Fauci admits to Congress that COVID social distancing guidelines lacked scientific basis - "Fauci, 83, revealed to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the “six feet apart” recommendation championed by him and other US public health officials was “likely not based on scientific data,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician. Schools nationwide remained closed well into the second year of the pandemic as a result of the social distancing guidelines, which were disputed by both research studies and other health officials. “It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health who served as President Biden’s COVID response coordinator for 15 months, told the New York Times in March 2021... A top White House adviser to two presidential administrations, Fauci’s transcribed interview before the House COVID panel “revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority,” according to Wenstrup. Those “failures” included foisting vaccination mandates on schools and businesses. “After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come,” Wenstrup said. “It is clear that dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely. Should a future pandemic arise, America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data.” Wenstrup also said committee members “remain frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s inability to recollect COVID-19 information that is important for our investigation,” while “others we have spoken to do recall the facts.” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), who sits on the panel, said Tuesday night that Fauci had shown an “amazing ability to either forget what happened or then to find ways to shirk any sort of responsibility for the influence that was had,” during the two-day affair. “They wash their hands of any sort of responsibility, saying, ‘Oh, those decisions were made by school districts.’ But the school districts know, if you don’t follow the guidance that’s coming out of the federal government, you open yourselves up to lawsuits,” Cloud said of Fauci and other US pandemic response officials. “He says he’s still not convinced that there was learning loss — that in his view, that’s still really open for discussion”... Republican staff members said the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director also “admitted that America’s vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future” but that he advised US colleges “to impose vaccine mandates on their students” during the pandemic. In 2021, Fauci had also said it was “proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls–t, and they get vaccinated.”"
Damn covidiots! Why can't they just Follow the Science?!
LILLEY: What else did Fauci recommend that wasn't based on science? - "Burwell wrote Fauci in February 2020 asking if she should wear a mask while travelling. Fauci responded that masks are for infected people to stop them spreading an infections. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you,” Fauci said, adding he did not recommend Burwell mask up . That was the view of virtually all doctors at the time. But as public and political pressure grew, the medical community changed its tune and insisted masking was the answer. Fauci went from saying there is no need to mask to recommending double and triple masking. The real problem during the pandemic is that too many decisions were made on the basis of political expediency driven by fear. Governments felt they needed to be doing something and the public was all too often clamouring for greater and greater restrictions... How many people had their lives ruined due to this unscientific decree? How many kids were forced out of school over an idea that “sort of just appeared.” We may never know the full damage of the pandemic. Beyond the lives lost, we had lives destroyed by financial hardship, loneliness, depression, addiction. We have a generation of children with maladapted social skills due to years out of the school system with limited physical or social interaction. Now we are told some of the very recommendations that led to this weren’t backed up by science at all. It’s maddening, it is outrageous, but it is not shocking. If the media had done their job and asked pointed questions and demanded evidence to back up decisions instead of acting like a cheering section for lockdowns, maybe things would have been different. Instead, we were failed by the media, failed by our political leaders and failed by the so-called top doctors – like Fauci."
Fact check: Masks are a coronavirus prevention method when used alongside other precautions | Reuters (2020) - "Wearing a mask in addition to keeping a distance of six feet can lower the chances of the disease being spread."
Did MIT Study Really Challenge 6-Foot Social Distancing For Covid-19 Coronavirus? Here’s What It Said (2021) - "Some people on social media are trying to put the six feet social distancing recommendation essentially six feet under. They are claiming that a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is showing that keeping six feet apart won’t really do much to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus indoors... Still not convinced that you should stay six feet away from others? Imagine then someone coughing in your general direction. Is your inclination to run up to the person and say, “me likey. Cough right into my face you bad boy” or “bad girl?” Remember each cough can spray a bunch of larger respiratory droplets at you like forcefully opening a fanny pack full of rice pilaf. When this happens, would you rather be right next to someone coughing or stay at least six feet away?"
