There are few people that have damaged US as Dr Fauci did. This all is just collateral damage caused by his policies.
He has single handedly destroyed any trust that large swaths of US population had in government agencies, not that there was much left after numerous scandals in agencies over the years, but he really dealt finishing blows.
He doesn't even have decency to resign or go to retirement, since he had become such a divisive personality and as long he es working for government, there large part of population wont take anything what he says as truth.
I would understand if he im the beginning would say, look people we don't really know, we asume xyz works, lets try, we will get back to you as soon as we know more. But he went purposefully to lie, because Americans are sheep that cant take truth or think for themselves. Constant flip-floping has just further destroyed any trust an normal person could have.
So it is really time for him either to go to retirement or be fired
The pandemic showed just how much we actually value our children, versus the rhetoric. When faced with a virus that was extremely weak (We knew in March of 2020 that it was less toxic than the last five flu seasons) and of no threat to anyone under 18, but could be dangerous if you were someone who did not take good care of themselves or was over 65, we deprived them of (up to) 2 years of in class education and the ability to socialize during a critical period of their psychological development. It was even worse in urban areas where 70-80% of students live in single parent households without the funds or oversite to ensure that remote learning would be effective.
Worse was the position of the teachers unions who fought to deprive these kids of an education for as ling as they could keep their members at home.
Who advocates for the kids? Do we need to allow them to vote at one year of age so perhaps a politician actually gives a shit about them?
I can’t help but think that the wave of “trans-gender” hysteria where 1000’s of predominately young women are discovering that they are really boys is another manifestation of the mental and physical illness unleashed by the extended lockdowns and fear mongering regarding Covid we have been subject to for the last two years. Worse yet is that no one in a position of authority will be held responsible for this devastation as we blithely move on to the next “crisis”, Ukraine or whatever.
Sorry but don't blame conservatives. This is 100% on the progressive liberals who freaked out and sacrificed liberty for safety and ended up with neither. Early on in May 2020 I sued CT Gov. Lamont in federal court to overturn his diktat on a 5 person gathering limit. Another CT conservative sued him on the mask mandate. We were trying our best to avoid this catastrophe. And were mocked and pilloried for it. Now that the results are in and growing that lockdowns didn't work and were a terrible idea, will heads roll? You know the answer to that. Progressives make mistake after mistake and keep on doing so with no consequences. This must change.
What an incredibly important and incredibly devastating piece. My heart breaks for these girls. We've betrayed them. Thank you, Suzy, for surfacing these stories, and not feeling any need to inject a false note of optimism about what comes next. This is the kind of moral reality check our culture needs.
Living in Texas this breaks my heart. We have listened to ridicule from the media - called Neanderthals by the president of the United States here in TX. Florida as well-throughout this pandemic. Maybe our states didn’t get everything right, but we did NOT do this to our children. I am so thankful we had a choice and my heart breaks for these girls and their parents who didn’t. I don’t know Fauci’s intentions, but I do know political games were played at the expense of children and that sickens me.
How we allowed ourselves to be convinced that the ONLY thing that mattered was keeping ANYONE from dying of Covid is beyond me.
If we are being really honest with ourselves, we sacrificed our kids so older people would feel safer. To me, that is kinda ass backwards. The kids should come first.
We listened to people who were only expert in their field, there was nobody measuring the cost benefit, nobody looking across disciplines, across society, to make the hard decisions.
The media was complicit with its hype, its narrative, its unwillingness to explore or allow conversations that questioned the narrative.
We allowed political interests and financial interests to trump the needs of our children.
Follow the science....but the science was and is so often wrong and even when it was right it only gave us information with which we adults were supposed to make decisions with the best POSSIBLE outcomes.
Media. Government. Teachers Unions. Those of us who allowed this or enabled it are all to blame.
