Dope1: Well, yes. You had to do *something*, and that was to act rationally and look at the data you had. But he didn't.

What data?

No data existed. There was literally nothing known about SARS-CoV-2 at the time other than that it was killing thousands of Americans a day and sending thousands more to hospitals and overflowing intensive care units.

Entire countries were in total lockdown.

What, you wanted scientists to spend three months studying whether six-feet or twelve-feet was the right social distancing before acting?

And then another three months for a study to prove or disprove the initial study?

All while cities were bringing in refrigerated trailers to act as morgues because the dead bodies were piling up in the hallways at city hospitals and morgues.

Dope1: He kept his made up restrictions in place for YEARS and followed up the made up masking and distance standards with attacks on anybody who questioned what he was doing.

Complete nonsense.

Cities and states controlled by republicans almost immediately began disregarding the CDC guidelines. Then president, now convicted felon Donald Trump refused to wear a mask and berated reporters at press briefings who refused to remove their masks when asking him questions.

In South Dakota, the puppy killing governor refused to close down the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and refused to require masking or social distancing. The event was estimated to have brought in over $720 million to the state. A study available in the National Library of Medicine titled "The contagion externality of a superspreading event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID‐19" estimated that the rally was associated with a 13.5% increase in COVID‐19 cases nationwide and if it's assumed that all of estimated Sturgis‐related cases were nonfatal, then these cases represented a cost of between $3.8 and $8.7 billion to treat.

In short, you're in a cult and people in a cult almost always refuse to leave that cult (unless, in the case of Covid-19, they caught the disease they said was a simple cold and died from it).

Finally, so far Dr. Fauci is right when he said: "Those viruses were phylogenetically so far removed from SARS-CoV-2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to have evolved or being made into SARS-CoV-2. It's just a virological fact."

And he also said he's open to new information but most virologists say that although a lab-leak origin is possible, the preponderance of scientific evidence points to a zoonotic origin for the COVID-19 pandemic.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: The contagion externality of a superspreading event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID‐19