As tens of millions of Shanghai residents are being put into the most ferocious lockdown to date, being locked in their apartments and reportedly starving, America’s Covid Czar Dr. Anthony Fauci signaled that such policies might be quite effective in curbing the spread of Covid if the government gets detained people vaccinated.
During an MSNBC “Reports” interview on Wednesday, the host, Andrea Mitchell, asked Fauci whether the government was concerned about the Covid outbreak in China. For some reason, Mitchell seemed uninterested in the fact that 24.89 million people in China’s most populous urban area — the most populous city proper in the world — are being detained against their will.
Fauci replied that by imposing strict lockdowns early in the pandemic, China was “doing better than anyone else” in terms of containing the virus. He said,
China has a number of problems, two of which are that their complete lockdown, which was their approach, the strictest lockdown that you’d never be able to implement in the United States. Although that prevents the spread of infection, I remember early on they were saying, and I think accurately, they were doing better than almost anybody else.
Fauci continued by saying that while imposing the lockdown, the authorities must act to “get people vaccinated”:
But lockdown has its consequences. You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won’t have a surge of infections.
Fauci did not specify how he saw a concrete way of getting people injected with the vaccine while they were not allowed to leave their homes. Presumably, the government could send medical personnel to each and every unvaccinated person.
Disregarding the concept of natural immunity, Fauci went on to explain that vaccination would be needed “Because you’re dealing with an immunologically naive population to the virus because they’ve not really been exposed because of the lockdown.” That claim goes against his own admission in 2004 that the “best vaccine is to get infected yourself.” Back then, Fauci said that if a person contracted the flu, she “definitely” did not need to get vaccinated because she was “as protected as anybody else.”
Fauci continued by bashing Chinese vaccines for not being effective enough:
The problem is, that the vaccines that they’ve been using are not nearly as effective as the vaccines that are used in the United States, the UK, [the] EU, and other places. So, they don’t have the degree of protection that’s optimal.
It may be strange to hear the nation’s top infectious-disease expert claiming that the vaccines used in America offer “optimal” protection, since their efficacy wanes within a couple of months, as admitted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the vaccine manufacturers themselves. The statement makes sense, however, if Fauci views a regular boost as an “optimal” Covid vaccination regimen.
Identifying “the source of the problem in China,” Fauci said that a large proportion of their population consists of the elderly, whose vaccination rate is relatively low.
Fauci did not mention the lives that would be lost or the other negative impacts the lockdowns have proven to inflict on society. According to media reports, there have been countless instances of suicides, starvation, mass civil unrest, and looting in Shanghai.
How bad is the Covid outbreak in Shanghai? While it seems irrelevant from the perspective of human rights — the government should not have the power to forcefully detain its ordinary law-abiding citizens no matter what — it should be noted that the policy seems distorted beyond imagination. While Covid cases reached 250,000 on April 13, just one person has been hospitalized and not a single one has died because of Covid since the outbreak began on March 1, according to the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission. The commission also noted that most of the cases were mild or asymptomatic.
Pursuing a “zero-tolerance” Covid policy set in place by the Communist Party, however, Shanghai went into a city-wide lockdown on April 3.
The residents are only allowed to go outside to take a Covid test, and a positive test means they are put into detention camps to “live side by side with thousands of others, without walls or showers, and with ceiling lights on around the clock,” according to a Reuters report.
Fauci seems to favor lockdowns a lot, and did his best to shut down debate on the matter in 2020. That same year, he praised the strict lockdowns implemented in Australia, calling them the “epitome of success.”
In late March 2022, Fauci signaled that the possibility of reinstating lockdowns in America was not off the table.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘lockdowns,’” Fauci said during an interview on BBC’s Sunday Morning. “That has a charged element to it. But, I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections.”
Earlier this year, a couple of major studies were published proving that the compulsory non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) commonly known as “lockdowns” did virtually nothing to reduce Covid mortality, while having a “devastating” impact on the economy, education, and public health.
