Commentary: It's high time Fauci and the rest of the 'experts' were made to answer some questions

Now that all 50 states are in some phase of reopening, with some clearly more serious about it than others, the temptation will be to move on from the disastrous coronavirus lockdowns as soon as possible. To forget this calamity, and return to normalcy. To get back to making America great again.

And while I have been both one of the earliest and staunchest advocates of ending the lockdowns and returning America to the American people, there remains two lingering questions that must be answered in order to assure such a panic scam is never permitted to undermine our way of life ever again.

1. What happened to Anthony Fauci between Feb. 28 and March 11?

On Feb. 28, Dr. Fauci wrote the following about coronavirus in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine: "If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."

If you're wondering where the much-panned talking point "coronavirus is just a bad flu" originally came from, this is it. It didn't come from Qanon or some MAGA Reddit forum. It first came from none other than Fauci, the pope of panic porn himself.

But then, just 11 days later while testifying before Congress, America's so-called chief infectious disease expert told a House committee that coronavirus was "10 times more lethal than the flu" in testimony that plunged the country into lockdown.

What changed with Fauci in just those 11 days? What new piece of data did he acquire that so dramatically altered his public position on the virus? Could it have been the disgraced Imperial College doomsday model? Perhaps he got an early glimpse, but the model wasn't published until four days later on March 15th. So how else can we possibly explain such a radical about-face from one of our most celebrated "experts"?

Ironically, thanks to the long overdue data from the CDC we're finally getting, Fauci's original measured analysis of coronavirus back on Feb. 28 is looking more and more accurate. We must learn what happened after that caused him to become the pied piper leading America into deep recession and destabilization of our healthcare system.

2. How come all the experts who opposed the lockdowns weren't listened to?

When I first began taking a contrarian view on our coronavirus public policy, I anticipated this was merely a proxy for climate alarmism. And while that likely drove Imperial College's doomsaying, the truth is there were plenty of other experts — who probably also believe there's more than two genders and salvation via the Green New Deal — that thought the lockdown strategy was anywhere from dumb to unnecessary. I was surprised to learn that not even within the echo chamber of institutional academia was there agreement this was the right strategy.

Here's just a sample:

• Dr. John Ioannidis, Epidemiology and Public Health, Stanford
• Dr. David Katz, Yale
• Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director Center for Infectious Disease Research, University of Minnesota and served last five presidential administrations
• Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University, conducted the antibody test for MLB
• Dr. Knut Wittkowski, former chief epidemiologist Rockefeller University Hospital
• Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Oxford University Theoretical Epidemiology
• Yoram Lass, Director Israeli Health Ministry
• Johan Giesecke, Former Chief Scientist European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

This prestigious group of thinkers from elite universities and institutions all over the world questioned the efficacy of these lockdowns. Some of them going all the way back to March. Like Gupta, who questioned the Imperial College model's credibility the week after it was published. Ioannidis wrote a skeptical peer-reviewed white paper on March 19 that has turned out to be downright prophetic. And yet, all of them were ignored. Why?

If someone comes to you and says up to 2 million people will die unless you risk a Great Depression, wouldn't you want to get a second opinion before deciding which of those Kobayashi Maru scenarios to try? Aren't patients faced with a difficult diagnosis encouraged to get a second opinion? Then how come Dr. Fauci never sought a second opinion from this group of experts, who all have credentials to rival his own?

As a virus, coronavirus is certainly different from the flu. Adults with auto-immune disease or diabetes who don't have to social distance during a typical flu season, are probably wise to do so with COVID-19. However, those are decisions that can simply be made between an individual and their doctor without wholesale public disruption.

That's different from the attacking mice with an elephant gun macro public policy approach we went with, otherwise known as the lockdowns, which has turned out to be the worst management decision in American history. And it's highly unlikely it ever would've happened without Fauci's chicken little act before the Congress on March 11. Just as it's highly unlikely it would've continued past April 1 without Fauci using the disgraced IHME models to convince President Trump to go beyond the initial "15 days to flatten the curve."

What did Dr. Fauci know, and when did he know it? We must get the answer to these questions, even if it requires a Nuremberg-esque tribunal to do so. Otherwise, how will we know in the future whether to take the next viral threat seriously, or that we're being panic scammed? It's just as likely the next pandemic won't be relegated to our nursing homes, as it will be another anti-America media-driven hysteria directed by a pop culture false prophet.

The American people deserve to know how to tell if the next threat is a foreign virus or another domestic political narrative, and that requires answers to these questions.