Some on the left accuse conservatives of rewriting coronavirus history. Figures such as Anthony Fauci have been doing so in full public view.
Five years since large-scale public reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic
began, historical revisionism is afoot. If you believe some people, it’s not the public health establishment and its left-wing political allies who are guilty of it. Rather, it’s conservatives.
In
The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait
forgives his ideological compatriots their Covid-era sins. They simply “got some things about the pandemic correct and other things wrong” and “have disavowed or at least moved away from their wrong beliefs,” while conservatives are guilty of a “pathological incuriosity” about our errors.
Chait overstates the case for leftist introspection. He pockets as givens the admission to acceptable discourse of contentions — the likelihood of a lab leak, the inadvisability of school closures, the myriad economic risks of excessive mitigation — that many, overwhelmingly on the right, advanced despite immense contemporaneous blowback. He might recall his publication’s declaration that
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s loosening of Covid restrictions was an “experiment in human sacrifice.”
Most damning, he has little to say about the continuing obduracy of the public health establishment. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been prevaricating his way into exculpation for his Covid-19 behavior. A
recent interview with the
Fenwick Review, a student publication at Holy Cross (Fauci’s undergraduate alma mater), provides many representative examples of his habit of mixing truth with evasion and outright deception.
First, Fauci plays word games with the terms “shut down” vs. “lock down.” “I say ‘shut down,’ not ‘lock down,’ because we did not do what other countries did, where essentially, you couldn’t even leave your house, you couldn’t go to work,” he says. Such fine distinctions mean little to the people who were kept out of school, who were kept out of (or lost) work, kept out of parks, and encouraged (by Fauci, without evidence) to be masked constantly.
It is true that governments of other countries,
such as China’s, reacted more harshly to Covid than ours. But the preferred government response to the disease here was
a drastic deviation from American political culture. We should be grateful that culture kept things from getting more drastic. Because if Fauci had his druthers, the response would have been even more excessive. In October 2020, he
said that “since we actually did not shut down completely,” the way China, among other nations, did, “we actually did see spread even though we shut down.”
Fauci employs similar parsing when describing his stance on school closures:
People don’t remember, and there’s a lot of slings and arrows thrown at me, but if you go back, and I ask people to do that and they say, “You closed the schools! And you did that!” Go back and go to YouTube and look at what I was saying in the fall of 2020, what I was saying a thousand times: “Open the schools as quickly and as safely as possible. Open the schools, close the bars . . . ”
This is similar to the line Fauci was retailing in 2022 when testifying before Congress. Unfortunately for him, there are receipts. Isaac Schorr and Brittany Bernstein
collected them for National Review.
It is true that he began expressing an openness for schools to reopen by summer 2020. But he included a “however” in this general receptivity to the idea big enough practically to negate it. “However, and I underline however, having said that [schools should open], what is paramount is the safety and the welfare of the children and their teachers,” Fauci said in July 2020, emphasizing that schools should open only if there is “a very, very low level of infection.”
Not until late November and early December —
technically still fall — did Fauci
begin saying things like, “It’s much better to close the bars and keep the schools open than to keep the bars open and close the schools.” (Opening both was too much, apparently.) But then, in February 2021, he returned to hesitation about reopening schools. Fauci said that the schools “need more resources” to reopen fully. This stance conveniently aligned with Biden administration messaging (
itself heavily influenced by teachers’ unions) in favor of the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s Covid-justified spending spree. Recall —
as Jeff Blehar did with righteous anger — that some schools were still shutting down over Covid well into 2022. Even if Fauci had changed his mind by then, such actions would not have been tenable without the predicate of his prior sanction.
Or would they have? Fond as Fauci still is of describing the Covid response in the first-person plural, he will place himself at some remove from it if necessary. Thus, he stresses to the Fenwick Review, “The public health officials and the scientists, myself included, we did not make policy.”
It is true, in the most literal sense, that Fauci and others like him may have lacked the political power that enabled them to make these decisions directly. But during the Covid period, many jurisdictions outsourced political decision-making to public health authorities, regardless of whether they literally had those powers. At the state level, this was possible not just because of a state government’s fairly broad police and emergency powers, but because of guidance and other cues that came from the federal government. And an essential player in elevating public health authorities to this position federally, and culturally, was Anthony Fauci. He can abjure politics all he wants. You don’t end up in charge of a powerful, grant-making agency for decades, and become the highest-paid figure in the federal government — earning more money than the president — without some political sway. So Fauci’s counsel to Donald Trump that he “shut the country down” should not go down the memory hole, even if Fauci himself did not have the actual power to do such a thing.
Fauci’s distortions of the recent past stand out for their jesuitical sophistry and their brazenness. But he is not alone in attempting to alter history concerning Covid, even five years later. Those of us who want to remember this history accurately and learn from it must guard against such revisionism.
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Source: Who’s Really Twisting the Covid Record? | National Review
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