More than a million Americans died, so Dr. Anthony Fauci is taking a victory lap. After all, it could have been two million.
When interviewer Neal Cavuto asked Fauci this:
Do you think shutdowns particularly for kids who couldn't go to school that it's forever damaged them?
The good doctor responded:
I don't think it's irreparably damaged anyone.
As a counterpoint I offer part of a book review by Sarah Menkedick in the New York Times. In it the reviewer recounts her experience of the lockdowns, and offers some comments on a book length treatment of the topic. Of course, some parts of America did not lock down. Some states did not close schools, but, for now, limit ourselves to those that did.
Menekdick writes:
No societal shift has impacted my adult life as profoundly as the extended closure of schools during the pandemic. At first, I mourned my career, which I gave up to facilitate the purgatory of Zoom “school” for my first grader. Then I mourned my family’s precarious, hard-won harmony, which dissolved into endless fights about time, work and space. Finally, I mourned the faith I’d held, without ever recognizing it as such, in public institutions. I discovered I no longer believed in school. I no longer believed in many of the systems I’d taken for granted as mostly valuable and functional. I spun out into despair, then anger, then a flat, terrible resignation.
Anya Kamenetz’s book “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now” hauled me back to that time. It is a relentless account of ruptures in so many Americans’ lives, from mental health crises to hunger to academic failures and accidents (in one of the most startling anecdotes, a 7-year-old boy is shot while breaking into a building when he should have been in school).
That should suffice for now. Those who wish to read more, aside from the information we have been sharing on this blog for two years now, can refer to the Kamenetz book.
American institutions of government — at all levels — should never again have this kind of unchecked power over our lives. There must be legislative oversight. The fact that executive bureaucracies were able to act without any direction from (or accountability to) legislatures shows a glaring failure in our way of governance. Also, a great many “experts” showed us they weren’t expert at much of anything. They guessed, theorized, hypothesized and opined as much as anyone else without their credentials and education. Our entire public health apparatus engaged in groupthink and tarred anyone who disagreed with them… in the most vicious and public ways. Not one of these experts has been held accountable. Fauci needs some jail time to reflect, given his glaring lack of reflection after these 2.5 years.
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