Too Little Too Late: WSJ Tries to Save Face on Failed COVID Policies

Guest Post by Madhava Setty, M.D.

Now that our public health agencies’ leaders have admitted failure when it comes to their COVID-19 policies, the Wall Street Journal suddenly has the “courage” to offer a stiff critique.

The Wall Street Journal last week published an opinion piece, “Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response,” with this subhead: “Lockdowns were oppressive and deadly. But U.S. and WHO officials plan worse for the next pandemic.”

The article begins:

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] belatedly admitted failure this week. ‘For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,’ Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an ‘action-oriented culture.’”

Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Walensky admitted they failed. They learned their lesson.

As John Tierney, author of the op-ed, wrote:

“Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been ‘much, much more stringent restrictions’ early in the pandemic.”

They believe that they didn’t go far enough? There should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions?”

That’s what they learned from the destruction their public health policies wreaked upon this nation and the others that followed their lead?

To his credit, Tierney pointed out the absurdity of Walensky’s and Fauci’s stance on their own incompetence.

Tierney also dropped a series of “truth bombs,” including:

• “Their oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right.”
• “For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following ‘the science,’ these leaders ignored decades of research — as well as fresh data from the pandemic — when they set strict Covid regulations.”
• “The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.”
• “U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies.”
• “When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer COVID deaths per capita.)”
• A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
• Florida’s and Sweden’s open policies have been vindicated based upon their lower levels of excess mortality compared to other regions.
• “It was bad enough that Fauci, the CDC and the World Health Organization ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks.”

I take no issue with Tierney’s list. The problem here is with the Wall Street Journal.

Every single point this opinion piece offered could — and should — have been made months or years ago.

There was longstanding advice from public health experts that predicted Fauci and Walensky’s failures? Why didn’t you say so in 2020?

Fauci and Walensky ignored decades of research? They touted flawed studies while ignoring the obvious failures unfolding in front of them, month after month?

The successes of Sweden and Florida were apparent in 2020.

Where were the articles in your publication that could have brought light to these issues over the last two years?

The Johns Hopkins University analysis on mask restrictions was published nearly nine months ago. Why didn’t you cover it?

Why did it take so long to run this kind of piece when the evidence was around for so long?

Do you really expect us to look the other way because you now have the temerity to call Anthony Fauci sociopathic?

You had ample opportunity to give voice to the dissenters who were pleading for a voice, a conversation and a debate based on the very same evidence you are mentioning now.

You failed your readership. You failed the public. 

The CDC’s policies were so devastating because you did not challenge them. Not once.

As a media platform, you were no less negligent than the public health officials you see fit to denigrate now — after untold damage has occurred, at their hands and yours.

Perhaps you’ve caused your loyal readers to finally scratch their heads and reconsider their perspective after 28 months of mercilessly attacking those of us who were asking you and other mainstream platforms to do your job.

Why are you holding Fauci and Walensky accountable now? Is it because they are finally admitting they blew it?

They are not the only galactically incompetent parties in this global tragedy. You are, too. And we all know it.

Interestingly, your scathing attack on our public health agencies still hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

One of their biggest “blunders” was not around lockdown measures. It was the dismissal of powerful, early treatment regimens, including ivermectin, that could have saved thousands of lives or more.

Instead, the public was forced to wait for a largely ineffective and harmful vaccine that has since exacted an incalculable level of damage on humanity.

Nevertheless, more than a year after Dr. Pierre Kory gave impassioned congressional testimony demanding that an official expert panel be convened to examine the mountains of evidence coming from all corners of the globe demonstrating the significant benefits of ivermectin in treating and preventing COVID-19, you had the audacity to print this hit piece on the safe and effective medicine that would have obviated the need to inject poorly tested mRNA technology into the bodies of several billion human beings.

Beyond being irresponsible, the article was silly, citing a single, small and yet-to-be-published study (at the time) that purportedly showed no benefit as proof that ivermectin cannot prevent COVID-19 hospitalizations.

The study underdosed the participants and was too small to detect statistically significant benefits, despite reduced incidence of hospitalization in most cohorts that got the medicine. (Read a full critique of the study here).

The study didn’t prove anything — other than that it was designed to fail from its inception.

Talk about touting a “badly flawed” study.

More importantly, your article on the study missed the real story: the scuttling of ivermectin by an unseen hand that was, it seems, in the pockets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through Unitaid, a quasi-governmental advocacy organization the foundation funds (full story here).

Have your editors lost their sense of smell from repeated bouts of COVID-19? Or were you never able to sniff out where the real stories are?

It’s fairly obvious that despite this attempt to reclaim your journalistic integrity you are still muzzled. Any story that even intimates that the highly profitable COVID-19 vaccine was not only unnecessary but also a stark failure, is still off-limits.

Your silence on this continues to deafen us.