After Getting Everything Wrong During Pandemic, Top Officials Now Try to Deflect Blame

Closed Chicago Theatre in Chicago on March 21, 2020. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The United States was shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, under guidelines started in March 2020 during the Trump administration. Officials declared that in order to “slow the spread,” the nation would have to self-quarantine for 15 days.

Then we were told that 15 days was not enough to “flatten the curve,” that we needed to quarantine longer.

A face mask is seen in front of the New York Stock Exchange on May 26, 2020. Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

The economy began to fail. Trillions of dollars were given in COVID-19 bailouts, and the American people were given crumbs from those funds. Teachers refused to return to school, and children were forced to learn from home. Businesses declared as nonessential were closed, which extended even to the forced closure of churches. People lost their livelihoods, while big corporations deemed “essential” saw their sales boom. Even prisons in some states were emptied, under the narrative that the jails could become “super spreader sites.”

As this happened, politicians were seen eating at restaurants with their families, elite parties were held at which only the servers wore masks, and mass Black Lives Matter protests were allowed to sweep the country with waves of destruction, under the narrative that the fight for “racial justice” was more important than the fight for public health safety.

A Return to Normality?

When things gradually began returning to how they used to be, it was still far from normal. Children were forced to wear masks throughout the school day. Vaccine mandates were rolled out. Many Americans were forced to get injected with experimental shots based on shoddy health data. This was rolled out alongside campaigns of election reform, mass censorship, and heavy-handed public criticism of anyone who stepped out of line.

Three years later, things are finally going back to normal. The vaccine mandates are ending. The public health emergency officially ended. The Atlantic even called for a “pandemic amnesty,” where we all just forgive the people who violated our rights, and simply move on.

An elementary school student adjusts her mask at St. Joseph Catholic School in La Puente, Calif., on Nov. 16, 2020. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Of course, the public doesn’t want to just move on. Instead, there are now calls for justice, to ensure this never happens again.

And as the public calls for justice, something new is happening. Key people who were responsible for these public abuses are trying to flip the script. They’re attempting to rewrite history, to shift the blame, and it seems they’re hoping the public simply forgets what actually took place.

Fauci Faces Calls for Justice

Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a focal point of the criticism.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had this to say: “You have people like Fauci saying that his lockdowns didn’t cause any permanent damage to any young kids. I got news for you. It did. And we are going to reap those rewards across the whole country for years and years and years, because they treated kids so poorly.”

Fauci responded to the growing criticism in a recent puff piece from The New York Times Magazine. He said that with pandemic policy, “Nothing was done perfectly.” And he tried to wash the hands of the institutions mainly calling the shots, by stating: “The emphasis strictly on the science and public health—that is what public-health people should do. I’m not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.”

Fauci: ‘It Wasn’t Fauci’

He added: “When people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’—it wasn’t Fauci. The CDC was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”

Former White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci at Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 17, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images

So Fauci didn’t shut down the economy? Well, technically he didn’t flip a switch somewhere that just locked down businesses across the nation. He didn’t personally close down a school, or personally put up a sign closing down a factory. But yes, as he notes, he gave the recommendation, and the policy that shut down the country was based on his recommendation given from his position of power.

It’s like a president starting a war then declaring he didn’t “go to war” because he never physically set foot on the battlefield. There’s a difference between physically carrying out an order and being the one who pushed for the order in the first place. And when it comes to the lockdowns, Fauci, by his own public admission, was the one who gave the recommendation for that order.

Conflicting Narratives

This was Fauci on CNN just weeks ago, on April 26: “It was a personification of me as a person who essentially closed everything down. Those were public health recommendations that came from the CDC, and I have always been very supportive of the CDC.”

But this was what Fauci said on Oct. 6, 2020, during a live forum: “And when it became clear that when we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread—this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the Northeast in the corridor, driven by New York City metropolitan area—I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.”

Did you get that? He took credit for giving the recommendation to “shut the country down.”

Of course, it’s not just Fauci. Many people were involved in the lockdowns and the abuses. And some of the biggest victims of these policies were America’s children.

Weingarten Says They Tried Opening Schools

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, recently testified before Congress on some of the decisions made for schools. She recently claimed that the teachers union had actually pushed early on to have schools reopened:

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, speaks during a press conference in Tamarac, Fla., on May 3, 2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“I’m sorry, Congressman Raskin, I’m just, we spent every day, from February on, trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools, but we also knew that people have to be safe. But maybe it’s because I live in New York City, I live near a hospital. Every other minute there was an ambulance. There was terror. Our members were terrified. Others were terrified. And what we were simply looking for was clear scientific guidance. And when we couldn’t get it, we did it ourselves, and we worked with doctors and we worked with others, and we just tried to get it out there.”

