Covid-19

“This might be the most insane hearing that I have ever attended,” freshman Representative Robert Garcia quipped during today’s hearing featuring former head of the NIAID Dr. Anthony Fauci – the first time that “America’s Doctor” testified publicly in Congress since leaving government service. Fauci, who played a dominant role in dictating public health policy across multiple presidential administrations, appeared diminutive in both his physical stature and in addressing the role he played as America grappled with a once-in-a lifetime pandemic.

The search for the origin of Covid-19 has been a story of investigators who suddenly found themselves under investigation. Virus hunters who had spent years successfully tracking the origins of novel pathogens fell under suspicion of having caused the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. An international consortium of scientists, including collaborators in the US, had hunted for novel SARS-like viruses in South China and Southeast Asia, collecting tens of thousands of samples from not only bats but animals and people associated with the wildlife trade or living near bat caves. In the lab, the scientists grew or recreated these viruses and made chimeras to understand how they could infect people.

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

Monday's release of the nation's report card on the academic performance of schoolchildren is just the latest stunning measure of how closed schools damaged young Americans. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which looks at the test scores of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading, is a devastating indictment of the nation's political leaders and teachers' unions, who collaborated to shut down schools and keep them shut for in-person learning long after those across most of the West had already reopened. We're only just beginning to comprehend the wreckage, which has had significant effects on school districts across the country, even after it was clear they could reopen safely. When Covid first arrived in America, its danger to young students was unclear.

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Senator Marco Rubio today sent a strongly worded letter to Harvard president Lawrence Bacow expressing concerns prompted by a Spectator magazine investigation by this reporter that Harvard may be “actively supporting [America’s] principal adversary,” the Chinese Communist Party. “Throughout the pandemic, we were told to trust the experts," Rubio told The Spectator exclusively. "But what we increasingly see is so-called trusted experts and institutions engaged in highly questionable behavior. This looks really bad, and if it turns out to be true, any last shred of faith that the American people had in these ‘experts’ will be deservedly stamped out.

The White House falsely claimed Thursday that there were no Covid-19 vaccines available when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. "When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available," the official White House account tweeted. In truth, the first vaccines were administered under the FDA's emergency-use authorization in mid-December of 2020. They were developed under the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed", a public-private partnership wherein the federal government invested billions of dollars into vaccine development and brokered a deal with pharmaceutical companies to purchase the vaccines once they were approved.

I was seven months pregnant in March, 2020. I had miscarried before, and it had taken a little while to conceive, so even before the world became anxious about reports of a novel coronavirus, I was a nervous wreck. When the pandemic came in earnest, I was utterly overcome. I had been working on a live news show. Every day in late February, and even at the very beginning of March, we were telling Americans to wash their hands, but that everything would be okay. Local politicians and medical experts came on the show to tell people it was all going to be fine. This was The Before. One day, I came into the studio during a commercial.

Fear is gripping the American public health and media establishments: they are losing control. States are belatedly (and far too tentatively) easing their coronavirus lockdowns, many without having met the absurd CDC benchmarks for doing so. Customers are joyfully returning to previously shuttered restaurants and parks, some even discarding that symbol of subjugation: the outdoor mask. The mainstream media and health experts are not going down without a fight, however; their newfound power over almost the entirety of human life has been too exhilarating to give up now. Their reaction to the current rebellion provides a glimpse of the strategies that will be deployed during the much-hyped 'second wave' of infections this fall in order to shut the economy down again.