures now in place.”

All Republican governors went along with the insanity of keeping all children nationwide out of school. In their defense, the public health complex made the societal pressure to keep schools closed incredibly intense.

This was despite the fact that all of the evidence available in March 2020, when schools in the United States shut down, pointed toward the conclusion that school closures would do nothing to slow the spread of COVID. For instance, the Washington Post reported on March 16, 2020, that the CDC had “advised that short- and medium-term school closures do not affect the spread of the virus and that evidence from other countries shows places that closed schools, such as Hong Kong, ‘have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not.’”

Evidence continued to show that school closures did nothing to slow the spread of the virus. The Lancet published a systematic review in May 2020 that concluded school closures “would prevent only 2-4 percent of deaths” — and even this likely overstated it. (Despite this evidence, over half of American students remained in remote “learning” in January 2021. Teachers’ unions kept bargaining for continued remote learning as late as 2022.)

With each day that passed in the pandemic, the public health complex became more entrenched in its narrative that maximum pandemic restrictions were necessary and that anyone who said otherwise was part of a right-wing disinformation network that needed to be silenced for the sake of society’s safety.

That especially kicked off after Elon Musk tweeted: “Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable.” Media outlet after media outlet came out to say that this was a lie and that children needed to stay in isolation. CNN, in a “news article,” called Musk’s tweet “false” and essentially demanded that Twitter remove the tweet by complaining, “Twitter did nothing.” Axios likewise screeched, “Twitter lets Musk’s coronavirus misinformation stand.” That article further demanded censorship by stating: “misinformation can only worsen the pandemic.”

“Health officials” — including the CDC — then went so far as to tell mothers who tested positive for COVID to isolate from their newborns after giving birth. They even recommended that mothers separate from their babies if they even had a “potential” case of COVID.

On Oct. 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was published by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University. The declaration urged society to adopt a new strategy called “Focused Protection,” under which “measures to protect the vulnerable” would be the “central aim” of public health measures. People not vulnerable to the virus, the declaration asserted, “should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” warned the scientists, adding, “Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”

The idea was that building immunity in the less vulnerable segment of the population would help society reach herd immunity, which the declaration defined as “the point at which the rate of new infections is stable.”

The New York Times article on the Great Barrington Declaration framed it as a dangerous conspiracy that was inviting danger, rather than as a reasoned alternative proposal. The article’s headline was: “A Viral Theory Cited by Health Officials Draws Fire From Scientists.” The article reported, “Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, has dismissed the declaration as unscientific, dangerous and ‘total nonsense.’ Others have called it unethical, particularly for multigenerational families and communities of color.”

Notable are the eight comments on that New York Times article that the Times’ editors selected as “NYT Picks.” All of these comments express outrage with the Great Barrington Declaration. “Face it, China rose to the challenge and had the communal concern and discipline to beat the virus,” said one comment. “I suspect Stanford University is not pleased that one of their faculty is gaining national attention for spouting non-science,” said another. Another commentator stated, “[W]hy believe these 2 neither were trained in the appropriate disaplin to have a valid opinion.” One said definitively, “Herd immunity is reached only if all efforts to combat the virus fail. It is not a cure, it is capitulation.” Another commentator repeated the moral absolutism that you were responsible for virtual murder if you left your house and caught the virus: “How would you feel if you got the disease through being irresponsible and then passed it on to your ICU nurses who later died?”

In response to the Great Barrington Declaration, 80 scientists signed the John Snow Memorandum to reaffirm their support for maximum pandemic restrictions. The letter was published in the Lancet and was headlined “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now.” The letter said of the Great Barrington Declaration: “This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists published an essay in which they said the Great Barrington Declaration was “Herding People to Slaughter.” The declaration, the Union of Concerned Scientists said, “was written by three scientists with fringe views and concocted in a gathering hosted by a libertarian think tank with ties to the climate-denying Koch Industries.”

It was as though the public health complex and scientific “community” were determined to beat down any dissent by smearing it all as “right-wing disinformation.”

As evidence of this strategy, let’s examine one claim smeared as a right-wing conspiracy theory: the fact that COVID emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The CIA, Department of Energy, and FBI all agree on this point, with the FBI as well as the CIA’s director, John Ratcliffe, saying that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yet consider the extent to which this fact was maligned as “disinformation” by the left-wing hacks who make up the nation’s public health complex and the left-wing journalists who jumped to join them.

On March 7, 2020, the Lancet published a letter written and circulated by Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that was collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on researching bat coronaviruses. The letter “strongly condemn[ed]” the claims that COVID emerged from a lab as “conspiracy theories.” (Daszak had worked to conceal the fact that he had coordinated the letter.)

The media parroted the line exactly, spinning the lab leak theory as “right-wing” and “nationalist.”

In an April 6, 2020, article on COVID’s origin, CNN summarized the situation thusly: “Scientists have banded together across international borders to condemn the nationalist-tinged conspiracy theories.” It portrayed the letter in the Lancet as definitive evidence against the lab leak hypothesis, simply saying that scientists wrote the letter “condemning the conspiracy theories.” The article quoted Peter Daszak as an expert source.

When in late April 2020 the Trump administration’s National Institutes of Health terminated a grant to EcoHealth Alliance for its research on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the scientific “community” reacted with one voice to slam the move.

Science magazine’s article on the matter was headlined “NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’ and might break rules, critics say.” The article reported that the research community was “reacting with alarm and anger” to the grant’s termination, and said that the NIH’s decision came after “conservative U.S. politicians and media” suggested “without evidence” that the virus emerged from a lab in Wuhan.

Within days, 31 scientific societies had signed onto a letter denouncing the NIH’s decision and claiming that it “politicizes science.” Then, 77 Nobel laureates signed a letter claiming they were “gravely concerned” by the funding revocation.

For the left-wing media, the pulling of funding from EcoHealth Alliance was the result of the right-wing conspiracy beast. For instance, Buzzfeed News wrote: “Right-wing media and conspiracy theorists have seized on a series of grants awarded over the course of six years to study coronaviruses to undermine Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

The fight over COVID’s origin is just one instance where Science Inc. suppressed information and sought control by framing the Right as entirely composed of bad-faith conspiracy theorists.

There is oh so much more that they lied about. And oh so much more that they covered up.

For instance, they pretended that churches were a place of particular danger so as to keep them shuttered for months. In fact, they loved mocking churches as special vectors of disease spread. Carlos del Rio, a “global health expert” at Emory University, baselessly called churches “an ideal setting for transmission.” The New York Times pumped up the conspiracy, saying, “Churches Emerge As Major Source of Coronavirus Infections.” In fact, the evidence suggests that churches were able to prevent viral spread through simple distancing measures.

Many people, especially children and those under the poverty line, have not come close to recovering from what they were subjected to by the people who ostensibly care about their health.

But at least we can say that COVID exposed these elitists for who they really are. The Left is in collapse. The censorship regime is at an end. Even the New York Times acknowledged this week that one of its reporters, Donald McNeil Jr., was “misled” when scientists tried to convince him that COVID could not have emerged from a lab.

Now, we need those guilty of perpetrating this mass lockdown to acknowledge what they did. That starts with the Republican governors who fell for the narrative of the public health complex and kept schools shuttered.

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