As millions of people were locked up, barred from attending events or even church, and schools closed, people asked the fundamental question: why is this happening, what is the government doing, and what is the exit strategy? There were many possibilities.

Maybe to preserve hospital capacity, but at that time hospitals were firing nurses, and parking lots were empty because they locked their doors for certain operations and routine examinations.

It may have been to buy time to stock up on PPE and respirators, but we later discovered that the respirators killed many needlessly and the supplies were later sold for much less.

Or maybe we should have waited for the vaccine. That’s what was said on the street. It is certain that vaccines have been in development since January 2020, if not earlier. One was coming. The companies themselves apparently had enormous influence over the regulatory agencies that later approved and licensed their products in unusual ways.

But the story is not entirely clear.

Consider Anthony Fauci’s March 2, 2020, email to Washington Post reporter David Gerson. The exchange came two weeks before the Trump administration announced the shutdown and four days after The New York Times called for a medieval response to the pandemic. It was just a week after Fauci changed his mind about both the severity and the closure.

The turning point came on February 27, when Fauci, who had previously said the virus was not serious and did not deserve isolation, sent an email to actress Morgan Fairchild instructing her to warn her followers of the impending shutdowns. “The American public should not be alarmed,” he wrote, “but should be prepared to mitigate the epidemic in this country with measures that include social distancing, telecommuting, temporary school closures, etc.”

On March 2, Gerson asked the question we would all be asking a few weeks later. “Is the general strategy of social distancing just to keep the percentage of Americans who get this disease down until a vaccine is available? That seems much harder to do in a free society. Does that mean closing schools? Public transportation? Do states bring and municipalities such decisions?”

Fauci’s answer is quite astonishing.

“Social distancing isn’t really about waiting for a vaccine,” Fauci wrote. “The most important thing is to prevent the easy spread of infections in schools (closing), crowds at events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), workplaces (work remotely where possible)… The goal of social distancing is to prevent a person who is infected easily spreads the virus to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in a crowd. Proximity to people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even 2 to 3. If we can increase the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”

Michael Gerson repeated it almost word for word in his column the same day, giving insight into the true way these columns were constructed.

Gerson, however, adds, “A vaccine, however, would be very helpful.”

Those who oppose vaccination requirements or suffer from adverse effects can take comfort in Fauci’s apparent view that a vaccine is not necessary and that the epidemic will end on its own. However, a close reading provides no such comfort. In fact, he foresees something even worse than the vaccination mandate. He was coming up with a plan to lock himself away forever.

No common respiratory virus has ever disappeared simply by reducing the rate of spread of infection through the artificial means of universal human isolation. As soon as people start communicating again, the virus will be on the move again until it reaches endemicity through herd immunity, which eventually happened in this case, just as it has throughout history. We survived the pandemic not by quarantine or vaccines, but by exposure. That’s how it always was and always will be. That’s why no civilized society has ever attempted a universal lockdown, much less a global one.

Fauci is actually advocating something very far reaching here to the point of bordering on insanity. He calls for a complete reconstruction of the social order in order to separate people forever so that we do not infect each other with anything. That seems to be his theory, as the idea that a reduction in infection levels would by itself cause the virus to die out makes no scientific sense. That’s like saying you can stop the rain by putting down an umbrella.

According to his plan, we would have locks forever. In this sense, the vaccine at least represented a possible emancipation from the permanent prison conditions Fauci envisioned at the time. And this is what the narrative really looked like: quarantine to end the pandemic, masks to stop the quarantine, and vaccines to stop the masks. Of course, nothing worked, but each stage provided a test of compliance.

But how serious was Fauci about it? Maybe it was just an email and not a grand theory of life itself. Could be. However, the closures did not stop soon. They went through the summer – except when they were protesting against racism – and the fall.

In August 2020, Fauci co-authored a major article in Cell that received very little attention. The article offers a general theory that the main cause of all infectious diseases is human contact, which is another way of saying society itself. “In a human-dominated world, where our human activities represent an aggressive, harmful and unbalanced interaction with nature, we will increasingly cause new disease emergencies.”

The answer is then obvious: to dismantle society itself. Or as Fauci puts it:

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that overcrowding in apartments and places where people gather (sports facilities, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement, catalyze the spread of disease… Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior, as well as other radical changes that may take decades: rebuilding the infrastructure of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewage systems, to places for recreation and gathering.

Maybe a beef with the current social footprint of massive fossil fuel use after the war? Perhaps his objection to the industrial revolution? No, you have to think much bigger. The problem is the following:

Emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have threatened humans since the Neolithic Revolution, 12,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherer humans settled in villages to domesticate animals and grow crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.
One would assume it would have made headlines if the man who designed the world’s response to Covid was just using this as leverage to upend 12,000 years of human history. Indeed, in this sense, “going to the Middle Ages” is only a step on the long way back. Forget the Constitution. Forget the Enlightenment. Forget even the golden age of the Roman Empire. Fauci wants to take us back to long before there was any real historical record: Rousseau’s conjectured state of nature where we lived foraging for food and nothing else.
And yet, the authors assure us that they doubt that going back so far into the past is really possible, however wonderful it may be. “Since we cannot go back to ancient times,” they ask, “can we at least use the lessons of those times to adapt modernity in a safer direction?”
As the lockdowns continued, many people began to suspect that Fauci and his colleagues had decided that the underlying problem was not a particular pathogen, but people in general and their tendency to want freedom of movement, association and work together. In his writings, Fauci sees all of this as nothing more than an opportunity to create and spread disease. Indeed, during his testimony in a free speech case, he demonstrated such an attitude when he criticized a court reporter for sneezing. “I don’t want Covid,” he protested.
Who knew that when we were told to wait just 15 days until the curve flattened out, we were actually agreeing to a complete reconstruction of life on earth as we have known it for 12,000 years? That seems to be the underlying agenda. If that sounds hyperbolic, check out the text above, all signed by Fauci the Great. By the way, during the period of the pandemic, Fauci’s fortune doubled. The radical reconstruction of human society proposed here has proved personally lucrative for its advocates.
How to fight this nonsense? Supporters of true freedom and a functioning society need a solid theory and understanding of the relationship between civilization and infectious disease. In my opinion, Sunetra Gupta and Steve Templeton came closest to providing just that. (Brownstone is about to publish Templeton’s powerful treatise on the subject.)
We probably didn’t fully understand that we needed such a thing before Covid, but in the absence of that, Fauci filled the void with his wild yearnings to disrupt the entire society as we’ve known it for 12,000 years. That was the hidden meaning behind Fauci’s email to the Washington Post.
Above all, Fauci is a veteran at promoting lockdowns/lockdowns.