In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.
But not everyone joined the lockstep march on Covid. Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, along with two other public health experts, issued the Great Barrington Declaration. It sensibly argued that the social costs of extended lockdowns far exceeded their mostly hypothetical benefits. The Great Barrington argument was derided in the press and secretly censored on social media at the behest of government officials.
Similarly, at a time when the CDC and WHO both asserted the disease was transmitted primarily through “close contact,” Virginia Tech’s Lynsey Marr and several other scientists found abundant evidence that Covid was, in fact, airborne. This meant the key to saving lives was improving indoor ventilation, not displays of hygiene theater. Both health organizations largely ignored the new findings for more than a year, instead sticking to the “six-feet-apart” mantra and other dubious protocols. The astonishingly early arrival of vaccines was one of the pandemic’s key medical breakthroughs. But, as University of California, San Francisco, oncologist and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad argued, health officials confused and angered the public by exaggerating the vaccine’s benefits, ignoring its small but real risks (for young men, the danger of myocarditis arguably outweighs the vaccine’s upsides), and insisting that everyone—even children or people who’d gained immunity from previous Covid infections—keep taking booster after booster. Fauci’s vaccine mandates were a massive overreach.
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Oh yes, it must be so “terribly frustrating” that Americans don’t “appreciate” having their: children masked, schools closed, businesses shuttered, family gatherings restricted, vaccines mandated, etc. In Fauci’s world, the citizen should just say “please and thank you” and do as they’re told. Science be damned.
Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”