Weird how "facts"
We're In a Major COVID-19 Surge. It's Our New Normal - "During COVID-19 lulls, “I’m living my life about as normally as I did in 2019,” Wachter says. Once indicators like COVID-19 hospitalizations and wastewater surveillance data start to suggest the virus is on the upswing, he wears a KN95 mask in crowded places like airports and theaters, where there’s little downside to masking. And in a full-blown surge, like now, Wachter masks almost everywhere and avoids some places he can’t, such as restaurants... Want to avoid infecting your grandmother before a visit? Maybe skip having dinner in a crowded restaurant a few days before and test before you go to her house. Want to minimize your risk of getting very sick if you do get infected? Stay up-to-date on boosters—as far too few people do, says Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. “The biggest failing right now in our response to COVID,” Hotez says, is that only about 20% of U.S. adults got the latest vaccine, which was updated to target newer viral variants. “That should be the number-one priority,” he says, since vaccination is the best way to prevent complications like hospitalization, death, and, to some degree, Long COVID. Even with boosters, Jetelina says Long COVID is a hard risk to plan around. The only tried-and-true way to avoid it is to avoid infection entirely; staying up-to-date on vaccines reduces the risk by up to 70%, according to recent research, but people can and do develop it even if they’re healthy, fully vaccinated, and have had previous infections without incident. With variants as contagious as JN.1 running rampant, doing almost anything in public opens up the possibility of getting sick."
From 2024. People still want to play this game
OutKick on X - "Barbra Streisand is getting slammed today after it was revealed that the $430+ millionaire took Covid relief funds in order to PAY HER GARDENER. At the same time this was happening, Streisand was going off on unhinged Twitter rants about President Trump and criticizing him over federal funds going to protect the border and not to where she really wanted them to go – her own pockets."
Fauci and his fans used 'science' to silence unsettled debate - "He was a remarkably successful as a bureaucrat but ended his term sullying science itself. These are fighting words to the partisans who bought Dr. Fauci bobbleheads, prayed before Dr. Fauci votive candles and slandered dissenting virologists as “deniers,” despite having no training themselves. Claiming “in Fauci we trust” shows a deep contempt for science itself. To his discredit, Fauci joined his true believers in condemning infidels who came to different conclusions. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, was one of his many victims. “[Fauci] deployed his allies in the press to destroy the reputations of scientists who disagreed with his pandemic management, rather than seeking good-faith discussions as all scientists should,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. Responding to his critics, Fauci said the following jaw-dropper: “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.“ Far more dangerous is not allowing orthodoxies to be challenged in public policy or science."
People were trying to gaslight, claiming no one ever said the science was settled. Then I quoted others making that claim
Covid Pandemic Policy: Officials Admit Reactions Destructive, Panicked - "The lockdowns that were imposed worldwide (with the exception of Sweden and a few other countries) ran contrary to the longtime conventional wisdom that the main responsibility of the public-health system in a pandemic is to keep people calm and society functioning. Our public-health officials did the opposite. Intentionally. The hysteria they generated led to hundreds of thousands of non-Covid excess deaths, massive economic and social harms, and, worst of all, an unprecedented disaster in education. Francis Collins, who was the head of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and is now a science adviser to President Biden, recently made a remarkably frank confession... Collins’s tardy mea culpa is welcome, and so too was the testimony last month of Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, during the country’s independent public inquiry into its Covid response. So far, the inquiry has presented a highly flawed picture of how Britain was plunged into a lockdown that greatly influenced the American decision to follow suit. Inquiry leaders appear to want the record to show that lockdowns should have started earlier and been more severe. But to his credit, Sunak didn’t follow that script in his testimony last month. During Covid, he headed Britain’s Treasury Department. He argued that Britain did a poor job of transparently discussing the costs and benefits as well as the fraying of the social fabric caused by the lockdowns: “Many of these impacts are not felt immediately. They are felt over time.” He pointed to findings from Imperial College London and the University of Manchester that applied a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) analysis to the first lockdown. Sunak said these reports “suggested that the lockdown in its severity and duration was likely to have generated costs that are greater than the likely benefit.” The QALY analysis is a standard way of measuring the overall quality of life. But the lead lawyer for the Covid inquiry, Hugo Keith, quickly dismissed Sunak by saying, “We’re not interested in QALYs.” This despite the fact that respected QALY studies have suggested that lockdown harms in England were five times larger than the benefits. Another cost of the lockdown was an increase in cynicism about government. Helen MacNamara, the second-most-senior British civil servant during the pandemic, told the inquiry panel last month that the lockdown protocols were rife with hypocrisy. She said she would struggle to “pick one day” when the Covid regulations were followed properly inside No. 10 Downing Street. She also criticized an overreliance on the advice of scientists who urged compliance with the lockdowns; the politicians she worked for treated the scientists’ advice as “the word of God,” she said. What the Covid inquiry has demonstrated is that the “expert science” relied on by leaders in Britain and the U.S. was often disastrously short-sighted. That’s why it should be a scandal that the Covid-policy postmortem in most countries is now mainly focused on burying government mistakes and avoiding accountability."