Thanks for documenting this. It’s hard to even compose this comment because this topic overwhelms me with such rage. I see all around me the devastation done to the kids in my bluest of blue town. As of this moment my daughter is the only one in her grade not to wear a mask even though the mask mandate was dropped a month a go. It was not dropped ceremoniously though as in other areas where it was announced and kids were told they did a great job and everyone cheered. No, because it was a lawsuit brought by parents the ‘good’ people have to do the exact opposite and continue wearing them. It’s maddening!! We are a place that ‘follows the science’ and ‘hate has no home’ except obviously we’re not following the science and I’ve never seen or experienced more hate than living here. Now I’m the one filled with hate and I’ve turned back into my teenage self-raging at the self serving adults and their fakery. How my teens have made it through this ok I will never know because at times when I’m ranting about the insanity I see I’m no longer acting like a dependable adult and I’m driving them away. At one point I asked my teens why they weren’t rebelling and shared my stories of school rebellion. My daughter rolled her eyes and pointed out that in the end these were not high stake rebellions. No one was going to label you a contagious granny killer (which also equals being racist, misogynist & all the other ‘ists’) and then cancel you on social media. I realized then how different it is for them. Teens are driven by biology to push boundaries and practice independence from adults with their peers. We’ve thwarted that drive. We’ve made the stakes so high that any rebellion is subject to complete expulsion from the tribe. What society of adults does this to kids.
I understand the desire to blame Fauci for this, but the real blame lies with the policymakers in Washington and the several states who decided to predicate policy for the past two years or so on the premise that the sole human good was (and for some is) the prevention of infection with and death from the SarsCov-2 virus and its variants. Neither Trump nor Biden, nor Cuomo, Newsom, Whitmer, ... ,Kelly, ..., DeSantis, were ever under any compulsion to regard Fauci's pronouncements as the sole inputs for deciding policy. But the madness of predicating policy on the basis of a single measure without any cost-benefit analysis was so widespread that Trump's inclusion of an expert in cost-benefit analyses in health-care on his COVID advisory panel was so savaged in the press that the new appointee withdrew. DeSantis is still being savaged in the press for Florida not fully participating in the madness.
When I was around 11 or 12 my mother and her boyfriend were buying and flipping houses. One year we moved from one town to another and for some reason, I don't know what it was - my sister and I stayed home from school for almost a year. We slipped through the cracks. No one knew that we weren't attending school. No one checked. We were left mostly alone in this weird house that sat between Ventura and Malibu on the county line. It was a nicer house than we'd ever lived in before. We were alone. All day with nothing to do but watch television. We just fell into ourselves, ignoring the kids down the block who knocked on our door.
I think that altered both of our personalities for life. COVID lockdown wasn't that different from how I lived my life before. Te internet replaced television but it was the same thing. Getting your social cues and your life lessons from something that wasn't real life. In 1994, after a really terrible breakup, I found the internet and essentially lived the rest of my life online. But it was much different before social media, before the flip flop tyrants got ahold of our brains. Still, it was living in alternate reality. I didn't realize the impact that year without school had on me until reading your piece just now.
Lockdown turned so many of us inward and online, vulnerable to the algorithm-driven hysteria that catches from one person to another. That is why, I think, we saw the largest protest in American history after George Floyd. Everyone was online, connected to each other and vulnerable to a wave of hysteria. We saw it before with the Me Too movement, but the summer of 2020 we saw something completely different from even that.
After the Jacob Blake shooting was dumped on Twitter the story was "he was at a birthday party, tried to break up a fight and was shot." Kenosha burned to the ground, people died, before anyone corrected that story. That's because all our reality was being shaped by a game of telephone. When social media becomes your only experience of life - social media, clickbait, outrage, bullying, hive minds -- the delusion of photo filters and fake lives on Tik Tok and Instagram - how does that shape how you see the world? Everything people believed that Summer that then shaped our entire country and is still shaping it came out of, I think, how the algorithms manipulated the hive minds into believing something that was not true (all cops are murderers and racists, for instance). I guess you could call it "mass formation psychosis" after all).
It was hard enough for me to go through life thinking it should be like life was on TV. I did think that. But I can't imagine what it would be like to never know real life and have only what's online to fill up those human experiences.
