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.

I am not an economist but I talk to some pretty smart financial minds. I have to quote one in particular even though I hate using anonymous sources; her bosses don’t know she’s a “right-winger” and that knowledge could affect her career prospects. She texted me this morning, “A lot of economists are fearful that ringing the alarm bell will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, but tell your readers whenever we say ‘2024’ regarding crashes and collapses we’re really thinking ‘2023’ but hoping to stave off the carnage a bit longer.”

It was an interesting quote that I had to reread a couple of times, not because it’s too complex but to grasp the undertones. “Crashes and collapses,” she said. “Stave off carnage,” she said. Sounds ominous. But as I said, I’m not an economist so I’m not sure what to make of it. I asked if she thought I should encourage people to buy precious metals in preparation. She texted, “Supplies first. Then gold and maybe silver.”

Again, ominous. We’ll see how it all plays out but I’m much less bullish about recovery than I was before the midterm elections. It seems like we’re in for some very troubling financial times ahead in this nation and around the globe. When they say 2024 for recession or any other bad economic conditions, assume it’s already here while hoping it never comes at all. Here’s Peter Svab from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times with a complete breakdown of what one economist has been predicting…

Recession Coming in 2024: Economic Forecaster

“We see this year that the Fed pushes too hard too fast.”

American industry will slow down next year, then fall into a recession the year after, according to ITR Economics, an economic forecaster.

“We’re still calling for more of a slowing growth cycle in 2023, but the original soft landing that we were calling around the end of 2023 now looks like it’s turning into a hard landing in 2024,” Patrick Luce, an economist with ITR, told The Epoch Times.

A key indicator that made ITR change the forecast was the inversion of treasury rates. In July, the 10-year treasury yield sunk below the 2-year one and the inversion has been growing since. Such an inversion signals that investors are wary of the economic situation in the next few years and it historically tends to happen 12 to 18 months before a recession.

Luce blamed the bleak outlook on the Federal Reserve’s aggressive raising of interest rates this year, from virtually zero in March to more than 4 percent now.

“We see this year that the Fed pushes too hard too fast,” he said.

“These impacts, they don’t happen overnight. They take time to manifest themselves in the broader, macroeconomic sense.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been saying for months that rates need to stay higher for longer in order to tame inflation. Inflation escalated from less than 2 percent in early 2021 to more than 9 percent in June. It has since moderated to 7.1 percent in November.

The increase has been attributed to several factors, primarily the gigantic government spending during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as supply chain disruptions caused by the lockdowns instituted in response to it.

The combination of the two factors “bottlenecked the system,” Luce said.

Other issues cited by some experts as affecting price inflation have been the restrictive domestic energy policy of the Biden administration and the war in Ukraine. Powell has stressed that the Fed has little power over the supply side of the economy, but that he can try to close the production-consumption gap by taming demand.

The problem is, by the time the Fed is satisfied that inflation has been quelled, it may have already tightened the monetary policy too much.

“These impacts, they don’t happen overnight,” Luce said. “They take time to manifest themselves in the broader, macroeconomic sense.”

Effects Lagging Behind

In its analysis, ITR likens the economy to a train. The cars in the front see the impacts of what’s to come first, while the rear cars are responding with a lag to trends already well underway in the economy.

“The financial sector leads the economy. Housing market, specifically single-unit housing, leads the economy,” Luce said.

Then come indicators such as new orders and industrial production. Further down is wholesale trade and then retail. At the rear of the train are consumer prices, which is exactly the indicator the Fed is trying to affect, Luce pointed out. In the housing sector, the upcoming recession is already evident, he noted.

Higher interest rates immediately throttle lending which then quickly hits the housing sector, which is sensitive to mortgage rate movements. Housing permit issuance was down about 11 percent year-over-year in October, leading ITR to consider the sector already in recession.

“That contraction is already underway,” Luce said. “It is our expectation for that to continue throughout next year and even into the first quarter of 2024.”

“As that federal funds rate peaks and if they start to bring it back down, that will also give easing to that affordability situation within the housing market.”

Yet he doesn’t expect the sector to get pummeled as in the Great Recession of 2008.

“Inventories are much lower today then they were back in 2005–2006 as they were leading up into the Great Recession,” he said.

Meanwhile, homeowner vacancy rates are low, homeowner occupancy rates are high, and people seem to still have enough income to pay their mortgages.