Of course, covid hystericists claim that if there had been an earlier and more severe lockdown, the cost would've been lower.
Stop telling us to protect the NHS when the NHS is failing to protect us - "Asked by the Covid Recovery Group of MPs to come up with a cost-benefit analysis which proved that the new tiers will do more good than harm, the Government’s response was, yet again, to hide behind its trusty Save the NHS shield. The shield has the magic power of deflecting any criticism of pandemic policy because the public cares about the NHS above all else, or so the official theory has it. I don’t know about you, but I am sick to death of this emotional blackmail which manipulates us into protecting the NHS when it is the NHS that should damn well be protecting us. Back in March, we gladly stayed home to buy the NHS time to deal with the crisis. Eight long, lonely months later, we see more clearly the dreadful harm that draconian measures have done to business, education and personal happiness. Not forgetting the 200,000 blameless people it is estimated the Covid Health Service has condemned to a premature death because it cancelled scans and treatments even while it was wasting hundreds of millions of pounds commandeering private hospitals, which it barely used. Nice no work if you can get it. Not so much Our NHS, then, as Their NHS. A service for which the taxpayer annually hands over a deafening £143 billion, but to which despairing surgeons tell me that same taxpayer is denied access because certain Trust managers have rather enjoyed using the virus as an excuse to keep entire departments closed and save money. Day after day, the public is drip-fed disingenuous data, such as that propagated by Gove, which invites us to feel sorry for the poor, sainted NHS. If we are “selfish” and fail to follow the latest corona regulations, well, it will be our own fault if the NHS “can’t cope” and more people lose their lives, I’m sorry, but that is a wicked falsehood. There are 13,466 Covid patients in all hospitals in England today. That’s 11 per cent Covid occupancy of hospital beds nationwide Only 9 per cent of hospital beds in the south of England are presently occupied by Covid patients. As for admissions, on Monday the TV news told us there had been 1,641 Covid hospital “admissions” in the past 24 hours. Is this really true? According to George, only 25 per cent of that number will have arrived at hospital as a confirmed Covid case. What happens is that patients who come in with other conditions are tested in subsequent days for the virus. Those who test positive will be put down as a Covid admission and are then added to the tally for the day before their result comes back. Now comes the bombshell. Between 17.5 and 25 per cent of so-called “admissions” have acquired the virus while in hospital. “Those percentages have been stable for the past three months,” reports George. Call it the NHS’s dirty secret. It is really really bad at infection control. By contrast, the Japanese are excellent; it’s one reason Japan has remarkably few Covid deaths (2,042 out of a population of 126 million) and the UK has the third highest total in the world. So, while Michael Gove in his prissy, pious professorial way is lecturing us on why “it would be intolerable to allow the NHS to be overwhelmed” the truly intolerable thing is kept out of sight. The health service is giving a potentially fatal virus to a distressing number of the fragile citizens who enter its care. You are more likely to catch Covid in a hospital than in an unfairly maligned pub... In France, key workers are told to get back to the hospital as soon as they’ve had a negative Covid test. Ours must see out the full fortnight at home, a farcical situation only exacerbated by the large number of NHS personnel who are shielding either because they have a pre-existing condition or are overweight. A staggering (in every sense) one in four nurses in England is obese. Obviously, you won’t hear a word of the damning data above from Gove or Matt Hancock. Both ministers are far too busy demanding that we “protect our NHS” the better to deflect blame from the service itself and spare the Government’s blushes. How many more sacrifices do you reckon we, as a nation, will we have to make to protect the NHS? Is it acceptable to put three million people out of work – four? – to save the NHS? Bailiffs at the door, tearful families homeless – what number of evictions should we tolerate to save the NHS? Relatives of residents in care homes denied the chance to kiss their loved ones goodbye, 60 million people unable to have their friends over; how much more of this life without living can we reasonably be expected to bear to save the NHS? Must absolutely everything we value be destroyed in order to protect the NHS? In a few years’ time, there will be graveyards full of men, women and children who died protecting our NHS. What’s the word Gove used? Ah yes, intolerable. It is intolerable that people should suffer so because their health service can’t do its job"
From 2020
‘Covid has turned cancer treatment upside down’ - "Epidemiologists scared everybody right at the beginning, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought. The Nightingale hospitals were never needed, for example – it just wasn’t that bad. The second time around, hospitalisations are now going down and the use of ventilation beds is going down. And we have not been so scared this time. The majority of cancer patients are curable. But they are not if you delay. The average age of cancer patients is in the 50s and 60s. The average age of Covid death is 82.4 years. The number of life-years lost from cancer is going to be massive compared to Covid, when we are able to analyse it. Since 82.4 years is very similar to the average age of death in Britain anyway, the loss of life-years model favours cancer every time and it favours heart disease and to a certain extent strokes as well... If you are running your own business, or are a gig employee who is paid for what you do by the hour, you are seriously disadvantaged and your future is threatened. If you want to go out and enjoy yourself, the options are not there. In Wales, you can’t even get an alcoholic drink in a pub, and the pub has to shut at six o’clock. This is just complete madness, and is not based on any scientific foundation whatsoever. As a society, we are used to certain norms, and liberty is in those norms. We have got to get back to a normal society to allow people to have better mental health."