There will be little accountability on this—people will trust doctors a bit less, perhaps, and Republicans may get a boost in the midterms—but we will move on to the next seeming crisis, most but the teenagers forgetting how eminently avoidable all this would’ve been, with better leadership and judgment from our elites.
This is hallmark of an unraveling society, that we cannot really account for, or even recognize, our mistakes. Like the many victims of inner-city gun violence after a breakdown in policing these last few years, the victims of progressive Covid policy will largely be forgotten in official narratives because they were collateral damage of seemingly well-intentioned policies by the most powerful members of our society.
Thank you for writing this. The is tragedy must be remembered.
Thank you for writing about this important but mostly overlooked topic. As the mother of 2 teenage girls, I know many teens and their moms. Easily 60% of these moms have told me of their daughters’ struggles with mental health this past year - and I’m sure there are more who simply aren’t talking about it. Add to that the fact that mental health resources are stretched thin - it’s impossible to find a therapist who takes insurance and the ones who don’t charge $300/hr. Finding a (reputable) psychiatrist who can prescribe medication was impossible. A friend’s daughter struggling with an eating disorder is waiting for a bed to open in a treatment facility because they’re all full. Throw on top of that all the remaining pressure to be some kind of superhero or you won’t get into a good college.
This piece reminds me so much of myself growing up in the '90s, except that for me it was because of my abusive family and not because of a worldwide pandemic. For what it's worth, I've been dealing with the fallout for the 2 decades since I left home, but then I didn't have the supportive family that it sounds like these girls have. I wish them all a swift and strong recovery.
This breaks my heart. We have 3 girls who all have been affected by the lockdown in different ways. The oldest was in college and stalled out with career plans after her internships and study abroad were cancelled. The middle has her first in-person class since March 2020 and the youngest, although in person last year in private school, has residual mental health problems. All screwed by the lock down policies but adjusting. Good for the parents for getting help for their kids.❤️
There are few people that have damaged US as Dr Fauci did. This all is just collateral damage caused by his policies.
He has single handedly destroyed any trust that large swaths of US population had in government agencies, not that there was much left after numerous scandals in agencies over the years, but he really dealt finishing blows.
He doesn't even have decency to resign or go to retirement, since he had become such a divisive personality and as long he es working for government, there large part of population wont take anything what he says as truth.
I would understand if he im the beginning would say, look people we don't really know, we asume xyz works, lets try, we will get back to you as soon as we know more. But he went purposefully to lie, because Americans are sheep that cant take truth or think for themselves. Constant flip-floping has just further destroyed any trust an normal person could have.
So it is really time for him either to go to retirement or be fired
The pandemic showed just how much we actually value our children, versus the rhetoric. When faced with a virus that was extremely weak (We knew in March of 2020 that it was less toxic than the last five flu seasons) and of no threat to anyone under 18, but could be dangerous if you were someone who did not take good care of themselves or was over 65, we deprived them of (up to) 2 years of in class education and the ability to socialize during a critical period of their psychological development. It was even worse in urban areas where 70-80% of students live in single parent households without the funds or oversite to ensure that remote learning would be effective.
Worse was the position of the teachers unions who fought to deprive these kids of an education for as ling as they could keep their members at home.
Who advocates for the kids? Do we need to allow them to vote at one year of age so perhaps a politician actually gives a shit about them?
This was not our finest hour.
I can’t help but think that the wave of “trans-gender” hysteria where 1000’s of predominately young women are discovering that they are really boys is another manifestation of the mental and physical illness unleashed by the extended lockdowns and fear mongering regarding Covid we have been subject to for the last two years. Worse yet is that no one in a position of authority will be held responsible for this devastation as we blithely move on to the next “crisis”, Ukraine or whatever.
Sorry but don't blame conservatives. This is 100% on the progressive liberals who freaked out and sacrificed liberty for safety and ended up with neither. Early on in May 2020 I sued CT Gov. Lamont in federal court to overturn his diktat on a 5 person gathering limit. Another CT conservative sued him on the mask mandate. We were trying our best to avoid this catastrophe. And were mocked and pilloried for it. Now that the results are in and growing that lockdowns didn't work and were a terrible idea, will heads roll? You know the answer to that. Progressives make mistake after mistake and keep on doing so with no consequences. This must change.
