Dr. Anthony Fauci just spilled the beans: contrary to the implicit promise numerous politicians made that COVID-19 restrictions would only last “until there’s an effective vaccine,” Fauci says the arrival of a vaccine won’t mean life will return to normal, perhaps for more than a year.
“If you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to COVID, it’s going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021,” said the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Friday.
A safe and effective vaccine produced this quickly would be a stunning scientific accomplishment that could save thousands of lives. But Fauci warned that widespread distribution and getting “the majority, or more, of the population vaccinated and protected” won’t happen until perhaps the end 2021, and therefore means we cannot be free from oppressive lockdown measures until at least that point.
Aside from Fauci being a reliable harbinger for politicians moving the COVID-19 goal posts, we have three very good reasons to doubt the understanding promoted by politicians so far about returning to normal when a vaccine is deployed: 1) politicians already moved the goalposts far away from “flatten the curve” and “15 days to slow the spread” and thus can’t be trusted 2) they’ve ignored their promise of reopening if effective treatments were found, and 3) the newly discovered phenomenon of COVID-19 reinfection gives panic-pushers an excuse to keep lockdown measures until some new target of vaccine efficacy or compliance is met.
In short, we have every reason to believe Fauci might even be understating the persistence of lockdown measures and almost no reason to believe previous political promises.
As I’ve written before, the slide from “flattening the curve” to make sure hospitals weren’t overwhelmed to goals as ambitious as “stopping the spread” happened about as fast as the decline in bad news about COVID-19 this spring. With nary an explanation as to why meeting the first goal wasn’t good enough to reopen American life as they had promised, politicians and journalists gaslit the public into accepting months of lockdowns.
No one this disingenuous can be trusted, which brings us to point number two: some governors have implied relief from lockdowns upon getting “effective treatment” as recently as this month. According to the Desert Sun, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in late August that the coronavirus “isn’t going away any time soon,” and that Californians need to “‘live with this fundamental truth until there is a vaccine’ or therapeutics help manage the spread of the virus” (emphasis added).
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