On Monday, the embattled director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, claimed he “didn’t recommend locking anything down” throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I wonder if you would recommend locking down schools if you have to do it all over again?” HillTV’s Batya Ungar-Sargon asked Fauci.
“Well, you know, again, it’s… first of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” he insisted. “You’re, you’re asking me questions… you’re talking about…The CDC is the public health agency that uses their epidemiologists and their science-based approach to make recommendations…”
“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down.”
Fauci joining others in the COVID “expert” crew trying to rewrite history. pic.twitter.com/litXRelNb3
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) July 26, 2022
That’s a cute story, and it’s completely false.
The truth is, Fauci is the architect of the nation’s COVID response, during which he shut down the economy, locked down schools, and universally masked up. He’s been a proponent of the lockdown approach throughout and even claimed earlier this year without evidence, “they certainly prevented a lot of infections, prevent a lot of hospitalizations, and prevented a lot of deaths. There’s no doubt about that.”
What we do have evidence of is that there were negative consequences of these lockdowns, which he acknowledged.
“Obviously, when you do have that kind of restriction on society, there are unintended negative consequences, particularly in children who are not allowed to go to school in the psychological and mental health aspects it has on children, in the economic stress that it puts on society in general, on individual families. Obviously those are negative consequences that are unintended,” he said. “One has to look at the balance of life saved, hospitalizations avoided.”
Of course, the other problem with Fauci claiming he didn’t recommend lockdowns is that he actually is on record saying that recommending lockdowns was the most crucial decision he ever made during the pandemic.
“What was the most crucial decision you had to make during the pandemic? And what was the critical thought process that took you through it?” a Holy Cross student asked him during an October 2020 virtual Q&A.
“Yeah, the most crucial it was a decision to make a recommendation to the President. It wasn’t my decision that I could implement. And when it became clear that 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 Northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area — I recommended to the president that we shut the country down,” Fauci said. “Unfortunately, since we actually did not shut down completely the way China did, the way Korea did, the way Taiwan did, we actually did see spread even though we shut down.”
Boy, that really sounds like he recommended locking down the country, doesn’t it? But he says he “didn’t recommend locking anything down.”
This comes on the heels of Fauci trying to soften his previous opposition to the COVID lab-leak theory and former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx claiming, “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”
It’s clear that the people who were in charge of our nation’s COVID response are trying to rewrite history regarding the pandemic.
I wonder what other whoppers are coming?