What an incredibly important and incredibly devastating piece. My heart breaks for these girls. We've betrayed them. Thank you, Suzy, for surfacing these stories, and not feeling any need to inject a false note of optimism about what comes next. This is the kind of moral reality check our culture needs.
Living in Texas this breaks my heart. We have listened to ridicule from the media - called Neanderthals by the president of the United States here in TX. Florida as well-throughout this pandemic. Maybe our states didn’t get everything right, but we did NOT do this to our children. I am so thankful we had a choice and my heart breaks for these girls and their parents who didn’t. I don’t know Fauci’s intentions, but I do know political games were played at the expense of children and that sickens me.
How we allowed ourselves to be convinced that the ONLY thing that mattered was keeping ANYONE from dying of Covid is beyond me.
If we are being really honest with ourselves, we sacrificed our kids so older people would feel safer. To me, that is kinda ass backwards. The kids should come first.
We listened to people who were only expert in their field, there was nobody measuring the cost benefit, nobody looking across disciplines, across society, to make the hard decisions.
The media was complicit with its hype, its narrative, its unwillingness to explore or allow conversations that questioned the narrative.
We allowed political interests and financial interests to trump the needs of our children.
Follow the science....but the science was and is so often wrong and even when it was right it only gave us information with which we adults were supposed to make decisions with the best POSSIBLE outcomes.
Media. Government. Teachers Unions. Those of us who allowed this or enabled it are all to blame.
Heartbreaking.
Now do teenage boys.
Thanks for documenting this. It’s hard to even compose this comment because this topic overwhelms me with such rage. I see all around me the devastation done to the kids in my bluest of blue town. As of this moment my daughter is the only one in her grade not to wear a mask even though the mask mandate was dropped a month a go. It was not dropped ceremoniously though as in other areas where it was announced and kids were told they did a great job and everyone cheered. No, because it was a lawsuit brought by parents the ‘good’ people have to do the exact opposite and continue wearing them. It’s maddening!! We are a place that ‘follows the science’ and ‘hate has no home’ except obviously we’re not following the science and I’ve never seen or experienced more hate than living here. Now I’m the one filled with hate and I’ve turned back into my teenage self-raging at the self serving adults and their fakery. How my teens have made it through this ok I will never know because at times when I’m ranting about the insanity I see I’m no longer acting like a dependable adult and I’m driving them away. At one point I asked my teens why they weren’t rebelling and shared my stories of school rebellion. My daughter rolled her eyes and pointed out that in the end these were not high stake rebellions. No one was going to label you a contagious granny killer (which also equals being racist, misogynist & all the other ‘ists’) and then cancel you on social media. I realized then how different it is for them. Teens are driven by biology to push boundaries and practice independence from adults with their peers. We’ve thwarted that drive. We’ve made the stakes so high that any rebellion is subject to complete expulsion from the tribe. What society of adults does this to kids.
I understand the desire to blame Fauci for this, but the real blame lies with the policymakers in Washington and the several states who decided to predicate policy for the past two years or so on the premise that the sole human good was (and for some is) the prevention of infection with and death from the SarsCov-2 virus and its variants. Neither Trump nor Biden, nor Cuomo, Newsom, Whitmer, ... ,Kelly, ..., DeSantis, were ever under any compulsion to regard Fauci's pronouncements as the sole inputs for deciding policy. But the madness of predicating policy on the basis of a single measure without any cost-benefit analysis was so widespread that Trump's inclusion of an expert in cost-benefit analyses in health-care on his COVID advisory panel was so savaged in the press that the new appointee withdrew. DeSantis is still being savaged in the press for Florida not fully participating in the madness.
