CNN has produced yet another left-wing narrative so-called documentary. During the campaign, you may recall, the network was running frequent “documentaries” that were essentially infomercials for the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party.
This time it was a panel of what they promoted to be “the Covid doctors.”
In fact, it was just another attempt to go back in time and find fault with President Trump, Republican governors, members of Congress and every American who questioned the need to shutdown the country to such an extreme. That is a worthy debate – but the left does not debate, it dictates.
Dr. Andrew Fauci loomed large in the broadcast. He should. With a $400,000-plus annual salary, he is the highest paid federal employee in America – maybe in the history of America.
Fauci said that the smartest thing he ever did in his life was to accelerate the production of vaccines.
Really? I thought that was a Trump administration project. I did not know that it was the result of the diminutive Dr. Fauci transforming into a medical superman. His claim may fool a lot of people, especially those who hate Trump. But others may recall that when Trump talked about having a vaccine before the end of 2020, it was Fauci who said that was impossible – it would take years.
The medical professional who got the most buzz in the post-“documentary” morning broadcasts was Dr. Deborah Birx – who had dropped off the media radar in recent months. She said that losing the first 100,000 lives to Covid-19 was “excusable” because the all-knowing doctors did not know with what they were dealing.
According to Birx, the next 400,000-plus deaths were mostly avoidable – if we (read that as President Trump) had responded with the correct actions and policies. Of course, Birx and the other doctors featured in the “documentary” were in positions of authority. Birx and Fauci were key members of the White House Corona Virus Task Force that was developing the policies.
We should recall that the ever-flexible Fauci publicly praised Trump by saying that he was dutifully following the Task Force’s advice. Fauci also made public statements that Covid-19 would not be a major problem for the United States. This was about the same time Trump was echoing Fauci’s professional viewpoint. But we are supposed to forget all that history. And our political amnesia is exacerbated by a media that does not report on past statements that do not comport with its biased narratives.
What was missing from Birx new-found thinking was exactly what she believes we should have done to prevent those hundreds of thousands of deaths.
It appears that she meant a greater shutdown and more laws and stricter enforcement of the mask, distancing and hand-washing admonishments.
I say “more laws and stricter enforcement” because it is impossible to imagine that anyone in America had somehow missed the advice and warnings emanating from the national media on a minute-by-minute cycle. Birx seems to believe we needed to go beyond all the advice and warnings the public was receiving.
It seems to me that what Birx was suggesting in retrospect was America should have been shutdown a lot more. Perhaps we should have imposed Draconian mask mandates that would have had offenders fined or hauled off to jail. That seems to be the only thing that would have exceeded the warnings and restrictive orders from governors and mayors. Was she thinking of shutting down all airline and train service completely? Should citizens be confined to their homes as a form of house arrest – limited only to government approved essential forays into public spaces?
Perhaps you think my speculative examples are a bit extreme. If so, then you try to ponder what more Birx would have done to contain the Covid-19 virus. What harsher measures did we need?
And then ponder the enormous damage Birx’s hindsight policies would have done to the well-being and very lives of the 90 percent of Americans who were never going to even get Covid-19 – and even the 80 percent of those who did get Covid-19 with mild symptoms or no symptoms. What about all those kids who are suffering because they are not in school? The restaurant workers without jobs?
Most Americans have already paid a very high price for all the protections that we took – voluntarily and imposed.
To have exponentially increased protective measures may well have resulted in a national catastrophe far greater than the pandemic.
Birx is a medical professional, so she seems to see only one side of the problem. She reminds me of that old saying … if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails. We should consider ourselves fortunate that we were not ruled over – or rolled over — by those who fail to fully appreciate the downside of the shutdown. Or is Birx’s current perspective just more political piling on the former President?
Yes, we could have done more … and we could have done less. Both the medical side and the economic side suffered tragically from the pandemic. So, maybe – without realizing it — we achieved a not-so-happy medium.
So, there ‘tis.