VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Tribune News Service) — What’s the deal with the recent self-serving COVID-era revisionism by Western officials?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, now retired from his position as the highest-paid civil servant in America — the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — is on a public relations tour, shoring up his legacy and moderating the various positions that he previously promoted.

Fauci went on TV amid the pandemic to peddle the idea that people make themselves cloth masks, and now says in a new interview with The New York Times that “masks work at the margins, maybe 10%,” with the exception, he says, of N95 or KN95 masks. So much for wrapping grandma’s hosiery around your face and thinking that you’re safe from viral contamination.

Fauci argues that he never closed a school. Except that he didn’t fight to keep them open despite now acknowledging that closures led to “deleterious collateral consequences.” He said that he had nothing to do with that, that it was a political decision. Except that people were arguing in favor of keeping schools open, and against the kind of lockdowns that Fauci claimed saved lives when he appeared on former CNN host Chris Cuomo’s show. Those lockdowns are considered by various scientists, like British infectious disease expert Mark Woolhouse, to have done more harm than good. But how did Fauci respond to those positions that dared to contradict his own? He dismissed them as anti-science. Like the only truth was the one that he put forward and anyone else was an ignoramus.

Fauci would have people believe that he had no real power when even the research funding that he controlled had a major influence on the entire direction of the science in America.

There’s a clear trend emerging of backtracking by Western officials who favored the most fearmongering and authoritarian pandemic policies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a gathering of university students in Ottawa last week that “while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all the incentives and all of the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated. And that’s exactly what they did.”

Why would someone have required any “incentive” if they had personally weighed up the benefits of the jab versus the risk of catching COVID and decided that the anti-COVID shots were definitely the best way to go? The fact that some didn’t come to that conclusion means they felt that introducing a laboratory product into their system wasn’t worth it to avoid an overwhelmingly survivable virus.

Trudeau attempted to distinguish between “someone choosing for personal reasons … not to get vaccinated, and someone deliberately using misinformation to mislead and scare other people with so-called facts that aren’t facts at all.” This implies that Trudeau’s government would have been totally cool with those who had chosen not to take the jab for personal reasons promoting their rationale as an alternative to the government’s official position.

There was one narrative and one course of action for all Canadians, and anyone who deviated from it quickly became a pariah, banned from polite company and everyday venues, as was the case across much of the Western world. The Canadian military even exploited social media to deploy military-grade propaganda techniques, honed during the war in Afghanistan, to reinforce the government’s COVID narrative. There was no room for debate, even though contradictory arguments, particularly related to the efficacy of the jab and the superior benefits of naturally acquired immunity to COVID, have since been proven valid.

Trudeau was so totally cool with people making personal choices that his government made the jab a requirement for federal employment. “If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your choice. But don’t think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people and put them at risk,” Trudeau said in August of 2021, ignoring that the jab doesn’t actually prevent catching or transmitting the virus. Presumably, that was one of Trudeau’s “incentives.”

And when faced with growing backlash, Trudeau invoked the federal Emergencies Act against COVID-related anti-mandate protesters of Canada’s Freedom Convoy — the kind of measure that was last used during a separatist terrorism crisis in Quebec in 1970 — and ordered the blocking of protesters’ bank accounts. A commission report on the use of these measures has since found that the bank account freezes served largely to discourage and dissuade anti-mandate activists from exercising their civil rights. Yet another of Trudeau’s “incentives.”

An “incentive” would be giving someone a coupon or a tax benefit — not infringing on their basic civil rights of movement and work. Yet that’s exactly what happened all across the supposedly free and democratic Western world — and all for “reasons” that seem increasingly unjustified as the fear abates and gives room to the many scientific facts that our governments censored to the detriment of actual science. Lives have been ruined, families have been broken. So when do they get held accountable?

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at http://www.rachelmarsden.com.

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