Newsweek OpEd: We've Failed To Learn From Past Pandemics. Our Posterity Deserves Better
My latest OpEd in Newsweek
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A headline from a Santa Barbara newspaper blared: "Mask is the Chief Ally of the ['Disease'] Physicians Declare." The subtitle ran: "Average person doesn't know how to take care of a mask and it becomes a veritable bacteria incubator." This wasn't the work of some dissident group of "fringe epidemiologists" in 2020; it was published on November 16, 1918, as the Spanish Flu swept across the country.
The basic fact is that our current crop of "public health" experts, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, has failed to learn the lessons of past pandemics. COVID-era lockdowns, mandates, and other draconian mitigation measures fundamentally destroyed trust in our public health institutions. Historic accounts from 100 years ago convey a cautionary tale, warning against these excessive measures—but our so-called "experts" ignored them. We cannot afford to let the COVID era pass into history without uncovering what transpired and determining who should be held accountable. Our children deserve a maskless future.
Earlier this month, Dr. Fauci, recently retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sat for a deposition in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. Dr. Fauci admitted that by April 3, 2020, he was fully in support of a universal mask mandate, after months of publicly and privately dismissing the intervention. But consistency is not a hallmark of Dr. Fauci's tenure leading the COVID-19 task force.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has again issued guidance recommending universal masking. But universal mask mandates and other ultra-strict pandemic interventions have been tried before. As many scientific studies will attest: They failed then, as they did now. The forgotten history of stringent interventions is something we should have remembered at the onset of COVID.
The tensions emanating from mask mandates, business closures, and other pandemic interventions during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic were felt across the U.S. The same thing happened this time around. In San Francisco, hundreds of people were arrested and fined for not wearing masks. Even the mayor of Oakland was caught flaunting his own mandate.
Early 20th-century authoritarians were ever-present and decried the public's inability to behave correctly. "A week ago, I laughed at the idea of the mask...I did not realize that the cost of such independence was the lives of others," wrote one doctor to the San Francisco Chronicle in October 1918. "[I] wish I had the military authority to make everyone wear a mask so that the influenza would be stamped out."
In our day, Dr. Robert Redfield, then-director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eerily echoed this same sentiment when he testified before Congress in September 2020. He asserted that if everyone wore a face mask for a few weeks, "we would bring this pandemic under control." He continued: "I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine."
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Redfield would later walk back those statements. Despite what the "trust the science" crowd preached, there was no actual underlying science to support any of it.
Indeed, based on random control trials dating back to 2008, there have been no peer-reviewed studies concluding anything close to an affirmative beneficial blocking of respiratory pathogens by wearing masks. Dr. Fauci's early pandemic intuition was correct: "Skip masking."
In 1920, a post-pandemic evaluation in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat lamented the results of the mask mandate experiment: "At the end of the first wave, there was a general agreement that the measure had proved ineffective."
In San Francisco, there was much discussion over potential shutdowns and whether locales should keep schools open at all. One local San Francisco teacher, named Miss Regan, felt the suggested measures were unnecessary. "A shock is good for the nerves... There is too much fear in San Francisco today, and too much of the idea that influenza means death. Certainly, the teachers are the ones to help to a more reasonable frame of mind."
Would that more teachers had channeled Miss Regan's plucky attitude in our day. Instead, the Chicago Teachers Union instead tweeted in December 2020: "The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny."
The negative impact of closing schools and quarantining healthy children was, and continues to be, undeniable. Education attainments have been set back a decade, by at least one reckoning. Another study across 16 countries concluded that the risk from COVID for young children, compared to the risk for someone at the average age of death (roughly 80 years old), was 100,000 times lower.
Another voice from the past sums up our experiences in many ways. A 1918 editorial in Iowa debated pandemic interventions and concluded: "The people are perfectly willing to do whatever needs to be done. But they dislike greatly the inconvenience themselves, only to learn later that what they did was not necessary."
As society reconvenes from the nightmare of the last three years, we should take it upon ourselves to seek accountability for these devastating losses and capture the stories of the impacts we endured. We must also demand full transparency from Dr. Fauci and others to determine who made these decisions, and why we have failed to learn the lessons of history.
These people are pure evil! They are past the point of return. Their credibility is lost forever!
Fauci is the worst of them...I'm waiting for Karma!
We learned nothing from the 1917 Pandemic. In fact we did worse.