A little more than a week ago, during a session to discuss pandemic lessons learned, Anthony Fauci was asked if there was another pandemic of disease X: Would the shutting down of schools and businesses would be part of the response to it? His response is astounding. It proves he has learnt nothing and that the saying “once a liar, always a liar” holds some truth.
On 15 August, Fauci responded to the question put to him by Dr. Teena Chopra, Wayne State University’s Dean of Coaching and Professional Development:
“Lockdowns have to have an end game. You have a reason to lockdown, for example, in New York City, when Elmhurst Hospital was overrun and they were having cooler trucks outside, because they had no places to put the bodies, you had to have something to immediately shut down the tsunami of infection. That lockdown was absolutely justified.
“Lockdown has a purpose. One of the purposes, if you do not have a vaccine, it is to get more ventilators, get the hospitals better prepared, get more people involved in the healthcare sector to do it until you decompress the pressure on the hospitals, then you can open up.
“If you have a vaccine available, you might want to lockdown temporarily so you can get everybody vaccinated.
“So, lockdowns with a purpose work. It saves lives.”
Were Hospitals Overwhelmed?
According to Wikipedia, starting on 16 March 2020, New York City schools were closed. A few days later, on 20 March, the New York State governor’s office issued an executive order for “non-essential” businesses to close. The city’s public transportation system remained open, but service was substantially reduced.
Wikipedia goes on to state that by April, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were out of work, with lost tax revenues estimated to run into the billions of dollars. Low-income jobs in the retail, transportation, and restaurant sectors were especially affected. Over the course of the year, average residential and commercial rents both declined more than 10% in Manhattan, and vacancies surged. Was the shutdown of schools and businesses justified?
