Nearly a year into our 15 days to slow the spread, our political class still refuses to call out our supposed medical experts for repeatedly discrediting themselves with noble lie after noble lie. Finally, Sen. Marco Rubio has rightly called out Anthony Fauci for lying to the public because our ruling class believes us plebians to be too stupid to understand the actual science about the coronavirus.
In the year since the Chinese Communist Party unleashed the novel coronavirus across the globe, we've learned an abundance about the virus that could have informed far less onerous mitigation measures. If we had known as we do now that young children are not significant vectors spreading the virus, we would have never shut down the kindergartens and elementary schools. If we had known that the outdoors, especially in direct sunlight, are orders of magnitude safer than indoors, we would have never closed off beaches and hiking trails, and city centers would have almost certainly closed off streets to allow restaurants greater capacity for outdoor dining.
The one thing we did know was likely, if not absolutely, true about was that masks could reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus, just as they did for other serious coronaviruses such as the SARS and MERS viruses.
Even before we shut a single business, as news of the CCP welding doors in Wuhan shut and mass deaths overriding hospitals in Hubei trickled across the Pacific, public health officials could have encouraged people to wear simple cloth masks when going into crowded areas. After all, not only did we know that as with nearly all airborne respiratory diseases, masks have been effective at preventing other types of coronavirus transmission, but also that studies of much smaller microorganisms than the novel coronavirus clearly demonstrated homemade masks efficacy against transmission.
And yet, the medical expert establishment knowingly decided to lie to the public about our cheapest and easiest tool to slow coronavirus transmission. As late as March, Fauci was telling the public that they had "no reason" to wear a mask, only admitting that this was a willful and deliberate lie many months later.
"[W]e were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply," Fauci said in a June interview. "And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
Now the nation's leading epidemiology expert has confessed that he knowingly lied about the percentage of the public with coronavirus resistance required to achieve herd immunity.
"Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts," the New York Times reported on Christmas Eve. "He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."
Although Fauci once said he believed herd immunity required around three-quarters of the public to have resistance to the coronavirus, he admitted to the New York Times that he's believed the figure to be up to 90%.
Fauci may believe that this is the only way to get the public to go along with the science, but in truth, it's why the backlash to "expert" advice has been so strong.
Almost a year into 15 days to slow the spread, and even the most benevolent of us are fed up with being lied to. Our last remaining bastion of credibility sullied theirs because of the sense that we were too stupid to follow fact-driven guidance, and we're paying for it in record coronavirus deaths.
Just imagine if this pandemic started with mass mask-wearing and limited business shutdowns akin to Taiwan? It would have prevented the community transmission that turned the virus into a national pandemic and kept the simple act of wearing a mask from becoming politicized. With more realistic standards set for social distancing and guidelines, the population would have been paced enough that perhaps tyrannical shutdowns and personal lockdown fatigues in places such as California wouldn't be driving people to socialize solely in multigenerational superspreader gatherings in cramped households.
Alas, the experts lied and people died. Rubio is just the one member of the ruling class with the stones to call a spade a spade.