The Patriot Post® · Are COVID Restrictions a Matter of Liberty?

“I don’t look at this as a liberty thing.” With that one sentence, Beltway bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci perhaps unwittingly expressed the great divide in America over the ChiCom Virus pandemic.

“That’s obvious,” retorted Representative Jim Jordan. The exchange between the two men occurred during a congressional hearing on COVID.

Before it came to that head, the Ohio Republican pressed Fauci: “Fifteen days to slow the spread turned into one year of lost liberty. What metrics, what measures, what has to happen before Americans get more freedoms?”

After Jordan pushed and repeated the question in various iterations, Fauci eventually responded, “I don’t look at this as a liberty thing, Congressman Jordan, I look at this as a public health thing. I disagree with you on that completely.”

Jordan should have been clearer that he was not saying our Liberty is subject to measurement by the medical community or Washington bureaucrats. Yet his real rhetorical point was that people like Fauci don’t even consider Liberty in their calculations. And Fauci affirmed it.

This is the same Fauci who last year described the devastating impact of lockdowns — millions of jobs lost, sometimes putting lives in jeopardy — as “inconvenient.” He’s the same Fauci who keeps moving the goalposts and refuses to even hint that a vaccinated population nearing herd immunity (which he redefined for polling reasons) still must remain subject to significant social protocols and restrictions.

As for answering the questions, like any slippery bureaucrat, Fauci hedged and remained vague, saying only that we can return to something more like normal when the level of infection is “low enough.” This man has single-handedly determined so much of our nation’s response to this pandemic. His continual obfuscating and dishonest approach makes it abundantly clear that, as Mark Alexander put it last month, “Fauci is long past his expiration date.”