Four years later, COVID-19 shutdowns remind us the government is the ultimate tyrant

A rogue governor who seized power despite repeated attempts by the legislature to stop him. Reckless and politicized government scientists who ran a media smear campaign against peers and citizens who challenged their policies. Carnage to the mental health, well-being, and financial fortunes of millions of Americans, especially children.

Four years ago, former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf ordered “all non-life-sustaining businesses in Pennsylvania” to close their doors to slow the spread of COVID-19. The week prior, he shut down all Pennsylvania schools. The governor was empowered to take these unilateral actions under the Proclamation of Disaster Emergency he signed on March 6, 2020.

Wolf’s actions seemed sensible at first. A deadly virus was sweeping the world, killing even the young and healthy. The government scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would just take 15 days to “flatten the curve” of COVID and save lives. Who wouldn’t want to save lives? A two-week shutdown seemed right.

But Wolf would not stop at two weeks. After his initial 90-day emergency declaration was set to expire, he extended it for over a year. During that time, Wolf ignored his own legislature’s votes to limit his power. He defied a federal judge’s ruling that his actions were unconstitutional. After 15 months, Pennsylvanians ended Wolf’s authoritarian reign through a successful ballot initiative, limiting a governor’s ability to use emergency powers.

It was a rare instance where citizens were able to exert control over a chaotic, dangerous, and powerful government bureaucracy that politicized a pandemic and upended lives.

Pennsylvanians could rein in politicians but entrenched federal bureaucracies they could not. No bureaucracy eroded public trust during the pandemic quite like the CDC. The health agency made and directed policies that were based on faulty information and, as whistleblowers would report, refused to change course, even when presented with truthful information.

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing, to data, to communications,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky. None more so than the CDC’s dogmatic insistence on the six-foot social distancing requirement that upended American society. Despite evidence presented by scientists that three feet would suffice for social distancing, then Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, refused to change protocols.

Of course, the CDC was going to make missteps in a fast-moving pandemic. The problem is that when presented with evidence to counter their policies, the CDC became dogmatic and political.

That entrenched bureaucracy — aided and abetted by Fauci and the Biden administration — sought to undermine, silence, and discredit dissenters. Independent journalists were able to scour Twitter’s (now X’s) files after Elon Musk bought the company. What those journalists uncovered was more akin to 1950s Moscow KGB tactics than what we would expect in a free society.

Thanks to Musk, independent journalist Matt Taibbi was able to uncover the Biden administration pressuring — with success — Twitter executives to “elevate” or “suppress” information that, Taibbi said, was “true but inconvenient.”

But the worst act of Fauci’s attempts to discredit and undermine those opposing him was his response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In October 2020, three epidemiologists — Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford — challenged the CDC and called for a more balanced and measured approach.

Time would prove the Barrington doctors right. But at the time, Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, had an email exchange in which they discussed a “devastating takedown” to undermine and discredit Bhattacharya and the others as “fringe” doctors. What followed was a slew of coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC News, and other outlets undermining the Barrington doctors’ credibility.

The disinformation campaign against Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and others led them to file a lawsuit against the federal government and public health leaders. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs contend that Fauci “coordinated directly with Facebook and/or other social-media firms to suppress disfavored speakers and content of speech on social media.”

Our children were the most impacted. In 2021, 42% of high school students reported persistent sadness and hopelessness. Depression and despair were highest among female and LGBTQ students. During the same time, the Mayo Clinic reported higher rates of suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, and substance abuse among minors than in previous years.

For science to be trusted, it requires questions and doubts. So, too, for the government. Many Americans raised objections and questioned the CDC’s data and its use of it to infringe on civil liberties. Those people were demonized and discredited. Fauci said those who challenged the CDC were “ignoring science.” Ugly smear campaigns against the people who had the courage to speak truth to power should not be forgotten.

While COVID-19 may no longer be a global threat, an increasingly authoritarian government still is.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this column misidentified the government agency that was led by Anthony Fauci at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic; it was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.