And just like that, the whole thing’s wished away.  Strategies that some of us have been down-throttled, blocked, or even deplatformed for suggesting over the past two years are suddenly the common wisdom of the “experts,” and images of Anthony Fauci are floating around social media with the text, “Have you seen me?”

Since the pandemic started, Fauci has been out there offering the public health establishment’s point of view, even if it was contradictory from week to week.  While a quick review of headlines shows he continues to pop up every few days, his appearances have become much less common.  One does wonder whether he’s keeping quiet because he disagrees with the softer direction the government has taken or simply because the Biden administration wants people to begin forgetting the ordeal of COVID.

Either way, the approaching election is conspicuous, and the shift in tone feels entirely political — if not to bury dangers for politics’ sake, then to acknowledge that skeptics were right all along without admitting error.

Let’s remember that COVID struck just before an election that Democrats desperately wanted to win (and, therefore, that the news media desperately wanted to win for them).  Around April of 2020, Rhode Island shifted its methodology for counting COVID hospitalizations from an attempt to understand who was in the hospital because of COVID to a simple tally of anybody who happened to test positive for COVID while in the hospital.  For weeks, we had been told that hospitalizations were the key metric to watch, and suddenly “cases” were the measure.

Now we’re approaching another election, and this time Democrats desperately do not want to lose — or at least to lose everything.  COVID is no longer “novel” to Americans, so ramping up the fear as cover for electoral cheating risks massive backlash.  The only option, therefore, is to go the other way and try to make people feel more optimistic while enjoying (partisans hope) an economic boost as the last of the COVID restrictions fade.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it sure is suspicious to see the CDC shift its approach to tracking COVID in a way that produces the map shown in the featured image of this post.  Jon Miltimore, of the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the change thus:

“A community’s COVID 19 level is determined by a combination of three pieces of information,” Massetti explained, “new hospitalizations for COVID 19, current hospital beds occupied by COVID 19 patients or hospital capacity, and new COVID 19 cases.”

By simply changing its formula to include hospitalizations and hospital capacity, the CDC took the vast majority of the US from a state of high community transmission to low or moderate. The color red is also conspicuously absent.

Sorry.  I call fraud… and on such a scale that the response ought to sweep the halls of government clean and usher in historic reform.