Panicky politicians caused the coronavirus crack-up, period. If not for their tragic inability to keep their cool, the coronavirus scare would have been anything but. To ignore the seminal role of politicians in the 2020-21 tragedy is to plant the seeds for a future crack-up.
To which some will say the above analysis is wrong, that “China” is the biggest corona-enemy as evidence apparently grows that a lab leak in Wuhan instigated the spread of the virus. The view is nonsense.
Whether the virus reached us via bats, wet markets, or a Wuhan lab, is to miss the point. And the point is that pathogens are a part of life. What’s not always been is politicians locking Americans down, shutting down their work and the businesses they work for, and arguably most tragically of all, demanding that Americans not interact.
As for those who respond that the political class had no choice since “China” allegedly hid the existence of the pathogen, nonsense once again. See above, but also get real: there was no way for the Chinese to hide a virus, and if they could have, that they could have hidden it is all the more evidence that it wasn’t very lethal in the first place. And it wasn’t. As the New York Times reported repeatedly, the people most affected by the virus were very old, yet even among the very old the virus’s lethality was of the one out of every hundred older American variety.
Which brings us to Anthony Fauci. That he handled the virus’s spread in horrid fashion is very true. Think back to his excitement at being on national television so often at the beginning of the lockdowns, and how he said early on that he would prefer that government authoritarians err very much on the side of caution no matter how many jobs were lost and businesses destroyed. What a sick man, a man so blithe about the economic horrors Americans were about to feel while he wouldn’t feel any with his guaranteed government paycheck.
Just the same, Fauci was nothing more than an expert. That his alleged expertise failed him so many times is a statement of the obvious, but it also misses the point. And the point is that while Fauci no doubt wanted Americans locked down, he lacked the power to do it. Only politicians with seeming police power had the ability to take our freedom, and they did.
Repeat it over and over again that panicky politicians were the true villains in the coronavirus debacle, and this includes a president in Donald Trump who got religion about the horrors of the lockdowns way too late. As made plain in my 2021 book, When Politicians Panicked, absent Trump’s nationalization of the U.S. response to the virus, and much, much worse, Trump’s signing into law trillions worth of spending that subsidized the lockdowns, there quite simply wouldn’t have been lockdowns.
Seriously, does anyone believe that California and New York could have and would have put a sleep hold on workers and businesses absent federal subsidies meant to keep the locked down afloat? Hopefully the question answers itself.
From there, let’s try to be reasonable. Neither the CCP nor Fauci locked us down, and in the process blinded us to market-based information (yes, free people are the ultimate market) on to how deal with a novel pathogen.
Panicky politicians took our freedom, and they funded their vandalization of reason through their excessive taxation of the wealth produced by the U.S.’s 1 percenters. If we ignore this truth, we set ourselves up for a repeat. Let’s not.
