A senior researcher at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIE), Phil Magness, reviewed the past year of lockdowns, false claims, and failed government policies in dealing with the spread of COVID.
He came up with a number of prime examples of policy reversals and vast inconsistencies, which we follow up with confirmed data:
24 January 2020: “Anthony Fauci says lockdowns are not possible in the United States.”
As the virus was first being talked about, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the media would anoint as the leading U.S. expert on infectious diseases, commented that the strict lockdown in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus first appeared, would never be accepted in the United States.
As quoted on CNN, Dr. Fauci stated,
“I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, but the judgment on the part of the Chinese health authorities is that given the fact that it’s spreading throughout the provinces, it’s their judgment that this is something that in fact is going to help in containing it. Whether or not it does or does not is really open to question because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
February-March 2020: “U.S. government and WHO officials advise against mask use.”
On 29 February, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams publicly discouraged citizens from wearing masks.
On 30 March, Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO, stated at a press briefing,
“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.”
Soon after, on 7 April, Newsweek published the article, “Surgical and Cotton Face Masks Ineffective at Blocking SARS-CoV-2 Particles When COVID-19 Patients Cough, Study Finds.” (The study was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.)
20 March 2020: “Ferguson predicts a ‘best case’ U.S. scenario of 1.1 million deaths.”
Neil Ferguson had a track record of exaggerated death tolls for a number of diseases before COVID-19. But as a lead researcher for an Imperial College report on 16 March that predicted up to 500,000 deaths from the virus in the U.K. and up to two million in the U.S., he was a major influence on both countries’ decision to impose extended lockdowns.
Note: In a subsequent interview, Ferguson predicted the number of U.S. COVID deaths would be just over one million.
16 March 2020: “Two weeks to flatten the curve.”
In mid-March, the White House COVID task force aggressively promoted the need for a two-week lockdown, which would keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with suffering patients. In a media interview, Department of Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert put out the dire warning that unless the country locked down, “We are ten days away from the hospitals getting creamed.”
As the Trends Journal reported at the time, just a few weeks after Bossert’s warning about hospitals “getting creamed,” on 6 April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo requested a U.S. naval hospital ship be provided, and he had the massive Javits Convention Center converted into a makeshift hospital to deal with the anticipated surge of COVID patients.
As it turned out, the hospital ship handled only 182 patients before departing, and the Javits Center remained mostly empty.
This didn’t stop Governor Cuomo from forcing recovering COVID patients to leave hospitals and check into nursing homes to make room for what he wrongly claimed would be a dire need for more hospital beds. His edict proved disastrous: within two months, New York reported over 5,000 deaths from COVID-19 in elder care facilities.
Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Michael Goodwin wrote at the time,
“Nursing home executives, meanwhile, complain privately that Cuomo should’ve known his mandate would be a killer, but they were never consulted and got no notice before being swamped with infected patients. As one owner put it, longtime residents began ‘dropping like flies’ soon afterward. The same executives will not go public with their complaints because they fear Cuomo will punish them with fines and take their licenses.”
Note: Phillip Magness points out that despite Cuomo’s bungled policies causing a year-end mortality rate of close to 2,000 deaths per million, while cheered on as a national hero, not only does New York have a higher virus death rate than any other state, it ranks worse than any other country in the world.
31 July 2020: “Anthony Fauci credits lockdowns for beating the virus in Europe.”
Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on 31 July, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the stricter lockdowns in Europe were the main reason it was experiencing lower rates of fatality from the coronavirus:
“If you look at what happened in Europe when they shut down or locked down or went to shelter in place – however, you want to describe it – they really did it to the tune of about 95% plus of the (European) countries did that. When you actually look at what we did, even though we shut down, even though it created a great deal of difficulty, we really functionally shut down only about 50% in the sense of the totality of the country.”
But on 10 August, the American Economic Institute published “Fact-Checking Fauci,” which included:
“There are several immediate problems with Fauci’s arguments, including the fact that COVID cases are showing clear signs of a summer resurgence in the same European countries that allegedly tamed the virus through harsh lockdowns in the spring. The American news media however has seized on Fauci’s narrative and used it to call for renewed lockdowns. The New York Times and the Washington Post both editorialized in favor of a second stricter wave of nationwide lockdowns lasting until October – this despite there being no clear evidence that lockdowns actually work at taming the virus.”
As Phillip Magness points out in the current AIE exposé, Fauci’s praising Europe’s strict lockdowns as a successful strategy “collapsed in the early fall when almost all of the lockdown countries in Europe experienced severe second waves – just like the locked-down regions of the United States.”
For a complete list of the “Twelve Times the Lockdowners Were Wrong,” the full article, click here.
