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At this point we aren't going to get anywhere with the whole "how real" COVID was discussion, but I am here to point out that we really authentically were worried. Healthcare was about to collapse (not because this was The One pandemic but because the system has little slack). The dominos are still falling directly from COVID.
Additionally, people zigzagged between it was a far right conspiracy theory to no this is real to scary Italian estimates to bad flu and all over the place but throughout we knew that some bad shit was going down.
What we did with that information is a much more debatable thing, but I'm here to remind the conspiracy types that if nothing else the healthcare and public health people believed it was a big deal.
There's a lot of ways to seriously defend some COVID responses. I was a COVID hawk, and if not as aggressive as what coastals had to deal with, not only a hawk by Tophattington standards, and I'm still more mid-position than most here. But the trouble here is that people either need to seriously defend, or actively eject, bad actors. Fauci isn't some rando, and whether he was actively lying, rather than mistaken, is a massive deal even and especially if you want a serious public health response to ever work ever again.
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