From late 2020 and into 2021, many politicians and experts claimed that the introduction of COVID vaccines would mean an “end to the pandemic.”
The vaccines became something of a panacea for politicians who had trapped themselves into a cycle of lockdowns, business closures, capacity restrictions and masking. It was based on poorly reasoned assumptions of where the virus was spreading.
The initial vaccine rollout appeared to be a success, with extremely high vaccination rates among the elderly. But the advent of the Delta variant and the seasonal summer surge in the South created a new substantial surge of infections.
That seemed to spook already terrified politicians, who were scared to roll back many pandemic-related restrictions.
For example, Los Angeles County ended their mask mandate with the state of California on June 15, 2021, only to reinstate it a month later on July 17.
Once it became abundantly clear through surges in highly vaccinated countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore that the vaccines did not reduce the spread of infections or transmission, politicians doubled down by enacting “vaccine passports,” or forced discrimination against the “unvaccinated.”
Gavin Newsom in California enacted “first in the nation” policies designed to punish healthcare workers or state employees who remained unvaccinated. New York City moved to enact the “Key to the City,” which tied the ability to attend sporting events or dine indoors to vaccination status.
This was based mostly on misinformation from Pfizer, from Dr. Fauci and the CDC, all of whom claimed that the vaccines were essentially 100 percent effective in preventing COVID.
That’s not an exaggeration; an article from Business Insider from March 2021 quoted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky saying that data “suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus.”
Another article in the Independent, a British news site, quoted Fauci saying that there were “no hospitalizations and no deaths.”
He’s even on video saying that people who were vaccinated could feel safe that they would not be infected:
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