Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Some of the people most strongly associated with promoting lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have recently sought to recast their positions, including Anthony Fauci, former leader of the federal COVID-19 response, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Fauci seemed eager to shirk responsibility for the lockdowns when talking to The New York Times last week.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he said.
It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that produced the lockdown recommendations, he emphasized.
“I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that,” he said, noting that he “happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations.”
That perception wasn’t mere happenstance though. Fauci hardly missed an opportunity for a media spotlight, accepting accolades for supposedly leading the country through the crisis.
Fauci boasted in October 2020 that, early in the pandemic, it was he who recommended that President Donald Trump “shut the country down.”
“This was way before” the major outbreak in the New York City area at the onset of the pandemic, he said.
Moreover, Fauci now argues he was appreciative of those who had their reasons for not following the advice of federal public health agencies.
“I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other,” he said.
That doesn’t appear to be accurate.
Fauci was repeatedly cited by the media as criticizing states that diverged from federal guidance.
On one occasion, he called it “risky,” and on another warned of “needless suffering and death” if states lifted COVID-19 restrictions earlier than federal guidelines suggested.
The former pandemic adviser now acknowledges that COVID-19 vaccines were presented to the public in a less-than-ideal way.
“We probably should have communicated better that the clinical trials were only powered to look at the effect on clinically recognizable disease, symptomatic disease,” he told The New York Times.
Nonetheless, various officials made comments to the effect that the vaccines stopped transmission of the virus—which was incorrect—while people who pointed out the limitations of the vaccine clinical trials were dismissed as “anti-vax” and censored by social media.
“Records can be shown to demonstrate Fauci’s undeniable leadership on decisions that led to substantial pain for otherwise healthy and productive Americans,” said Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, a group that pushes for government transparency and impartiality.
School Reopening
Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), recently told Congress that the union advocated for school reopening from early on in the pandemic.
“We spent every day from February [2020] on trying to get schools open,” she said.
That appears to be only partially true.
The union did issue a paper in April 2020 that proposed reopening schools that were largely shut down the month before amid the rising spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 (pdf).
In practice, however, Weingarten always appeared to demand more to be done before schools could be opened “safely.”
Some of the core demands included universal masking of teachers and students, improving ventilation at school buildings, and maintaining six-foot physical distancing at all times. But those requirements, according to the union, required major investment or sacrifices of classroom time. Classes needed to be much smaller, for example, to ensure the distancing.
“If you do six feet of physical distancing, you’re essentially saying in a school you’re going to have about 50 percent or 60 percent of people in there at any one time, not 100 percent,” Weingarten told NBC News in February 2021.
And the demands went on.
The AFT’s reopening report from February 2021 called for 20 percent of all students and staff to be tested each week. If one student tested positive, the whole classroom should be sent home for 14 days; if two students in different classrooms tested positive, the whole school should shut down in-person learning for 14 days, the document recommended (pdf).
New York City schools tried to implement similar if less stringent rules, only to prompt protests from parents.
“Day 2 of school. A positive case was found in daughter’s classroom. 25 kids now have remote school for 10 days,” Jill Goldstein, who has a child in one of the city schools, wrote on Twitter.
“This is unacceptable.”
There also appeared to be a tendency to delay school reopening until teachers had ample opportunity to get vaccinated.
On one hand, the AFT said vaccinations weren’t necessary for school reopening, but on the other, it stated that teachers needed to be prioritized for vaccination and that vaccination progress should be “aligned” with the reopening.
“Teachers and school-related personnel need the layer of protection vaccines provide. It is the bare minimum of what they need to get back into the classroom,” Weingarten wrote on Twitter on Feb. 24, 2021.
In some of the districts with large local unions and robust reopening demands, it was only after the vaccines became widely available that local authorities were able to reach reopening deals, according to a report by the Defense of Freedom Institute (pdf).
Some of the AFT’s largest local affiliates went even further.
United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), one of the AFT’s largest and most powerful affiliates, stated that reopening would require “broader community preparedness and increased funding.”
That was supposed to include not only prolific testing, masking, and social distancing, but also expanded sick leave, a wealth tax, a millionaire tax, “Medicare for all,” and a moratorium on charter schools, according to a document issued by the union in July 2020 (pdf). The document is no longer accessible on the UTLA website.
Facing public resistance, the UTLA in the end agreed to a reopening plan without those demands.
Resources, Red Zones, and Politics
Weingarten seemed rather inflexible in her demands.