“The consumer’s ability to service debt right now and household ability to service debt right now is very strong,” Luce said.

What’s weighing housing down are very high prices. ITR is expecting the Fed to get rates up to about 5 percent and then stop the hikes around March–May next year.

“As that federal funds rate peaks and if they start to bring it back down, that will also give easing to that affordability situation within the housing market,” Luce said.

He noted the housing market particularly depends on locality, meaning some areas will likely see major crashes while others perhaps a mere slow-down.

Recession in Tech

Tech is another sector that will see the recession arrive early, ITR predicts. The industry was “stimulated over trend” during the pandemic and is therefore “more susceptible to the pullback in kind of that post-COVID era,” Luce said.

The rest of the economy is likely to sink into a recession in early 2024, albeit a relatively shallow one, ITR expects. From a GDP perspective, the recession may resemble the “flat and bouncy” one of 2000–2001, Luce said.

From industrial production perspective, it would be close to the recession of the late 1960s or early 1990s. “Definitely more mild than what we saw during the Great Recession,” he said.

The recession wouldn’t cause deflation, he explained, but rather “a temporary reprieve” in inflation.

For the rest of the decade, ITR expects inflation to remain elevated. For one thing, Americans are getting older on average, which means a shrinking labor pool and upward pressure on wages. In addition, during the pandemic, many people who were working despite retirement age have called it quits and don’t seem to be coming back.

“When I look at the labor force participation rate, the majority of demographics are back on trend, but folks over the age of 65 especially haven’t gotten back to that participation rate from the COVID era,” Luce said.

Moreover, the pandemic and lockdown woes have prompted an “onshoring trend” of companies reducing dependency on foreign supplies and bringing production to the United States. That also boosts domestic labor demand.

A shift toward higher inventory levels to bridge over potential supply disruptions is also inflationary as it kills some capital productivity.

“Those trends are real and we’re feeling them,” Luce said.

If the Fed insists on its mandate to keep inflation around 2 percent, it may run into “structural” factors “providing more inflationary pressures above that 2 percent level,” he said.

The ITR forecast assumes the job market will remain “strong enough to support ongoing real income growth” and that food prices will “moderate or come down,” Luce said.

Another caveat is that ITR bases its forecasts on market forces—it doesn’t try to guess what the government may do, for example, in response to a recession.

Other market metrics have recently dropped far more precipitously though. Sales volume, for instance, is down more than 24 percent since last year. Construction started on less than 120,000 private housing units in October, down from more than 150,000 in April, according to Census Bureau’s seasonally adjusted data (pdf). Prices of lumber, the most common residential construction material in America, dropped by nearly 70 percent since February and are now roughly at the early 2020 level.

The housing market has been pummeled by the Federal Reserve’s lifting of interest rates this year, which have boosted mortgage rates from less than 3 percent in September last year to more than 7 percent in early November. The rates have since eased to some 6.5 percent. This indicates that the market has yet to reach its bottom.

“We expect a drop of 15-to-20% over the next year, in order to restore the pre-Covid price-to-income ratio,” wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at the Pantheon Macroeconomics in a note last week.

Fannie Mae’s Economic and Strategic Research (ESR) Group expects home prices to hit a low point in the second quarter of next year with a recovery the year after.

One major factor is that 80 percent of mortgage holders have locked in rates of at least two percent lower than the current rate which makes them unwilling to look for a new house, the ESR said in a recent forecast.

“The economy continues to slide toward a modest recession, which we anticipate will begin in the new year, with housing leading the slowdown,” said Doug Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae.

“Higher interest rates have ignited the typical reduction in residential fixed investment, which historically has led into either an economic slowdown or recession. From our perspective, the good news is that demographics remain favorable for housing, so the sector appears well-positioned to help lead the economy out of what we expect will be a brief recession.”

Dropping house prices are bad news for those who bought theirs during the record-high prices of the past few years. They can easily find their mortgages underwater unless they put enough cash down.

Meanwhile, prospective homebuyers still don’t have much to look forward to because even at lower asking prices, houses will remain expensive when the higher mortgage rate is factored in. One factor keeping a bottom under the market is low inventory, currently some 36 percent below the October 2019 level.

“It’s hard to imagine a significant drop in pricing. Inventory is just too low,” commented Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive of Miller Samuel appraiser, in a recent Bloomberg interview.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.