While millions were locked down, forbidden from going to events or even church, and the schools and arts were shut down, people kept asking a fundamental question: Why is this happening, what is government doing, and what is the exit strategy? There were a number of possibilities.
Maybe it was to preserve hospital capacity and yet, at that very time, hospitals were furloughing nurses and parking lots were empty because they locked their doors to elective surgeries and routine checkups.
Maybe it was to buy time so that personal protective equipment and ventilators could be stockpiled, and yet we later found that the ventilators killed many unnecessarily while stockpiles later sold for pennies on the dollar.
Or maybe it was to wait for a vaccine. That was the word on the street. Certainly, vaccines had been in development since January 2020 if not earlier. One was coming. And the companies themselves clearly had a huge influence on the regulatory agencies that later approved them and mandated their products through unusual means.
But the story is not entirely clear.
On March 2, 2020, Gerson asked the question that we all would ask a few weeks later.
“Is the overall strategy of social distancing just to keep the percentage of Americans who get the disease low until a vaccine is available? This seems much harder to do in a free society. Does this mean closing schools? Public transport? Do states and localities make such decisions?”
Fauci’s response is rather startling.
“Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine,” wrote Fauci. “The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), workplaces (do teleworking where possible). ... The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
Gerson, however, adds, “A vaccine, however, would be tremendously helpful.”
Oh.
Those who resent the vaccine mandates, or suffer from adverse effects, might take some solace in the seeming position of Fauci here that a vaccine was not necessary and that the epidemic will end on its own. However, a close read provides no such comfort. He is actually imagining something even worse than a vaccine mandate. He was mapping out a plan for lockdowns forever.
No common respiratory virus has ever gone away simply by reducing the rate of infection spread through artificial means of universal human separation. As soon as people start interacting again, the virus will be on the move again until it reaches endemicity through herd immunity, which is exactly what eventually happened in this case, just as has happened through the whole of history. We got over the pandemic not due to lockdowns or vaccines but through exposure. It was always thus and always will be. That’s why no civilized society has ever attempted universal lockdowns much less on a global scale.
But how serious was Fauci about this point? Maybe it was just an email, not a big theory of life itself. Maybe. But the lockdowns did not end anytime soon. They went on through the summer—except when protesting racism—and on to the fall.
The answer then is obvious: Dismantle society itself. Or as Fauci puts it:
“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement, catalyzes disease spread. ... Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
Maybe the beef with current society traces from postwar fossil fuel use on a mass scale? Maybe his objection is to the Industrial Revolution? No, you need to think much bigger. The problem is as follows:
“Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have been threatening humans since the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”
One might suppose it would be top headlines that the man who crafted the COVID response for the world was merely using this as the lever to reverse 12,000 years of human history. Indeed in that sense, “going medieval” is a mere step in a long road back. Forget the Constitution. Forget the Enlightenment. Forget even the golden age of the Roman Empire. Fauci wants to take us back long before there are any actual historical records: a conjectural Rousseauian state of nature where we lived by foraging for food around us and nothing more.
And yet the authors assure us that they doubt that going that far back is truly possible, as wonderful as it might be. “Since we cannot return to ancient times,” they ask, “can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?”
As the lockdowns went on and on, many people started to suspect that Fauci and his cohorts had decided that the underlying problem was not the pathogen in particular but people in general and their penchant for wanting the freedom to move, associate, and do things together. Fauci in his own writings sees all of this as nothing but a chance for disease creation and disease spread. Indeed, during his deposition in a free speech case, he put this attitude on display when he snapped at a court reporter for sneezing. “I don’t want COVID,” he protested.
Probably before COVID, we did not entirely understand that we need such a thing but lacking it, Fauci filled the void with his Joker-like longings to disrupt the whole of society as we’ve known it for 12,000 years. That was the hidden meaning behind Fauci’s email to The Washington Post.
To top it off, Fauci has routinely denied promoting lockdowns.
