This page is a summary of the testimony which is clearly trying to pick quotes and/or frame things to make Fauci and Democrats look bad. FWIW I agree that eg. children shouldn't have been required to wear masks in school, but I don't trust whoever wrote this to write a neutral or fair summary from the full set of facts we know (which no one will read directly because it would be thousands of pages).
> children shouldn't have been required to wear masks in school
Historically children were required to get vaccinated before attending public schools. Having large groups in close proximity for long periods is a serious disease transmission risk. With COVID the children themselves had minimal risk but the community was at risk from them.
~1,220,000 people died with the precautions we took. That doesn’t mean 1,220,000 people would have died with fewer precautions or that more couldn’t dramatically lower that number.
Public heath is complicated, but we traded roughly a million American lives for freedom. Suggesting we should have done less is a difficult stance for me to support even as doing dramatically more would have been extremely painful.
Red states are more rural which slowed spread initially, but overall you see a higher death monthly rates in Red states after the first wave ~July 2020 not just after vaccination became available.
It’s not just state policies. The first wave in 2020 hit most densely populated and thus Blue counties hardest, but the second wave in 2020 and every wave after that hit the least populated and most Republican areas hardest.
Cross-checking the list with population density figures per state gives a very different outlook. I went through a very cursory look and skipping the "purple" states I got:
New Jersey is #1 after DC, Mississippi is #33.
New York is #8, South Dakota is #46.
Massachusetts is #3, Louisiana is #26.
Connecticut is #4, North Dakota is #47.
Illinois is #12, Arkansas is #35.
Only getting to New Mexico it breaks down since Alabama has a higher pop. density but Albuquerque has 2x the pop. of Huntsville and pretty much 3x the pop. density.
To be clear I’m glad we don’t live in the kind of totalitarian state that would have been required for such extreme measures, but …
Keeping deaths to ~1/4 million would have been theoretically possible from extreme social distancing until total mandatory vaccination of the population was achieved.
I’m rather glad we didn’t go down that route, but it’s worth remembering when we opened things up it was with full knowledge that people would die from those choices.
This isn't a math problem, it's not a stats problem. Realizing this abstraction of numbers is an error of reification. What's really worthy of consideration is the holistic picture which as of yet can not be resolved due to the ineradicable complexities of the evolving circumstances. The protocol to which we were subjected wrought untold damage and it's unclear in the long run whether the effects which evolved will have ultimately saved any lives.
For instance the current geopolitical regime is certainly informed, in part, by the economic and political effects which originated as a consequence of and during COVID and shutdown mandates. And these economic effects have also affected policy and personal behaviors. It's a whole Pandora's box, and we won't be able to measure it with any meaningful resolution for... Probably decades... And even then there will be conflation because attributing overdose deaths to economic issues emanating from shutdown policies five years after the fact isn't a trivial argument to make, but nonetheless isn't an impossibility when considering actual human circumstances.
And then considering what may have occurred on the obverse, where actually minimal intervention was taken, is also impossible to surmise. But I don't think it's unrealistic to have a meaningful boon. It may be the case that in spite of all the intervening circumstances that mortality would have ultimately been comparable due to the half-hearted nature which may have just been a collosal disruption. e.g. we hit a saturation point which lead to peak mortality and policy failed to modify the consequent mortality in the range beneath it.
And yet another where minimal, targeted interventions a la the Great Barrington Declaration were deployed.
And since nobody acts in isolation in a globalist society it will be yet more difficult to ascertain.
So bandying about mortality numbers, I think, is insufficient when there have been so many consequences which have evolved from COVID policies, many of which are qualitative and difficult to quantify but have considerable meaning outside the silly abstractions we conjecture carry so much meaning.
Large scale impact doesn’t automatically imply net positive or negative impact.
Less pollution in 2020 will have positive health effects for decades to come vs significant economic harm which is where the uncertainty comes in. If we don’t know if the impacts are positive or negative we must default to looking at the net effect we can measure and add error bars around it for the things we can’t calculate.
They used the term "New Normal" from day 1. Conspiracy theory is just a derogatory term to belittle opposition.
They gaslit us on so many topics throughout the years.
They have went back on their statements on Ivermectin
They have went back on their statements on efficacy of the jabs - starting from 99% effective down to 10% - indicating
they never had any tangible data to support their claims
They said that the jabs were about stopping transmission, then gaslit saying they never said that despite hundreds of hours of recording saying otherwise
Fauci admitted the 6 ft distancing had no science / data behind it.
Should I bring forth the damage caused by thrusting stage 2 ventilators on people?
What about the damage from vaccines with myocarditis and GBS?
You can call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but the official narratives are more riddled with inconsistencies than the "conspiracies" were
Now back to your original question of can we dispense with the data that is knowingly bad - yes.
Comorbidities were enough to do that, along with false attribution. Ofcourse these topics were heavily censored, creating even more discourse.
> They have went back on their statements on efficacy of the jabs - starting from 99% effective down to 10% - indicating they never had any tangible data to support their claims
I can buy that they never had tangible data. But can you point me to a source for them claiming only 10% effective?
This borders on intellectual dishonesty on your part. They’re saying the vaccines, with their effectiveness around the original quoted numbers were ineffective against a new variant.
There are hundreds of other articles detailing ineffectiveness of the vaccines and lowering efficacy. It is well known that the institutions also changed the narrative to say that vaccines were never about "transmission"
I've seen a 2 minute long video showing the declining percentages mainstream media claimed on the vaccine over the course of 3 months. Perhaps this one particular article was dishonest however.
Your original statement was that they lied about the effectiveness. The article you presented to back that up was about how the effectiveness was different for a different strain. So either you didn't read the article, didn't understand it, or were being dishonest.
Are you denying the blatant/overt censorship? Many scientists were censored by institutions. This is well known and documented. The twitter files even made this apparent on congress floor, where silicon valley knows more about science than accredited doctors.
I'm saying that you haven't provided anything to back up your conspiracy theories. "I've seen videos", "the twitter files". None of this substantiates your original claims, and are pretty typical of conspiracy theorists.
“Dr. Fauci repeatedly played semantics with the definition of “gain-of-function” research in an effort to avoid conceding that the NIH’s funded this dangerous research in China”
There is so much BS editorializing here. Also is there any research that shows that masking actually impaired learning? I didn’t see any listed, just claims that there were studies.
Please explain. This page is a link to the actual testimony.