Getting ready for the next one — will there be an October surprise?
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hunting lockdown escapees
John Tierney in the WSJ: Fauci and Walensky double down on failed CVOVID Response
Lockdowns were oppressive and deadly. But U.S. and WHO officials plan worse for the next pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention belatedly admitted failure this week. “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an “action-oriented culture.”
Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.
Yet these oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right. For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following “the science,” these leaders ignored decades of research—as well as fresh data from the pandemic—when they set strict Covid regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.
Related: Biden still pushing federal worker vaccine mandate
President Biden's administration is still pursuing litigation to implement a federal worker vaccine mandate despite recently changed Centers for Disease Control Prevention (CDC) guidelines for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
The case, called Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden, is set for a hearing before the entire Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Sept. 13. It stems from a case filed in Texas last December that resulted in a federal trial court issuing a nationwide injunction against the federal government enforcing its vaccine mandate for civilian employees.
A panel at the appeals court then ruled for the Biden administration, overturning the trial court. But the Feds for Medical Freedom workers group asked the entire 17-judge appeals court to weigh in. The court agreed, putting its previous ruling on hold and preventing the mandate from being enforced until a final ruling is issued. Now the Biden administration is set to go to court to try to enforce that mandate next month.
But the CDC recently changed its coronavirus guidelines, making recommendations on quarantine and prevention effectively equal between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
"CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection," the latest updated guidelines say.
The guidelines also say that "quarantine of exposed persons is no longer recommended, regardless of vaccination status." This recommendation, according to the CDC, is meant to help "limit the social and economic impacts" of the virus mitigation measures.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow for constitutional studies Ilya Shaprio told Fox News Digital that those changes in the CDC guidelines will complicate the Biden administration's efforts to enforce the federal employee vaccine mandate.
"I imagine the government is taking a hard look at its litigation posture and any other remaining vaccine mandate cases," he said. "I think the court in this case and in others will have a jaundiced eye towards government representations that a mandate is as required now as it was six or 12 months ago."
Shapiro added: "It goes to the standard of arbitrary and capricious under administrative procedure… If there's really no reason to require this if the CDC itself… is saying that there's no benefit if there's no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated, then why is he doing this?"
Why is he doing this? Because he wants to set the precedent that a president, acting under his unilaterally-declared state of emergency (he just extended it past the November elections) can order any damn thing he wants to order, from compulsory submission to vaccines (sic), to a moratorium on evictions, to a cancellation of $1.5 trillion of student loans. Power, power, power; that’s what this has been all about, all along.
