Exactly one year ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined President Trump in the Rose Garden to announce plans to extend the COVID-related lockdowns for another 30 days. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx then presented doomsday models predicting more than 2 million Americans would die of COVID-19 in a matter of months, and urged the president to keep the country shut down until the end of April. Trump, persuaded by the data, agreed.
“We feel that the mitigation we’re doing right now is having an effect,” Fauci said on March 29, 2020, referring to the initial “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative the White House announced on March 16. “But the decision to prolong . . . this mitigation process until the end of April, I think, was a wise and prudent decision.” Fauci bragged that he and Birx pored over the data with the president and explained why they believed it was the best course of action. “The president accepted it.”
At that moment, Donald Trump officially handed over the reins of his once-booming economy and his political future to two heartless, clueless incompetents who unfortunately remain in the spotlight to this day. The economic, educational, physical, and mental damage Fauci and Birx inflicted on the country will never be fully calculated, yet neither shows a hint of remorse for what they’ve done. And yet the virus is still here—in fact, in some areas, such as New York and New Jersey, cases are again starting to rise despite more than a year of shutdowns, masking, and social distancing.
So it’s fitting that Fauci’s year-long reign of terror culminated in his suggesting a form of child abuse disguised as more “mitigation strategies” to fight the virus.
“When we talk about what you can do when you’re vaccinated, you can certainly have members of a family if the adults are vaccinated and you’re in the home with your child, you don’t need to wear a mask and you can have physical contact,” Fauci told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on Sunday. “When the children go out into the community, you want them to continue to wear masks when they’re interacting with groups from multiple households.”
Fauci also warned that maybe, just maybe, kids can play on playgrounds and attend camp this summer if everyone behaves themselves. When infection levels get down to what makes Fauci and his colleagues comfortable, Fauci explained, “it is conceivable that you would have a good degree of flexibility during the summer, even with the children, with things like camps.”
Fauci Spreads Misinformation
Not only does it require an audacious level of arrogance to tell tens of millions of parents, without hesitation, what their children can and cannot do, it signals a deep-seated malevolence toward the most helpless human beings. Prohibiting children from participating in the fundamental joys of childhood while forcing them to wear dirty, dehumanizing face masks is physical and psychological child abuse. Fauci should be widely condemned for his remarks and CBS News should be ashamed for giving voice to such abusive, unscientific advice.
Let’s deal with the facts, something Fauci seems uninterested in discussing and Sunday talk show hosts seem uninterested in reporting. Children under 13 have the lowest infection rates of any age group and a near zero fatality rate. The death rate for people 85 and older is 7,900 times higher than the rate for children between 5 and 17.
There also is no evidence children act as “super spreaders” even in tight quarters such as schools. To the contrary, children act as a powerful living immunization force, denying the virus a place to land. That is to say, even when children get the virus, they can easily fight it off without suffering any debilitating symptoms, building immunity. One has to wonder how much closer we would be to herd immunity had we let our children live their normal lives instead of confining them to house arrest for months on end.
Face masks for children have no known impact on reducing transmission; in fact, masking children has obvious downsides. Little people are messy, fidgety germ-carriers—dirty hands constantly fiddling with a face covering isn’t healthy for the child or the parent. God only knows what accumulates on the fabric mask of an average 7-year-old boy. Fauci’s advice could very well be making children sick.
Nor is it healthy for a child to have a depressed immune system deprived of the normal flow of oxygen compounded by limited physical activity or sunshine. Contrary to what Dr. Fauci says, a sunny playground or summer camp filled with happy, on-the-move children is the very best thing for them.
A Shameless Megalomaniac
Aside from the opposing scientific or common sense argument to what Fauci claims, the mental and emotional damage children now suffer in a masked world is impossible to gauge.
In a packed airport on Sunday, shortly after watching Fauci’s interview, I watched a young mother talking to her newborn. The woman was wearing a face mask per Joe Biden’s mask mandate. It made me think of all the precious moments between mother and baby, the kisses and the laughter and the private whispers, stolen because of a useless face mask. A baby who doesn’t get to see her mom or dad smile or watch their lips move as she tries to navigate those first spoken words.
Who knows how this will impair the verbal, cognitive, and emotional development of millions of infants born over the past year? Does Anthony Fauci even care?
What about the fear and paranoia children now accept as a way of life? Most adults—though perhaps fewer and fewer these days—grasp the idea that crises are temporary and can separate fact from fiction. Young, impressionable minds are not so resilient or discerning. What happens when the masks come off? Will children still view an unmasked person as a danger? Even worse, they’ve been brainwashed not just to believe a virus is a mortal threat but that they could sicken or kill someone else. When in history have we placed such an enormous burden on children—forcing them to view themselves as possible killers?
This is exactly what Fauci suggested over the weekend. Children must wear masks or risk infecting adults, he warned. From the time college kids took to Florida beaches last spring until now, ghouls like Fauci and Birx have labeled our children and young people as walking pathogens who could end grandma’s life. None of it is true—and the real grandma killers still run major states such as New York and Michigan—but that sort of rhetoric is what keeps getting Fauci invited back on the Sunday talk shows and CNN.
Trump blasted Fauci and Birx in a statement Monday. “[I]f it were up to them, we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression,” the former president wrote on the one-year anniversary of that fateful Rose Garden announcement. “Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before.”
Fauci has proven time and again he is a shameless megalomaniac obsessed with the spotlight and the sound of his own voice. But his comments over the weekend crossed a new line. Parents should ignore him, child advocacy groups should condemn him, and the media—CBS News in particular—should quit giving him a platform. Anthony Fauci needs to be stopped; he’s done enough damage.