By Jeffrey A. Rendall
Memories remain fresh from the Anthony Fauci-generated COVID pandemic hysteria
Something just wasn’t right here.
Ever have a similar feeling when you’ve faced a situation where a lifetime’s worth of experience and responsible learning are pointing to one interpretation of the stimuli/facts/data while what you’re being told and shown by the “folks in the know” screams just the opposite?
Such was the case six-plus years ago when the panic and hysteria over the novel coronavirus of Chinese origin began in earnest across the globe. Life had been going on swimmingly and then, all of a sudden, we were calmly but firmly instructed by government authorities to “shelter in place” and not speak to anyone person-to-person. If you recall the tone of news reports from the time, it was almost as though that genre of plague/epidemic horror movies had morphed into real life.
Relying on memory, first came information snippets and video from Italy of patients coming down with a mysterious respiratory infection and the medical brains in the far-off land fraught with worry over not having enough beds or respirators to deal with the emergency.
What to do? Hearts went out to the Italians, yet the contingency still seemed quite far away for those located apart from major airports or likely sources of transmission.
Reports then surfaced of the virus having reached American shores courtesy of a cruise ship full of afflicted passengers — or through air travel. From where? Was this a real emergency crisis situation or just the latest iteration of a health scare that should be taken with a grain of salt?
American health officials appeared to be as confused as the rest of us, issuing a spate of warnings and advisories and recommendations as though they’d just consulted a medical manual somewhere and understood what to do because the author of the textbook knew precautions. Right?
Around that time frame, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s name became a familiar household reference. What to do? Trust what they’re telling us or resist? Stop going to church and the mall? For how long? Where and when would it all end?
It’s hard to revisit those uncertain times. In an opinion column titled, “The Fauci diary tells the story of institutional cover-up”, Peter Navarro wrote at The Washington Times last week:
“…On lockdowns, the same diary shows Dr. Fauci urging the closure of schools, bars and restaurants; backing a shelter-in-place order for New York City; praising then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s shutdown of nonessential activity; and pushing President Trump to extend national restrictions.
“In contrast, I warned on ‘Meet the Press’ that prolonged lockdowns could kill ‘many more’ Americans through depression, alcoholism, deferred medical care, economic ruin and other collateral damage. Public health officials were counting viral cases while ignoring the lives being destroyed by their prescriptions. History has vindicated my warning far more than Dr. Fauci’s one-dimensional certainty.
“Here is the bottom line: The man who demanded that America ‘follow the science’ was often following politics, panic, ego and institutional self-protection. I did not trust him then. His own diary proves America should not trust him now. Mr. Paul, let the hard questions begin.”
This column was written before Fauci “took the Fifth” over a hundred times when he showed up to shed light on his crooked COVID dealings.
If the past is a guide, Senator Paul should have let Fauci have it with a kind of mustard you’d rub a sandwich with the other day.
Seeing obnoxious and smug liberal bureaucrats squirm is always fun, isn’t it? We were deprived of our opportunity.
In essence, Paul represented us all when Fauci stepped up to the microphone. Or at least the tens of millions of well-informed Americans who refused to buy into the government’s butt-covering narrative all those years ago and have waited patiently for justice to be served on a senate hearing room-sized seat plate. It’s hard to think back on 2020 with any kind of fondness, but some of us would’ve achieved retroactive satisfaction when Saint Fauci was laid bare before the world and forced to explain why he did what he did based on his own written blathering in his diary.
COVID 19 wasn’t supposed to be political, right? Fauci and the government’s infectious disease team was assigned to safeguard the American public regardless of their personal feelings for President Donald Trump and his policies. Trump had just been through the sham impeachment trial at that time, was proud of having “survived” the witch hunt and primed to mount a winning reelection campaign.
Democrats used COVID to curtail their primary nominating process, since allowing their own voters to choose between crazy Bernie Sanders and broken-down old goat former Obama vice president Joe Biden would’ve represented an irresponsible and callous disregard of safety precautions. Or so they reasoned.
What to do? Pass mail-in voting measures! Keep senile Joe barricaded in his basement so that he’d be shielded from the Chinese bug while simultaneously sidestepping difficult scrutiny of his proposed platform. Or lack thereof. Biden’s campaign could be summed up thusly – “Trump is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths because he mishandled the Chinese virus calamity.”
Remember how Dr. Jill Biden gave her Dem convention speech in a shuttered (by decree) and lifeless school? Dems even cancelled their in-person convention in favor of featuring “performances” from party pols and celebrities. They were all so responsible, weren’t they? None of it was for political effect, remember?
I recall having conversations with pro-lockdown supporters about Fauci and his recommendations. They bought into the six-foot “social distancing” crapola that soon became commonplace. Small businesses shut down. The government paid employees who couldn’t work. Like no shyster would ever take advantage of that “we’ll trust you” scenario, correct?
Those of us with school-aged children understood the magnitude of what Fauci and his crooked cohorts advocated. The slow trickle of data we actually received indicated young children weren’t at serious risk from the mysterious virus, yet school systems were compelled to spend millions on plexiglass barriers to keep the youngins apart.
Fauci’s unabashed cheerleading for mask mandates was particularly offensive. Remember how Fauci was caught mask-less at Nationals Park that time? What a hypocrite.
Local officials were complicit, too. My son’s school athletics teams were required to wear masks during a game. Players on the baseball field were exempt from the rules, but the catcher and batter had to pull up their masks when at the plate. No amount of common sense objections to the absurdity of the regulations would suffice, either.
You either complied, or you didn’t participate. Freedom be damned!
But the biggest remaining effect from Fauci’s high-level treachery are the lasting impacts from the hastily developed vaccines the diminutive doctor and his ilk promoted. President Trump bears some complicity in the rollout of the purported “cure” for the overstated disease, but Fauci and the Democrats were responsible for perpetuating the mandates and causing thousands of decent, law-abiding men and women to lose their jobs because they wouldn’t lay down their bodily integrity to accept the “jab”.
It’s safe to say everyone knows someone who got sick from the vaccine. Some were hospitalized. How many died as a result? I don’t know the statistics, but, seeing as Fauci and the Biden people were in charge at the height of the COVID controversy, who can say whether the statistics were “cooked” to paint a false impression?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services today because of his passionate advocacy for sanity on the COVID vaccine. Lots and lots of people outright refused to be bodily violated because Fauci and Biden and the rest told them it was a love thy neighbor-type duty.
They lied about it. The Democrat cabal told Americans that if they accepted the vaccine, they’d be immune from exposure.
I accepted the vaccine. I still got COVID. How many were similarly stricken?
In his piece, Navarro also detailed his struggles to convince Fauci of the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID. To no avail, of course. How many humans succumbed to preventable deaths because of Fauci and Biden’s shortsightedness?
The inestimable damage from COVID – and the way it was handled by Anthony Fauci and his fellow health bureaucrats – continues to mount. The effects of bad public policy cannot be completely pinned down, though it appears certain Americans will be feeling the pain for a long, long time.
Like with his son Hunter (and many, many others), Anthony Fauci received a pardon from Joe Biden on the senile one’s way out of office. His own diary scribblings show he’ll need more than that to salvage his reputation.
Jeff Rendall is editor and publisher of GolfintheUSA.com and has written about golf and politics for over a quarter of a century. A non-practicing attorney from California, he moved to the east coast three decades ago to pursue and combine his interests in all things American history and culture. Jeff has worked as an intern on Capitol Hill and in various capacities in grassroots organizing and conservative organizations and publications, including a nearly two-decade stint at ConservativeHQ.com. Column republishing or other inquiries: Rendall@msn.com .