From 2020
‘The cancer legacy could be worse than the damage caused by Covid’ - "Some patients did not come forward, trying to play their part in efforts to “protect the NHS”; others held back for fear of catching Covid. But many who wanted to see their GP struggled to obtain face-to-face appointments, following national orders issued, which said anyone seeking an appointment must first undergo telephone or online assessment. The result? The UK stands in the middle of a “cancer catastrophe,” say experts"
From 2021
The UK government’s attempt to frighten people into covid protective behaviours was at odds with its scientific advice - "Among the many revelations from recent leaked UK Government WhatsApp messages published by The Daily Telegraph is the fact that Matt Hancock, former health secretary, proposed using fear in order to get the public to comply with covid-19 restrictions... These revelations seem to confirm what many had been arguing for two years: that the UK government aimed to control the public through use of fear. We will leave aside the ethical and political dimensions of this argument for now in order to concentrate on the science. Both the government and The Telegraph accept the effectiveness of fear appeals—the one to extol it, the other to decry it. Both presuppose that fear is an effective way of controlling people. However, the scientific literature tells a very different story. It shows that frightening people is generally an ineffective way of persuading them to engage in health protective behaviours... Not only do they promote a naïve and mistaken strategy of fear, they also convey a wider attitude of contempt towards the public, suggesting that they cannot be reasoned with and can only be scared into doing the right thing. This contempt is a defining feature that is found throughout the leaked Whatsapp messages: contempt for the teaching profession who are described as “absolute arses” who “just hate work”; contempt for the police, described as “the plod” whose concerns about repressive enforcement of covid rules was airily dismissed with the comment that they “have been given their marching orders”; contempt for travellers placed in quarantine whose discomfort was described as “hilarious”—and, of course, contempt for the general public, not only in words, but also in deeds—for instance, Hancock getting tests couriered for a colleagues’ son even as he refused testing to those entering care homes from the community for want of adequate supplies... Similar points could be made about the government’s use of fines and other punishments to secure compliance, despite advice that this could alienate the public—especially those who lacked the resources to comply"
Fear is effective on covid hystericists, though, many of whom are still terrified
The UK didn't even have hard vaccine passports (a negative or positive test were accepted)
Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "This isn't "long COVID." It looks like highly advanced gangrene, something I've seen before overseas. You need to get to an ER NOW, and you may well lose that leg. I am going to DM you."
Trina Lawrie @trina1982t2: "If I hear one more person say "Long Covid doesn't exist" or "it's just the flu" I will scream. I was reasonably healthy when I caught Covid in Feb 2020. I've thought long and hard about posting these. This is my right leg, July 2023."
Another cost of covid hysteria
Chinese Lab Mapped Deadly Coronavirus Two Weeks Before Beijing Told the World, Documents Show - WSJ - "Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days... Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks. China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020... The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak, but it suggests that the world still doesn’t have a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin. The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine... It “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who has reviewed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. “It’s important to keep in mind how little we know.” The Chinese researcher who submitted the virus sequence, Dr. Lili Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. The institute is part of the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences... the virus sequence was shared within China with China’s equivalent of the CDC on Jan. 5 but not made known globally to scientists. The sequence that Ren provided in December 2019 was never published and was deleted from the database on Jan. 16, 2020, after NIH, following its protocols, asked her for more technical details and she didn’t respond... Ren is listed in contract documents as being a collaborator on a U.S.-funded project to study how coronaviruses can be transferred from animals to humans. The work, which included collecting bat samples in China, was overseen by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The Journal has previously reported that Chinese specialists met with the World Health Organization in Beijing on Jan. 3, 2020, but didn’t disclose that the new disease was caused by a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew."
