America’s Draconian COVID Lockdowns Were About Following China, Not the “Science”

In the recent deposition of Anthony Fauci in Missouri v. Biden, a civil lawsuit against the Biden administration over alleged free speech violations, Fauci acknowledged that Dr. Clifford Lane, clinical director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was appointed to the February 2020 World Health Organization-China Joint Mission team, told Fauci that he was “impressed” with China’s successful management of the Covid outbreak.

In doing so, Lane conveyed to Fauci his belief that “extreme social distancing policies” were essential to curtailing the spread of disease. During his deposition, Fauci stated that he had “every reason to believe” the accuracy of Lane’s evaluation and admitted that “social distancing, even by somewhat difficult means” that involved “essentially the entire community” was possible in the U.S. as early as February 2020.  

Indeed, a review of the earliest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid-19 guidelines, as well as Fauci’s own emails from the period, indicate that a WHO-backed, CCP-driven agenda informed the U.S. pandemic response from the beginning. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx wielded the flimsiest of “scientific evidence” to beguile the American public while hiding their lockdown cards up their sleeves.

China’s aggressive and unprecedented approach to “flattening the curve” was neither ethically justified nor scientifically proven. Authorities from the WHO, Italy, France, Australia, and the U.S. knew that the elderly and those with underlying health conditions were the most at risk. In the vast majority of cases, the virus wasn’t dangerous.

According to the Joint Mission report, “approximately 80 percent of laboratory confirmed patients [in China] had mild to moderate disease.” In children under 19, Covid-19 was mild and constituted around 2.4 percent of reported cases; only 0.2 percent of children infected were in danger. The Joint Mission team lead and senior adviser to the WHO director-general, Dr. Bruce Aylward, emphasized that asymptomatic transmission chains were an “urban myth” and that there was “no evidence schools were driving transmission.”

Yet the Joint Mission exported the narrative that this was a “rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic” and insisted that China’s containment measures were “proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains.” In lockstep, governments began deploying, with enthusiastic support from the press, an incremental terror campaign against their own citizens.

The U.S. White House Coronavirus Taskforce announced the initial CDC community control guidelines on March 9, 2020. Birx and Fauci cheerily explained that the “scientific evidence that informed each of these guidelines” came from research out of Australia.

The paper referenced was authored by experts in epidemiology, population, and public health and was posted online only four days earlier, on March 5. Fauci forwarded it to Birx and then CDC Director Robert Redfield the night before the March 9 press conference. The authors hadn’t been contacted by anyone from the U.S. government or the CDC, and the paper hadn’t been peer-reviewed. When Dr. Carlos Del Rio, now president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, emailed Fauci after the briefing asking for a copy of the Australian paper, Fauci responded that it was “not for distribution” as it was a preprint.

The so-called “scientific evidence” was an absolute nothing burger. The paper’s recommended preliminary social distancing measures for households, workplaces, schools, and commercial venues were based on two shaky assumptions. The first was that China had “constrained transmission of Covid … through rapid and intensive containment and mitigation interventions.” This argument was rooted in the WHO’s Joint Mission report and relied on infection data provided by Chinese authorities that showed an astonishing 83 percent drop in newly confirmed cases from the first day of the delegation’s visit to its last day in China two weeks later.

The second assumption was that hygiene and social distancing measures flattened the curve. However, the conceptual model pushed by the authors was not based on randomized controlled trials but on observational and simulation studies for influenza.

In fact, the most comprehensive research paper cited by the authors acknowledges the limitations of their own survey owing to the “relatively low” quality of the evidence. Worse, the review, originally published on February 6, 2020, finds “limited scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of [isolating exposed persons],” “no obvious rationale for the routine use of contract tracing in the general population,” “weak” evidence for and “major ethical concerns” regarding home quarantine, some evidence for school closures, “limited” evidence for workplace interventions and closures, and “limited” evidence for avoiding crowding. In other words, of the six social distancing measures considered, all but one were found to have no proven benefit.

Fauci and Birx fooled the public by presenting prima facie independent research that, in reality, was a mere hypothesis predicated on the CCP’s lockdown narrative. Despite the cozy branding, the earliest CDC interventions were intended to pave the way for increasingly draconian restrictions. Indeed, the Australian researchers argued that a pre-emptive phase of interventions would “assist [in preparing] for a more stringent phase.” Author Dr. Craig Dalton later reiterated that preliminary measures would be followed by “more heavy-handed interventions.”

Birx even admitted that “getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures … was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions” while actively avoiding “the obvious appearance of a full lockdown.” After convincing the Trump administration to implement a two-week shutdown, Birx was “trying to figure out how to extend it,” even though she “didn’t have the numbers … to make the case.” Hence the “15 days to slow the spread” ruse announced on March 16 evolved into 45 days, and so on.

The “step-wise introduction of stringent measures,” as the Australians described it, was central to bringing the population along. As Aylward had recommended, once trust was established, authorities could then adapt measures as the strategy was rolled out.

“Building trust” really meant driving fear. In a March 6 webinar for Australian government health protection practitioners, one of Dalton’s co-authors, Dr. Stephen Corbett, expressed doubt as to how China’s containment strategy could be achieved in countries with a different “political structure.” Aylward responded that “what China had going for it” was not “fear of government” but tapping into people’s fear of death and disease. His remarks emphasized the “everyone has a role to play” rhetoric that public officials around the world were cranking up as they justified pilfering civil rights.

Amazingly, the people who endorsed CCP lockdown thuggery are clinging to the unscientific communist scam. In September, Aylward accused nations of having blood on their hands if they stepped back from tackling Covid, Birx infamously regretted not going harder with the lockdowns and still believes in asymptomatic transmission chains, and Fauci was only last week floating the idea of further school closures. Dalton, who still congratulates himself over the contribution his research made to ensnaring the American public, thinks Australia should set up a standing public health army to help fight the next pandemic and reduce the amount of time Australians will have to spend in lockdown.

The “experts” who pushed this upon us won’t learn a thing unless we replace “zero Covid” with “zero amnesties,” not only in solidarity with the Chinese people still caught up in this madness but out of sheer self-preservation.

Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.

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