Flattening the Curve Was a Lie

Remember when government officials told us that we needed just a brief shutdown of economic and social activity to “flatten the curve” of covid transmission? The theory, although few seem to remember it, was that the same number of people would eventually catch covid, we just wouldn’t catch it all at once and thus we wouldn’t overload the hospital system. In fact, two weeks of curve-flattening turned into a year and a half of fascist control. (If you think that overstates the case, consider that my own governor issued an order that purported to bar every resident of Minnesota from leaving his or her house without the governor’s permission.)

The transition from curve flattening to outright fascism was so smooth that one always suspected it was planned from the beginning. And, sure enough, the appalling Deborah Birx admits it was all a lie:


Ponder that for a moment: government bureaucrats, mostly Birx and Tony Fauci, knew that “flattening the curve” was just the “first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions.” Which destroyed many thousands of businesses and devastated a generation of young people. And Birx and Fauci “had to make these palatable to the administration”–to Donald Trump and those he appointed–by “avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown.” Which is what they had planned.

President Trump deserves blame for not standing up to Fauci and Birx, who ostensibly were working for him. He evidently thought that firing them in the name of the Constitution was politically impossible, and he may have been right. In any event, the result was the great public health disaster of modern times. And so far, not one of the guilty parties has paid a price.

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