It was one year ago today that President Donald Trump imposed that travel ban on most of Europe over the Wuhan Coronavirus, the official kickoff of the dominoes falling that bring us to the point we are at now. There were a few actions that happened before the European travel ban – the China travel ban, the formation of the Coronavirus Task Force, travel warnings, etc., but today is the anniversary of when those dominoes started to fall in quick succession. In the week that followed, the world was basically shut down. Emergencies were declared, borders were closed, economies halted, lives put on hold. Ultimately, it culminated in “15 days to flatten the curve.” Through all of it, over the past year, we’ve learned next to nothing.
How many things have the “experts” gotten wrong? It’d be easier to ask what they’d gotten right – a new virus started infecting humans. That’s about it. Everything else has been contradicted at some point by the very people who made the original declarative statements.
No one has been more “all over the map” in the last year than Dr. Anthony Fauci. “To mask or not to mask” is a question the highest paid person in our federal government hasn’t bothered to ask himself, he's declared both this past year. No person has done more to damage the concept of experts than a doctor who likely hasn’t treated an actual patient since finishing his residency in the late 1960s. He’s a paper-pusher, a bureaucrat who reads about the work of others and decides if it’s something others should do. And all of us are his lab rats.
Under his leadership, or lack thereof, we’ve collected a pile of data during this pandemic that future generations will…find almost useless.
The collection of data is wildly important in matters like a pandemic because they do happen with some regularity. Few feature viruses as transmissible as COVID-19, but they do pop up all the time. Collecting accurate information about the size and scope of a pandemic like this, as well as who was impacted, how and how severely, and what worked and didn’t is invaluable information for future generations. We don’t have that, at least in any reliable form.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set out guidelines that made it almost impossible to not die of COVID at the start of the pandemic. If someone exhibited any symptoms that could be associated with the virus, hospitals were instructed to simply declare it to be so. How many terminally ill people who had the sniffles were declared COVID deaths?
We will never know because people like Dr. Fauci didn’t make it a priority to know.
Testing was awful at the start, which is understandable since it was a new virus. But testing the dead should’ve been a priority, multiple times to make sure, and gathering samples to test later. Figuring out what made COVID so deadly to some, whether or not that are definitely shared characteristics rather than possible patterns, would make a huge difference to the future and would’ve made a huge difference over the last year.
Imagine if we had learned there were certain characteristics that made someone’s risk significantly higher. Not just weight or other co-morbidities, but something in the DNA or as simple as blood type. We didn’t gather that comprehensive data, so we don’t know if it would’ve made a difference over the past year and it won’t make a difference the next time.
It was a complete and total failure by the bureaucratic state.
Maybe enough data will have been gathered that some sense can be made of it, but it’s doubtful. Given how lockdowns didn’t work, yet persist, and masks haven’t worked, but mandates persist, no one in any position to take responsibility seems to have any interest in doing so. They’re just committed to what hasn’t worked until they’re not, then they act like it never happened as they move on to the next thing.
I hope somewhere out there useful, usable data exists in spite of the bureaucratic incompetence that has been captaining this ship for the last 12 months. Otherwise, we really would have gone through all of this and learned nothing.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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