When the CDC lifted mask recommendations for COVID-19-vaccinated people in May 2021, Weingarten criticized Texas for no longer requiring masks in schools, pointing out that children weren’t eligible for the vaccine yet. Two months later, the CDC recommended masks again regardless of vaccination, citing the spread of the virus’s Delta variant and data showing that vaccinated people were spreading it just as much as the unvaccinated.
Experts have warned that masking children, especially the youngest ones, could stunt their development. Some people have also criticized what they perceived as arbitrary masking rules. If classes were held at restaurants, for example, students presumably would have been allowed to take their masks off while sitting, based on rules once in place in many jurisdictions.
When the CDC cut the school social distancing guideline to three feet, Weingarten pushed back: “The issue with the change in distancing in schools is that overcrowded and under-resourced schools are already having trouble meeting basic safety guidelines. We need to be focusing on actually getting all of the mitigation strategies in place first.”
The AFT also pushed for the CDC to issue universal guidelines as a condition of schools reopening. The CDC did so in February 2021, but only after extensive consultations with the AFT and the inclusion of several of its demands.
Just as Weingarten wanted, the guidelines called for reopening based on the level of detected COVID-19 cases in the community. Schools in “red zones”—those that couldn’t offer COVID-19 tests to all teachers and students at least once a week—should have held virtual classes, unless they could “strictly implement all mitigation strategies.”
The thresholds were so low that almost all schools were in “red zones” back then.
Weingarten made clear that the guidelines couldn’t in fact be universally implemented—not unless Congress gave public schools much more money.
“Educators, students, and parents all want our schools to #ReopenSafely. But we need the resources from the #AmericanRescuePlan to do it,” she wrote on Twitter on Feb. 17, 2021. She was referring to the $1.9 trillion spending package pushed by the Biden administration, which promised public schools $130 billion on top of the $110 billion given by Congress to schools and colleges in the previous COVID-19 packages.
In fact, the massive amount of federal funding had little to do with school reopening. The Congressional Budget Office stated in February 2021 that most of the $110 billion remained unspent and less than 5 percent of the $130 billion was to be spent by September 2021 (pdf).
Surveys have indicated that many teachers didn’t want to return to work because they were afraid they would catch COVID-19 (pdf). Yet research has indicated that the virus was spreading no more in schools than outside of schools and that children were actually less likely to spread it—even in areas that, according to Weingarten, opened prematurely, such as Florida.
Teachers could theoretically avoid the virus by shutting themselves in their homes, but that would only shift the risk from themselves to other people who still had to operate in the outside world on their behalf, delivering food and other necessities to them.
In the end, school reopening appears to have had little to do with resources and federal guidelines.
Poorer districts that masked less vigorously, for example, were somewhat more likely to be open in 2021, according to the Return to Learn Tracker. The factors most prominently associated with in-person instruction were the political leaning of the district and the estimated strength of the local teachers’ union, one research paper showed.
“The decision to return students to in-person classes this fall was strongly correlated with the county level share of the vote won by Donald Trump in 2016,” according to the working paper.
‘Gaslighting’
“The efforts to rewrite history by those who advocated for severe restrictions and school closures are absolutely galling, especially considering their documented roles in forming those very policies they are running from now,” Chamberlain told The Epoch Times.
“They pushed for the lockdowns that destroyed lives and livelihoods, pressed to keep students out of schools while parents watched their kids deteriorate academically, physically, and socially-emotionally, some to the point of suicide.”
National testing showed a dramatic drop in test scores after children finally returned to classrooms.
Meanwhile, hotline calls regarding children and domestic violence went up more than 50 percent during the initial lockdown months, and reports of predators enticing minors online almost doubled in 2020. Suspected suicides by self-poisoning increased by 30 percent in 2021 compared with 2019, an April paper revealed.
Still, Weingarten appeared at times reluctant to acknowledge how much the lack of in-person instruction set children back.
“Clearly there was education disruption, but our members push back on the idea that there was a loss of education,” she said, according to a May 18, 2021, AFT tweet.
Chamberlain accused the likes of Fauci and Weingarten of gaslighting, of “trying to convince the American public that they did and said exactly the opposite of what they actually did and said.”
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed last week that he never forced anyone to get the vaccine, although he “chose to make sure that all the incentives and all the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated.”
“This is precisely why the public’s trust in government has fallen off a cliff during the pandemic,” Chamberlain said.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a February 2021 report on school reopening. The report was issued by the American Federation of Teachers. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.