THE GASLIGHTING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: White House casts COVID-19 lockdowns as a Trump-era relic.
When asked about a new study suggesting that the negative effects of lockdowns far outweigh any positives, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that most of America’s lockdowns occurred during the Trump administration.
The study is a Johns Hopkins meta analysis of lockdowns that found that they are not an effective way of reducing mortality during a pandemic but do cause tremendous societal harm.
“[The study] suggests that lockdowns shouldn’t be a part of a future pandemic response,” a reporter asked Psaki on Friday. “Is that the shared view of the administration?”
Lockdowns were never part of the Biden administration’s plan for combating COVID-19, Psaki responded.
“Most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous president,” she said. “What our objective has been is conveying that we have the tools we need to keep our country open.”
Psaki did not answer directly when asked if she agreed lockdowns caused more harm than good but reiterated that President Joe Biden is not promoting them.
He was as recently as December: With Scant Information on Omicron, Biden Turned to Travel Ban to Buy Time.
And then there was this classic moment last March: Biden Mocks Texas And Mississippi For Reopening, Dropping Mask Mandates: ‘Neanderthal Thinking.’
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post at the end of last year: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.
Early on, public health officials minimized COVID’s dangers, with Anthony Fauci telling people that it was safe to go on cruises. Maybe that was just a mistake. But then Fauci told people not to wear masks because they didn’t help, changing his position within a couple of weeks to become stringently pro-mask. The earlier statement, it turned out, wasn’t based on his scientific opinion but on a desire to reserve masks for health-care workers — a worthy goal, but that doesn’t justify the lying.
Public health officials then pushed lockdowns to the max, telling everyone to stay in their homes and not to gather in even small groups, but after George Floyd’s death they suddenly announced an exception: It was fine to gather in huge groups if you were protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter.
Racism, they told us, was a “public health” problem, too. That’s doubtful in itself — racism is a behavior, not a disease — but if the threat of COVID was serious enough to shut down the economy and the schools, then that wasn’t the best time to be gathering in groups. After all, sexually transmitted diseases are a public-health problem, but they weren’t issuing quarantine exceptions for people to protest those.
As lefty journalist Glenn Greenwald recently observed, “This was a pivotal moment in the pandemic’s history: For four months, the message was clear and unrelenting: everyone must stay home. Those who leave — even to go to a deserted beach — are reckless sociopaths. It flipped overnight to endorse a mass protest movement liberals liked.”
This is what I mean by lies and political manipulation. People noticed, and the public health establishment’s credibility — already damaged by the mask reversal — collapsed.
Peppermint Psaki does get bonus points for chutzpah considering how locked down Biden himself was in 2020: Biden won White House with ‘put your dumb uncle in the basement’ strategy, new book says.
Additionally, as the Daily Wire noted yesterday, “While on the campaign trail in September 2020, then-candidate Biden also stated that he would be in favor of ‘shutting down’ the country if that’s what his medical team advised: ‘I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,’ Biden told ABC’s David Muir in a joint interview with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, to air Sunday. ‘We’re going to do whatever it takes to save lives.’”