This month marks the third anniversary of the shutdowns from the COVID virus. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Almost immediately, Governor Wolf announced that Pennsylvania needed a two-week pause to ‘flatten the curve’ to help prevent the spread of the virus.

Maybe it was because it was announced on a Friday, the 13th, that initially caused me to be concerned about this action. The Lycoming County Commissioners expressed in their meeting the following week their full but reluctant compliance. It was agreed that these shutdowns were necessary because we needed to “follow the science.”

I would not call myself a scientist, but I have studied and taught at a graduate level in the field of psychology and have written and evaluated more than my share of scientific studies. There was something that did not pass the smell test for me concerning COVID-19. It started with the source of this virus. Our federal government initially pushed very hard to convince the public that this was a natural virus. Yet there were a number of scientific studies that had already come out identifying the source as the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. To give just one example, the Wuhan Institute was identified from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March 2020 by Chinese researchers themselves.

The conspiracist side of my brain believed that there were more political concerns than health concerns in trying to minimize the Chinese responsibility for this pandemic. But what happened after this was much, much worse. The “two weeks to flatten the curve” quickly evaporated as the restrictions grew and grew and grew.

There is no need to review all the disruptions in business, commerce, supply chain, and especially education that resulted from these shutdowns. Unless you have been living on an uninhabited island for the past three years, you have been impacted by these measures by the local, state, and federal governments. And all of these were justified in the name of “science.”

However, during all this time, there have been those who have challenged this narrative. The Great Barrington Declaration was published in October of 2020, authored by three highly respected scientists from the University of Oxford, Stanford University, and Harvard University, and since then has now acquired nearly one million signatures. The declaration notes, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health… with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”

And this was just six months into the shutdowns from the pandemic. Since that time, the Brownstone Institute has tracked more than 400 (!) studies on the failure of compulsory COVID interventions from lockdowns, restrictions, and closures. In a normal world, this volume of evidence would fall into the category of “settled science.” However, the government’s response was to do its best to suppress these reports and silence the dissenters. When the Great Barrington Declaration was released in October 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci was quoted in the New York Times that it was “dangerous and total nonsense” and, in other venues, called the originators “three fringe epidemiologists.” (Memo to Dr. Fauci: no one from Oxford, Stanford, or Harvard would be considered fringe.)

There was also the highly suspicious death count as a result of COVID. The Association of American Medical Colleges admitted early on that determining if a person dies “of” or “with” COVID is “complicated.” Our Lycoming County coroner noted that some of the deaths that he had attributed to natural causes strangely got changed to “COVID-related” in Harrisburg. Thus, we should not be surprised that according to the World Health Organization, the United States has the highest death rate in the world! But before we get to chant, “we’re number one! we’re number one!” the WHO also admits that “there is no international standard for measuring deaths or their causes, and countries record deaths in different ways, which makes comparison difficult.” Right…

Did I mention during this time that the man who, more than any other, was directing the “science” was the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci? He is a physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. He made clear during a Senate hearing, “I am the science.” It just so happened, and by an amazing coincidence, his net worth grew by $5 million from 2019 to 2021. Talk about following the science!