America’s Draconian Covid Lockdowns Were About Following Communist 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