When I was around 11 or 12 my mother and her boyfriend were buying and flipping houses. One year we moved from one town to another and for some reason, I don't know what it was - my sister and I stayed home from school for almost a year. We slipped through the cracks. No one knew that we weren't attending school. No one checked. We were left mostly alone in this weird house that sat between Ventura and Malibu on the county line. It was a nicer house than we'd ever lived in before. We were alone. All day with nothing to do but watch television. We just fell into ourselves, ignoring the kids down the block who knocked on our door.
I think that altered both of our personalities for life. COVID lockdown wasn't that different from how I lived my life before. Te internet replaced television but it was the same thing. Getting your social cues and your life lessons from something that wasn't real life. In 1994, after a really terrible breakup, I found the internet and essentially lived the rest of my life online. But it was much different before social media, before the flip flop tyrants got ahold of our brains. Still, it was living in alternate reality. I didn't realize the impact that year without school had on me until reading your piece just now.
Lockdown turned so many of us inward and online, vulnerable to the algorithm-driven hysteria that catches from one person to another. That is why, I think, we saw the largest protest in American history after George Floyd. Everyone was online, connected to each other and vulnerable to a wave of hysteria. We saw it before with the Me Too movement, but the summer of 2020 we saw something completely different from even that.
After the Jacob Blake shooting was dumped on Twitter the story was "he was at a birthday party, tried to break up a fight and was shot." Kenosha burned to the ground, people died, before anyone corrected that story. That's because all our reality was being shaped by a game of telephone. When social media becomes your only experience of life - social media, clickbait, outrage, bullying, hive minds -- the delusion of photo filters and fake lives on Tik Tok and Instagram - how does that shape how you see the world? Everything people believed that Summer that then shaped our entire country and is still shaping it came out of, I think, how the algorithms manipulated the hive minds into believing something that was not true (all cops are murderers and racists, for instance). I guess you could call it "mass formation psychosis" after all).
It was hard enough for me to go through life thinking it should be like life was on TV. I did think that. But I can't imagine what it would be like to never know real life and have only what's online to fill up those human experiences.
There will be little accountability on this—people will trust doctors a bit less, perhaps, and Republicans may get a boost in the midterms—but we will move on to the next seeming crisis, most but the teenagers forgetting how eminently avoidable all this would’ve been, with better leadership and judgment from our elites.
This is hallmark of an unraveling society, that we cannot really account for, or even recognize, our mistakes. Like the many victims of inner-city gun violence after a breakdown in policing these last few years, the victims of progressive Covid policy will largely be forgotten in official narratives because they were collateral damage of seemingly well-intentioned policies by the most powerful members of our society.
Thank you for writing this. The is tragedy must be remembered.
Thank you for writing about this important but mostly overlooked topic. As the mother of 2 teenage girls, I know many teens and their moms. Easily 60% of these moms have told me of their daughters’ struggles with mental health this past year - and I’m sure there are more who simply aren’t talking about it. Add to that the fact that mental health resources are stretched thin - it’s impossible to find a therapist who takes insurance and the ones who don’t charge $300/hr. Finding a (reputable) psychiatrist who can prescribe medication was impossible. A friend’s daughter struggling with an eating disorder is waiting for a bed to open in a treatment facility because they’re all full. Throw on top of that all the remaining pressure to be some kind of superhero or you won’t get into a good college.
"Her dad is in tech. Her mom doesn’t work."
I beg your pardon. Have you ever been a mother, Suzy?
This piece reminds me so much of myself growing up in the '90s, except that for me it was because of my abusive family and not because of a worldwide pandemic. For what it's worth, I've been dealing with the fallout for the 2 decades since I left home, but then I didn't have the supportive family that it sounds like these girls have. I wish them all a swift and strong recovery.
This breaks my heart. We have 3 girls who all have been affected by the lockdown in different ways. The oldest was in college and stalled out with career plans after her internships and study abroad were cancelled. The middle has her first in-person class since March 2020 and the youngest, although in person last year in private school, has residual mental health problems. All screwed by the lock down policies but adjusting. Good for the parents for getting help for their kids.❤️