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Everyone remembers the last activities they did before the world shut down in March 2020. Mine was attending my friend’s beautiful wedding in Aruba and hearing from family back home that all the activities around the Jewish holiday of Purim had been canceled.
I wasn’t shocked that the pandemic was hitting our shores. A month earlier, my brother-in-law who lives in Asia was sending pictures of the temperature check to get into his office building. "We’re all going to get this thing," he told us. I had already stocked up on canned and paper goods. We got home from the wedding, pulled our kids from school and went straight into lockdown.
While we reminisce on the "before times," it’s equally important to recall the beliefs that had been shattered by these two COVID-19 years.
REPUBLICANS DEMAND TSA ALLOW COVID MASK MANDATE TO EXPIRE
I was a small government conservative, sure, but I somehow still believed in our health agencies. The people were panicking, and buying toilet paper en-masse, but I was certain our health officials had spent decades preparing for a pandemic such as this. They would lead the way on sharing information between countries, carefully discarding information from totalitarian regimes like China, and would prioritize returning us to normal as soon as possible.
In retrospect, it’s crazy that I had such faith. I didn’t think I was naive but it turns out I was. I had generally counted on the government, certainly the federal government, to handle things poorly. I was raised on the Ronald Reagan quote "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"
And still, I believed. This was important. This was their moment to shine. They couldn’t let us down now.
They did not shine. They did let us down.
From locking us all down to frequently providing conflicting information and lying that the "science" had "changed," our health agencies were a complete disaster.
Again and again, they pushed failed mitigation policies that had actual harm on Americans. The leaders at the agencies, Dr. Rochelle Walensky at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health either straight-out bungled any task or comment or simply lied to us. This isn’t about the fog of the pandemic, the spring of 2020, this is to the present day.
As late as November 2021, Walensky was alleging that masking was at least 80% effective in stopping all viruses! "Masks can help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by reducing your chance of infection by more than 80%, whether it's an infection from the flu, from the coronavirus, or even just the common cold." That would be miraculous if true. It is not true. There has not been a single study that showed masking to be an effective way of stopping COVID-19, let alone the common cold. And yet, right now, in New York City, toddlers are masked because of the broken and unscientific policies pushed by these organizations.
From locking us all down to frequently providing conflicting information and lying that the "science" had "changed," our health agencies were a complete disaster.
HAWAII BECOMES LAST STATE TO LIFT MASK MANDATE, IDAHO ENDS COVID-19 DISASTER DECLARATION
Fauci would go on TV and be led along by the interviewer. In an April 2021 interview with Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show, Guthrie asked about the recent loosening of masking guidance and why her child still had to mask according to guidance while she did not. She described a walk home from the bus stop where she unmasked but her child could not.
Fauci assured her that children would get vaccinated soon and would be able to unmask then. Just a few weeks earlier, Fauci said, "The risk when you’re outdoors, which we have been saying all along, is extremely low." But here’s the kicker: There was no new guidance exempting children from removing their masks outdoors. Guthrie had gotten it wrong and Fauci simply went along with it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Nov. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Both Fauci and Walensky would destroy the faith Americans like me had in our health agencies. They did not conduct themselves or the agencies to the benefit of us all, only to the benefit of their political allies.
Walensky let teachers union head Randi Weingarten craft actual policy that would keep kids out of school. Fauci would argue for Biden’s stimulus bill in order to open schools. Both were doing a political job while pretending to be nonpartisan. Their partisanship cost kids an education and for many kids far more than that.
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It wasn’t just them, of course. As late as February 2022, Dr. Jerome Adams, who had been U.S. surgeon general at the start of the pandemic, was pushing the idea that masks worked because he alleged New Zealand, Singapore and China had masked their way to lower numbers.
New Zealand and Singapore are both in a serious spike right now, both on the CDC’s "level 4" that urges Americans to avoid travel to these countries, showing that masking could not work, while China is so obviously lying about their numbers.
Does Dr. Adams really believe the lies himself or is he lying to us? It is not meaningless that a medical professional at such a high level in America could hold beliefs like this.
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It has cost faith in our systems.
Americans will never again simply follow what the health agencies tell them. Even for conservatives like me, that feels like a loss. We need agencies to tell us the truth in times of crisis. We need agencies that reach sane and rational conclusions and don’t foment hysteria. Those agencies are not what we have.