Anthony Fauci suggests locking down healthy would’ve made medical sense

OPINION:

President Biden’s top medical wonk, Anthony Fauci, said in a recent interview that the initial response to the coronavirus should have been one of immediate lockdowns, immediate mass face masking and immediate “what have you” — that last, of course, meaning whatever the good doctor labels as necessary. He is “science,” after all.

This is Fauci’s last struggling gasp for relevancy in a time of overwhelming American weariness of all-things-clampdown.

The fact is Fauci himself was one of the biggest flip-floppers on the so-called science that was stated all along the coronavirus clampdown road — cited by media and medical bureaucrats alike to justify stripping citizens of their God-give individual liberties.

“Fauci wrote in February 2020 that store-bought face masks would not be very effective at protecting against the COVID-19 pandemic and advised a traveler not to wear one,” the New York Post wrote in June of 2021.

“Following the science, Tony? Fauci insists pandemic ISN’T over just hours after he said it was, claims comment was ‘misconstrued,’” the Daily Mail wrote in April of 2022, then updated in July.

“Fauci Can’t Use Science to Excuse His Missteps,” The Washington Post reposted from a Bloomberg analysis in December of 2021.

“Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics),” the Foundation for Economic Education wrote in June of 2021.

That last is particularly powerful pointing to Fauci’s pseudoscience-like science and present-day revision of history.

“Last summer in an interview with CBS Evening News … Fauci said he had no regrets over advising Americans against wearing masks in public spaces early in the pandemic, even though his recommendations changed months later,” FEE wrote. “‘I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,’ said Fauci.”

In other words: the science changed. The data on the coronavirus changed. The media community’s understanding of the virus changed.

Both publicly and privately, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act, Fauci advised against the general public wearing face masks. He said “masks are really for infected people,” in one email dated Feb. 5, 2020. He said drugstore face masks are “not really effective in keeping out [the] virus,” in this same email. He said the “typical mask you buy” is not able to prevent a virus “small enough to pass through material” from passing through that material, in this same email.

His words.

His “science.” His flip-floppy, failed fact, so-called “science.”

Keep that in mind while considering his present-day look back on lessons learned from the virus and his views of what he could’ve done better.

Now, in an interview with TheHill.com, Fauci suggests the better way to have beaten this virus would have been to clamp even more freedoms.

“If I knew in 2020 what I know now, we would do a lot differently because back then we were not sure of a number of things,” Fauci said.

No duh.

That’s pretty much the truth for any virus that comes along: The best medical minds don’t know a number of things.

Fauci then said that today’s data show that “50 to 60 percent of the transmission” takes place from those who show no symptoms — and get this: that even those people should have been subjected to some virus mitigation restrictions. 

His words: “Had we known that then, the insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm and there would have been much, much more stringiest restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy, encouraging people to wear masks, physical distancing or what have you.”

His meaning: Lock ‘em down!

In a normal world, people who show no symptoms of sickness are generally considered healthy. After all, who goes to the doctor to get tested for sicknesses when they don’t feel sick?

The problem with Fauci’s recommendations is he’s trying to turn American individualism — where individuals are responsible for an in control of their own medical decisions — into American collectivism, where citizens are told by their government leaders which actions are required for society at-large.

And that’s been the mark of the medical bureaucracy and it’s governmental response to this coronavirus from the get-go. Fauci may know more about diseases than the average American citizen.

But the average American citizen knows more about individual liberty that Fauci.

And in America, land of God-given rights, it’s liberty that trumps science. It’s freedom that comes first. 

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE  or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.