Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Some of the people most strongly associated with promoting lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have recently sought to recast their positions, including Anthony Fauci, former leader of the federal COVID-19 response, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Fauci seemed eager to shirk responsibility for the lockdowns when talking to The New York Times last week.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he said.
It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that produced the lockdown recommendations, he emphasized.
“I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that,” he said, noting that he “happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations.”
That perception wasn’t mere happenstance though. Fauci hardly missed an opportunity for a media spotlight, accepting accolades for supposedly leading the country through the crisis.
Fauci boasted in October 2020 that, early in the pandemic, it was he who recommended that President Donald Trump “shut the country down.”
“This was way before” the major outbreak in the New York City area at the onset of the pandemic, he said.
Moreover, Fauci now argues he was appreciative of those who had their reasons for not following the advice of federal public health agencies.
“I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other,” he said.
That doesn’t appear to be accurate.
Fauci was repeatedly cited by the media as criticizing states that diverged from federal guidance.
On one occasion, he called it “risky,” and on another warned of “needless suffering and death” if states lifted COVID-19 restrictions earlier than federal guidelines suggested.
The former pandemic adviser now acknowledges that COVID-19 vaccines were presented to the public in a less-than-ideal way.
“We probably should have communicated better that the clinical trials were only powered to look at the effect on clinically recognizable disease, symptomatic disease,” he told The New York Times.
Nonetheless, various officials made comments to the effect that the vaccines stopped transmission of the virus—which was incorrect—while people who pointed out the limitations of the vaccine clinical trials were dismissed as “anti-vax” and censored by social media.
“Records can be shown to demonstrate Fauci’s undeniable leadership on decisions that led to substantial pain for otherwise healthy and productive Americans,” said Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, a group that pushes for government transparency and impartiality.
School Reopening
Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), recently told Congress that the union advocated for school reopening from early on in the pandemic.
“We spent every day from February [2020] on trying to get schools open,” she said.
That appears to be only partially true.
The union did issue a paper in April 2020 that proposed reopening schools that were largely shut down the month before amid the rising spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 (pdf).
Coffee the Christian way: Promised Grounds
In practice, however, Weingarten always appeared to demand more to be done before schools could be opened “safely.”
Some of the core demands included universal masking of teachers and students, improving ventilation at school buildings, and maintaining six-foot physical distancing at all times. But those requirements, according to the union, required major investment or sacrifices of classroom time. Classes needed to be much smaller, for example, to ensure the distancing.
“If you do six feet of physical distancing, you’re essentially saying in a school you’re going to have about 50 percent or 60 percent of people in there at any one time, not 100 percent,” Weingarten told NBC News in February 2021.
And the demands went on.
The AFT’s reopening report from February 2021 called for 20 percent of all students and staff to be tested each week. If one student tested positive, the whole classroom should be sent home for 14 days; if two students in different classrooms tested positive, the whole school should shut down in-person learning for 14 days, the document recommended (pdf).
New York City schools tried to implement similar if less stringent rules, only to prompt protests from parents.
“Day 2 of school. A positive case was found in daughter’s classroom. 25 kids now have remote school for 10 days,” Jill Goldstein, who has a child in one of the city schools, wrote on Twitter.
“This is unacceptable.”
There also appeared to be a tendency to delay school reopening until teachers had ample opportunity to get vaccinated.
On one hand, the AFT said vaccinations weren’t necessary for school reopening, but on the other, it stated that teachers needed to be prioritized for vaccination and that vaccination progress should be “aligned” with the reopening.
“Teachers and school-related personnel need the layer of protection vaccines provide. It is the bare minimum of what they need to get back into the classroom,” Weingarten wrote on Twitter on Feb. 24, 2021.
In some of the districts with large local unions and robust reopening demands, it was only after the vaccines became widely available that local authorities were able to reach reopening deals, according to a report by the Defense of Freedom Institute (pdf).
Some of the AFT’s largest local affiliates went even further.
United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), one of the AFT’s largest and most powerful affiliates, stated that reopening would require “broader community preparedness and increased funding.”
That was supposed to include not only prolific testing, masking, and social distancing, but also expanded sick leave, a wealth tax, a millionaire tax, “Medicare for all,” and a moratorium on charter schools, according to a document issued by the union in July 2020 (pdf). The document is no longer accessible on the UTLA website.
Facing public resistance, the UTLA in the end agreed to a reopening plan without those demands.
Resources, Red Zones, and Politics
Weingarten seemed rather inflexible in her demands.