So, the teachers union played a heavy role in keeping schools closed. Weingarten claims they really wanted to get them open, as they knew that the situation wasn’t good for kids. But apparently, it wasn’t their fault for closing schools, since the physical decision to close things down was based on scientific guidance from the officials who were giving the public recommendations for people like her to follow. They were acting on the available information.

So Who’s to Blame?

Does the blame fall on the people who carried out the action? The people who recommended that the action be carried out? Was the real problem a lack of information? Then maybe we should blame groups, such as the World Health Organization or Big Tech, that were restricting and censoring information and news reports that didn’t follow the official narratives.

Should we blame the groups that created the official narratives? Well, the censorship policies followed recommendations from the CDC, which was also being fed recommendations from Fauci. Seems we’ve gone full circle.

In other words, the accusations are turning into a big mess of different people all pointing fingers at each other. Whom do you hold responsible? None of them? Or maybe all of them?

But just as with Fauci, people were quick to point out that Weingarten’s statements didn’t seem to be genuine.

Disingenuous Claims on Reopening Schools

Back in July 2020, President Donald Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, released plans to reopen U.S. schools. And despite the top-level recommendation, Weingarten was one of the biggest voices trying to stop schools from reopening.

This is what Weingarten said to The Guardian at the time: “It’s as if Trump and DeVos want to create chaos and want to jeopardize reopening. There’s no other reason why they would be this reckless, this callous, this cruel.

“Their recklessness scared people so much that now I fear a brain drain of people basically opting out of teaching, because they don’t want to jeopardize their own families.”

An empty classroom at Hollywood High School in Hollywood, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2020. Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

The teachers union Weingarten represents was also a key force in keeping schools closed.

Education Week reported in December 2020 that “several statewide teachers’ unions, including in Illinois, Maryland, and Wisconsin, have put pressure on their governors to shut down schools across the state or set clear benchmarks that dictate when districts will have to close their doors.” Weingarten told the publication that before schools could open, the unions wanted requirements for facemasks and other COVID-19 mandates.

It’s not just a U.S. issue either. This is a global issue. And global leaders are likewise shifting the narrative and altering history.

Trudeau Claims He Didn’t Force Vaccines

Take Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example. Canada had some of the strictest mandatory vaccination policies around. In a recent speech, he claimed that he never forced anyone to get vaccinated.

“And all of the scientists, and the medical experts, and the researchers, not just in Canada, but around the world, understood that vaccination was going to be the way through this. And therefore, while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all the incentives and protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated, and that’s exactly what they did. We got vaccinated to a higher level than just about any other of our peer countries. And that’s why we had a less deadly pandemic than most other countries.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks with reporters before Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 8, 2022. Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images

Did he really not force anyone to get vaccinated? Well, you be the judge.

This is Trudeau in August 2021: “We have made the decision that federal public servants need to be fully vaccinated. That is something we are also applying to everyone who gets on a plane or a train in the coming months in Canada.”

Here’s Trudeau again in that same month: “You deserve better. You deserve a government that is going to continue to say, ‘Get vaccinated.’ And you know what? If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your choice. But don’t think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people, and put them at risk.

“I need you to talk to your neighbors and talk to your friends. Talk to those folks who are still wondering whether they should get vaccinated, and tell them yes. They need to get vaccinated so we can protect ourselves, protect our communities, and protect our kids who can’t yet get vaccinated. That’s what we need to do. I need you to get out there.”

I see. He didn’t technically force anyone to get vaccinated. You just couldn’t use public transportation and you risked getting fired from your federal job if you refused. And then the government told your neighbors and other people to seek you out, to try to force you to get vaccinated.

Oh yeah, and when truck drivers held protests calling for an end to the vaccine mandates, Trudeau also invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act to crush the protests.

Censorship of the Experts on COVID-19

Was it really the case that all the scientists and medical experts and researchers were onboard with the vaccines? All of them? Maybe that was partly because scientists, medical experts, and researchers faced punishment, and could even lose their jobs, if they said otherwise. Remember the narratives of “dangerous COVID misinformation”? Well, that’s one way to get all the “experts” onboard.

We also learned later through the release of the Twitter Files that U.S. federal agencies were colluding with Twitter to suppress information on COVID-19 and vaccines. This included censoring information on COVID-19 and the vaccines that was later shown to be true. It turned out that Twitter even colluded with the FBI to make a blacklist of experts who went against the official narratives.

Chief clinical officer John Corman at Virginia Mason administers a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle on Jan. 24, 2021. Grant Hindsley/AFP via Getty Images

As things stand, it looks like many of those responsible for the lockdowns, the mandates, and other abusive policies no longer want to admit their roles in it.

The public is calling for accountability. The people who may be accountable are trying to dodge the blame, while pointing their fingers at someone else. But at the end of the day, accountability will be necessary to ensure that what we endured under COVID-19 policy never happens again.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.