Remember this?
Why is this man smiling, along with the woman who calls him her mentor?
Four years have passed since Dr. Anthony Fauci declared lockdowns throughout most of the economy, smiling and gladhanding with the people up on that stage who abetted him, and not a word of apology since for all the damage he did.
According to Mark Hemingway, writing in The Federalist, the inevitable outcome of this disastrous and tyrannical policy, could be seen here:
On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.
Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not.
The worst outcome, however, might have been the Biden administration irresponsibly outsourcing its Covid policy on schools to the teachers unions, who fought to keep schools closed for more than a year in some places, followed by an insistence on ineffective and difficult-to-enforce mask mandates on children.
It was a disaster. But like the Gaza denizens in the wake of October 7, how they celebrated, they and their friends in the hospital-industrial complex which took a lot of federal aid and in the press:
Amy Reichert, the brilliant local Republican without an office in San Diego has fished up a couple of important ones worth recalling:
...and the self-immolating media. The Los Angeles Times was one of the worst of them, but the San Diego Union-Tribune did the best it could to keep up.
Look at those headlines that now-former editor (who like thousands of San Diegans, is fleeing to South Carolina) is so proud of:
Why We All Need to Stay Home
Getting Used to Not Being Able to Move Around Freely
There were a heckuva lot of cheerleaders for this disaster, promoting it, censoring others, getting people fired, which as it turns out were all terrible and wrong things to do. As Hemingway notes, the lockdowns and the freakish response unleashed by Fauci and his casually stated lockdowns effectively destroyed Americans' trust in government.
The bottom line is that the Covid response fundamentally eroded trust between citizens and the government like no other issue in generations, and Democrat lawmakers were pretty clearly on, as they like to say, “the wrong side of history.”
And the scope of the damage is far from entirely described.
This week, Stanford University's Scott Atlas, M.D., Johns Hopkins University's Professor of Economics, Steve Hanke, the University of Chicago's Casey B. Mulligan and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity's Philip G. Kerpen put out an important paper describing the damage done from lockdowns four years on, from both a medical and an economic perspective. The vital paper is titled COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years.
The 49-page report has an executive summary or can also be read in whole here;
The top ten lessons learned?
Leaders should calm public fears, not stoke them
Lockdowns do not substantially work to reduce deaths or stop viral circulation
Lockdowns and social isolation had negative consequences that far outweighed benefits
Government should not pay people more not to work
Shutting down schools was a major policy mistake, with tragic effects on children, especially the poor
Masks were of little or no value, and possibly harmful
Government should not suppress dissent or police the boundaries of science
The real hospital story was underutilization
Protect the most vulnerable
Warp Speed: Deregulate but don't mandate
All of these lessons learned were the result of mistakes, hideous ones, with Fauci's hand in nearly every one of them. On top of that, Fauci was a hypocrite, not bothering wearing a mask at a baseball game, lied to Congress according to Sen. Rand Paul, and retired as the U.S.'s highest paid government employee.
That's one ugly picture for someone who smiled so blithely at wrecking the economy, wrecking children's education, contributing to COVID deaths by not differentiating risks, and above all destroying public trust in government. Never again should anyone like him ever be permitted with as much power as he had. Within his grins and smiles an abyss opened.
Hat tip: Instapundit
Image: Twitter screen shot (detail)