Carina Benton writes for the Federalist about America’s ill-advised COVID-19 lockdowns.

In the recent deposition of Anthony Fauci in Missouri v. Biden, a civil lawsuit against the Biden administration over alleged free speech violations, Fauci acknowledged that Dr. Clifford Lane, clinical director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was appointed to the February 2020 World Health Organization-China Joint Mission team, told Fauci that he was “impressed” with China’s successful management of the Covid outbreak.

In doing so, Lane conveyed to Fauci his belief that “extreme social distancing policies” were essential to curtailing the spread of disease. During his deposition, Fauci stated that he had “every reason to believe” the accuracy of Lane’s evaluation and admitted that “social distancing, even by somewhat difficult means” that involved “essentially the entire community” was possible in the U.S. as early as February 2020.  

Indeed, a review of the earliest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid-19 guidelines, as well as Fauci’s own emails from the period, indicate that a WHO-backed, CCP-driven agenda informed the U.S. pandemic response from the beginning. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx wielded the flimsiest of “scientific evidence” to beguile the American public while hiding their lockdown cards up their sleeves.

China’s aggressive and unprecedented approach to “flattening the curve” was neither ethically justified nor scientifically proven. Authorities from the WHO, Italy, France, Australia, and the U.S. knew that the elderly and those with underlying health conditions were the most at risk. In the vast majority of cases, the virus wasn’t dangerous. …

… Yet the Joint Mission exported the narrative that this was a “rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic” and insisted that China’s containment measures were “proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains.” In lockstep, governments began deploying, with enthusiastic support from the press, an incremental terror campaign against their own citizens.