Fauci’s deposition was sealed under court order, but Dr. Aaron Kheriaty gave the most detailed overview of the deposition below:
From our deposition of Fauci yesterday in the MO v. Biden case. Fauci confirmed that in Feb 2020, Fauci sent Clifford Lane, his deputy at the NAIAD, as the U.S. representative for the WHO delegation to China. Lane convinced Fauci we should emulate China’s lockdowns.
The CCP had announced China had contained the virus through draconian lockdowns–a claim now known to be false. Given the China’s pattern of falsified information, Lane and Fauci should have approached this claim with skepticism. Lockdowns were wholly untested & unprecedented.
As our lawyer, @Leftylockdowns1 put it, Fauci “was apparently willing to base his lockdown advocacy on the observations of a single guy relying on reports from a dictator.” Not exactly a double-blind randomized trial level of evidence, or indeed, any level of evidence.
Days after Lane returned, WHO published its report praising China’s strategy: “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures [lockdowns] to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.
“This rather unique and unprecedented public health response in China reversed the escalating cases,” the report claimed. My colleague @jeffreyatucker at the @brownstoneinst gave a tongue-in-cheek gloss of WHO’s misty eyed report: “I’ve seen the future—and it is Wuhan.”
Lockdowns quickly spread from China to the West, as a troubling number of Western apologists besides the WHO also looked to the Chinese Communist Party’s covid response for guidance.
The U.S. & U.K. followed Italy’s lockdown, which had followed China, and all but a handful of countries around the globe immediately followed our lead. Within weeks the whole world was locked down.
From the very beginning, the evidential basis for this global policy catastrophe was always paper-thin.