Jamie Metzl on X - "New revelations by @HouseCommerce that China had the sequenced genome of the SARS-Cov-2 virus on December 28, 2019 is highly significant. The difference between China sharing this data with the @WHO and world when they had it and doing so 15 days later in Jan 2020 is potentially the difference between a #COVID19 pandemic killing 27 million people and no pandemic at all. China must be held accountable for its unconscionable transgressions."
Matt Ridley on X - "Not only did China not share the genome of the virus for more than 2 weeks, we now know. It also had the SEQUENCE before it even admitted there was an OUTBREAK. Why? It looks more and more suspicious, as well as criminal."
How the coronavirus split science in two - "To see how politics can turn a proposed cure into a poisonous squabble, look no further than the Great Barrington Declaration. Published in October 2020, the declaration was a call against broad, public lockdowns by a trio of respected infectious disease experts. Instead, they argued, only the old and the sick should isolate. The venue and timing — a think tank linked to the right-wing Koch brothers, just weeks before the U.S. presidential election — set off so many alarm bells that it was hard to hear the actual argument. Some of the underlying rationales for their proposal sounded like they came from the political left: Poor people lose jobs in a lockdown, or get exposed at their “essential” posts, while those with white-collar roles can easily telework and order UberEats. Disruptions to schools and other health programs, like childhood vaccination, will also disproportionately affect the poor. But the authors quickly found themselves compared to climate denialists... a September letter in the BMJ — a medical journal — urged fighting back against the “new merchants of doubt,” a reference to a 2010 book about how fossil fuel companies and tobacco firms supported contrarian scientists and think tanks to hide the risks of climate change and cigarettes. The letter recommended methods like “public inoculation” to warn the regular people in advance that they might be misled by vested interests. The well-established authors of the Great Barrington Declaration wanted to create space for discussion; they knew they could weather the blowback without risk to their posts. Others haven’t been so fortunate. In Belgium, Sam Brokken, a lecturer in health sciences, is still looking for a new job eight months after his ouster from appointment at PXL University of Applied Sciences in the Flemish town of Hasselt. Brokken, who has studied Zika and dengue fever outbreaks, was also skeptical of lockdowns. In the summer of 2020, he had argued in an open letter in a Belgian medical newspaper that only those most vulnerable to COVID-19 — the elderly, the immunocompromised — should isolate. More than 1,400 other scientists signed his call for a so-called “reverse lockdown.” But it was Brokken’s views on vaccines that cemented his orientation as an outsider. In February 2021, he went on television to argue that only those over 60 should get the coronavirus shot. For younger people, who have a lower risk of severe disease, the personal benefit is low... He also argued that the benefit to society from vaccinating younger adults is also limited, because there’s no guarantee that the vaccines will prevent someone from passing on the coronavirus. That’s turned out to be all too true: While vaccination reduces transmission, it doesn’t eliminate spread, and the highly infectious Delta variant is pushing even highly vaccinated populations back toward isolation. After his appearance, Brokken was slammed as an anti-vaxxer in the Belgian press and by fellow academics. One prominent professor said he shouldn’t have been given an equal platform with more serious scientists. Six weeks later, he was fired... YouTube has been especially aggressive about pulling down speech that questions various coronavirus prevention measures. For instance, the company took down a March 2020 interview with John Ioannidis — a Stanford physician long known for skewering bad science — in which he questioned the quality of the data about COVID-19 death rates and called for more targeted responses to the pandemic. In April of this year, YouTube blocked a video of a panel discussion, hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration and former Trump coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas. The scientists talked about why they don’t recommend masking for kids... The divisions are unlikely to disappear with time, said Vinay Prasad, an oncologist and public health scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, who’s made a career of finding holes in medicine’s conventional wisdom (and who recently drew fire for urging more discussion about the risk of vaccines). Over the next 15 years, he predicted, “you will get two sets of literature,” one declaring lockdowns worked and should have been implemented sooner, the other declaring them disasters."
From December 2021. Clearly, vested interests are only a problem if you're contradicting elites. Ironically, even at this stage, the vast majority of the literature was clear that lockdowns were useless, or almost so
