<\/a>Drew Holden<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The indictment of a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly of the National Institutes of Health, for misleading the public on COVID has kicked off a renewed effort<\/a> to hold the experts accountable for dishonesty and deceit about the virus. But do we really<\/em> remember the start of the pandemic? What the experts and their handmaidens in the legacy media said was true, and what definitely \u2013 allegedly \u2013 wasn\u2019t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those were heady days. Information about the virus and its danger were hazy; leaders and everyone else were scared about what was to come. It can feel uncharitable to look back critically at the pronouncements and decisions made at the time considering that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But these were not forgivable missteps, or slightly missed calculations. The failures were era- and generation-defining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s plenty of blame to go around. Governments and elected leaders were the decision makers, after all. But I feel like we\u2019re in danger of letting the legacy press off the hook. The institution of the media has constitutionally enshrined protections precisely because they are supposed to hold government to account \u2013 and what could have been a more vital time to do so than when governments at all levels were wielding more power, limiting individual freedom more dramatically, than any time in recent history?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, the legacy media became watercarriers for the use of government force, and the hall monitors of lockdowns and mask mandates and all manner of other restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every prediction, every warning, every scold, was delivered with complete certainty by media-selected experts and their legacy press messengers, paired with a know-it-all condescension toward anyone who might even ask questions. It was The Science, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I fear we\u2019re already forgetting just how wrong the press and its collective cadre of experts were about combatting a pandemic, how misleading legacy media reporting on The Science was, and the attendant harm suffered across America as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, there was much these individuals couldn\u2019t have known at the time. So why did they act like they did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the first entry in a four-part series I\u2019m calling \u201cA COVID Autopsy,\u201d to try to remember just how misguided, just how ridiculous, just how wrong<\/em> so much of what was alleged by the press at the time turned out to be. And in some small way, capture the damage done as a result (most of that will come in Part 4).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an attempt to capture the scale of failure and hypocrisy and synthesize the specific instances thereof, I\u2019m breaking out each piece in the series by specific topics, from lockdowns to school closures and beyond. I\u2019ve tried to denote places where those making the predictions had reason to think otherwise, and also call out the hypocrisy when these groups went from confidently declaring one thing to reversing course and asserting the exact opposite with the same conviction \u2013 a pattern that reliably appeared just as soon as a certain president weighed in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each of these topics has enough inaccuracy and deception to dedicate a whole piece to. On some, I\u2019ve linked to my own longer attempts at doing that, or to the work of others doing likewise. Buckle up, there\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Novel Coronavirus<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To help remember what the sequence of events was, there\u2019s no place better to start than on the initial coverage of COVID and lockdowns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You may have forgotten, but in what became a theme of COVID, the initial coverage was far different in tone and substance than where it would end up. In many cases, the dividing line in coverage wasn\u2019t about the facts or even The Science, but about what President Donald Trump was saying at a particular moment in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s start with masks. <\/strong>While the legacy press, The Science, and Democrats would eventually shift to dogmatic support for wearing a mask at all times as the only way to be a decent citizen (CNN, August 5, 2020: \u201cThe debate over masks today is a lot like the decades-long fight to mandate seat belts.<\/a>\u201d captures it well), each of these groups doubted the efficacy<\/a> of what would soon become a symbol of the pandemic. The legacy media were of one voice in early 2020: stop buying masks, they don\u2019t work, and shortages will hurt health care workers. Remember?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CNN, January 28,2020: \u201cThere\u2019s been a run of surgical masks in the US because of the coronavirus scare. You don\u2019t need them, physicians say.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n USA Today<\/em>, February 17, 2020: \u201cTop disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is \u2018minuscule\u2019; skip mask and wash hands<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n NPR, February 25, 2020: \u201cHealth Officials Warn Americans To Plan For The Spread Of Coronavirus In U.S.<\/a>\u201d: \u201cExperts say that commonly worn surgical masks aren\u2019t very effective protection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n