Its superfast spread told us early the virus was unstoppable and likely lab-modified.
You didn’t think any question related to Covid would be settled in the recent congressional grilling of Anthony Fauci and you were right. That’s why the episode came and went from your news feed with barely a ripple.
Here’s the story that needs to be fleshed out. Covid was a superfast spreader compared with the ordinary flu or even the novel pandemic flu that afflicts mankind once or twice a century.
Its superfast spread had a particular outcome in Wuhan, Northern Italy and New York City, where the virus spread unrecognized for weeks and severe cases, though a small percentage of the total, reached a critical mass that overwhelmed hospitals.
Where communities anticipated the virus and people made small adjustments, these catastrophes weren’t repeated. A vast fog of recrimination since has obscured this part of the story.
Our efforts did nothing to stop Covid and yet all but extinguished the flu during the two years in question. One variety, the so-called Yamagata B strain, appears to have been rendered extinct by social-distancing efforts that had zero effect on Covid itself.
That’s how fast-spreading Covid was, and how uncontainable.
Stop here: If Covid’s uniquely rapid spread was due to a lab modification, as accumulating circumstantial evidence suggests, that’s extremely important to know.
Back to the story: Most people’s experience of Covid wasn’t going to be bad enough to justify lockdowns. They wouldn’t voluntarily stop normal living; the spread wasn’t going to be curtailed.
On the same day President Trump received a report saying the virus had potential to be a trillion-dollar calamity, I wrote that it was already certainly spreading undetected in New York City and was less deadly than reported thanks to unobserved mild or symptomless cases. I was channeling what epidemiologists were thinking at the time. Scientists, it’s true, would end up surrendering to the politicians, but the real story is that the politicians surrendered to the public, which wanted to be told an unrealistic story about the virus being stamped out.