When the CDC lifted mask recommendations for COVID-19-vaccinated people in May 2021, Weingarten criticized Texas for no longer requiring masks in schools, pointing out that children weren’t eligible for the vaccine yet. Two months later, the CDC recommended masks again regardless of vaccination, citing the spread of the virus’s Delta variant and data showing that vaccinated people were spreading it just as much as the unvaccinated.
Experts have warned that masking children, especially the youngest ones, could stunt their development. Some people have also criticized what they perceived as arbitrary masking rules. If classes were held at restaurants, for example, students presumably would have been allowed to take their masks off while sitting, based on rules once in place in many jurisdictions.
When the CDC cut the school social distancing guideline to three feet, Weingarten pushed back: “The issue with the change in distancing in schools is that overcrowded and under-resourced schools are already having trouble meeting basic safety guidelines. We need to be focusing on actually getting all of the mitigation strategies in place first.”
The AFT also pushed for the CDC to issue universal guidelines as a condition of schools reopening. The CDC did so in February 2021, but only after extensive consultations with the AFT and the inclusion of several of its demands.
Just as Weingarten wanted, the guidelines called for reopening based on the level of detected COVID-19 cases in the community. Schools in “red zones”—those that couldn’t offer COVID-19 tests to all teachers and students at least once a week—should have held virtual classes, unless they could “strictly implement all mitigation strategies.”
The thresholds were so low that almost all schools were in “red zones” back then.
Weingarten made clear that the guidelines couldn’t in fact be universally implemented—not unless Congress gave public schools much more money.
“Educators, students, and parents all want our schools to #ReopenSafely. But we need the resources from the #AmericanRescuePlan to do it,” she wrote on Twitter on Feb. 17, 2021. She was referring to the $1.9 trillion spending package pushed by the Biden administration, which promised public schools $130 billion on top of the $110 billion given by Congress to schools and colleges in the previous COVID-19 packages.
In fact, the massive amount of federal funding had little to do with school reopening. The Congressional Budget Office stated in February 2021 that most of the $110 billion remained unspent and less than 5 percent of the $130 billion was to be spent by September 2021 (pdf).
Surveys have indicated that many teachers didn’t want to return to work because they were afraid they would catch COVID-19 (pdf). Yet research has indicated that the virus was spreading no more in schools than outside of schools and that children were actually less likely to spread it—even in areas that, according to Weingarten, opened prematurely, such as Florida.
Teachers could theoretically avoid the virus by shutting themselves in their homes, but that would only shift the risk from themselves to other people who still had to operate in the outside world on their behalf, delivering food and other necessities to them.
In the end, school reopening appears to have had little to do with resources and federal guidelines.
Poorer districts that masked less vigorously, for example, were somewhat more likely to be open in 2021, according to the Return to Learn Tracker. The factors most prominently associated with in-person instruction were the political leaning of the district and the estimated strength of the local teachers’ union, one research paper showed.
“The decision to return students to in-person classes this fall was strongly correlated with the county level share of the vote won by Donald Trump in 2016,” according to the working paper.
‘Gaslighting’
“The efforts to rewrite history by those who advocated for severe restrictions and school closures are absolutely galling, especially considering their documented roles in forming those very policies they are running from now,” Chamberlain told The Epoch Times.
“They pushed for the lockdowns that destroyed lives and livelihoods, pressed to keep students out of schools while parents watched their kids deteriorate academically, physically, and socially-emotionally, some to the point of suicide.”
National testing showed a dramatic drop in test scores after children finally returned to classrooms.
Meanwhile, hotline calls regarding children and domestic violence went up more than 50 percent during the initial lockdown months, and reports of predators enticing minors online almost doubled in 2020. Suspected suicides by self-poisoning increased by 30 percent in 2021 compared with 2019, an April paper revealed.
Still, Weingarten appeared at times reluctant to acknowledge how much the lack of in-person instruction set children back.
“Clearly there was education disruption, but our members push back on the idea that there was a loss of education,” she said, according to a May 18, 2021, AFT tweet.
Chamberlain accused the likes of Fauci and Weingarten of gaslighting, of “trying to convince the American public that they did and said exactly the opposite of what they actually did and said.”
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed last week that he never forced anyone to get the vaccine, although he “chose to make sure that all the incentives and all the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated.”
“This is precisely why the public’s trust in government has fallen off a cliff during the pandemic,” Chamberlain said.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a February 2021 report on school reopening. The report was issued by the American Federation of Teachers. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
