The Big Lie: How Fauci instilled panic, sets stage for lockdowns

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the key witness in the March 11, 2020, hearing on COVID-19, made false claims about the lethality of COVID-19, generating panic and creating the conditions for an unprecedented national lockdown.

In particular, and in contrast to the testimony prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institutes of Health, Fauci spoke to the severity of the virus.

To the average member of Congress, the answer here was crucial because it addressed the only two serious issues: “Am I going to die?” and “Will I be blamed and politically punished if my constituents die?”

To this, he responded with what seemed like science but was actually completely wrong, dreadfully wrong, and catastrophically wrong. He claimed that we knew for sure that at best COVID-19 was 10 times deadlier than the flu.

In fact, he threw around so much data confetti that a person could have easily believed that he was downplaying the severity to promote calm. His intention was the opposite.

Fauci spoke this final number with so many other numbers before it that no one could figure out which way was up. The main takeaway anyone would have is that there is going to be vast bloodshed.

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The “spread” could not be stopped forever. The hospitals weren’t really overcrowded, as we’ve seen. There was never a chance for “zero-COVID,” as the catastrophic experience of China and New Zealand has shown.

In the end, the pandemic of a respiratory virus is solved through exposure, upgraded immune systems and herd immunity, regardless of severity. And again, please recall that biological evolution has made such pandemics self-limiting: there is a trade between severity and prevalence subject to latency.

Latency here was never a factor, contrary to the lies in the early weeks. So the more infectious this virus would be, the less severe it would be, nearly by definition.

Let’s just assume that Fauci is correct about the flu, though there is plenty of controversy about his chosen figure of 0.1%. If he is right, for the most affected demographic from COVID-19, he was off by two times.

For youth, he was off by 3,333 times — an exaggeration of more than 300,000%! And he did it with a straight face. The rest of the population falls between there for a total of 0.095%. So in general for the whole population, he was off by 10 times, meaning that the actual infection fatality rate is just slightly less (if this is right) than the seasonal flu.

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Throughout the entire pandemic, from the beginning to now, the average age of the 0.09% of infected people who died remained at the median age of death in absence of the pandemic. If this same virus arrived decades early, it would have hardly been noticed at all.

So why? Here we get into interesting theorizing. Brownstone has done a lot of this for the better part of 18 months, and we will continue to do so. We can talk all evening about this. We already do. And we continue to collect evidence too.

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The point is that the world is not the same. Fauci pulled the lever on the wall that set this in motion. He never should have been given that deference that power that influence. There should have been a check on him. And some people tried but the censors then flew into action.

The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood — spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians — one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning.

Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium.

Originally published by Brownstone Institute.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for The Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including “Liberty or Lockdown,” and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on economics, technology, social philosophy and culture.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense