In the third week of March a secret emergency meeting was scheduled to take place between President Donald Trump, the COVID Task Force, and eight of the most eminently qualified public health experts in the world.
We didn't know it at the time, but this would have been the most important meeting of the COVID-19 era.
This has been a nagging question ever since July 27, 2020 when BuzzFeed News broke the news in an article by Stephanie M. Lee: "An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March." In her article Ms. Lee framed this aborted meeting as a dodged bullet, and the scientists as unhelpful meddlers, but for many of us the fact that there even was an attempted meeting like this was extremely heartening.
COVID mania quickly captured us all, and by early March we were suddenly armchair experts on cytokine storms and case counts, and even your aunt Glenda posted that "Flatten the Curve" Washington Post article on Facebook and suddenly we found ourselves on March 15, 2020 watching in slack-jawed horror as Trump, Fauci, and Birx stood up there, telling us their bright idea was to shut down the entire country.
In his letter to the White House Ioannidis warned Trump against "Shutting down the country for a very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this" and he requested an emergency meeting to provide all the key stakeholders in the Executive Branch a much-needed second opinion, delivered from a "Diverse panel of the top experts in the world."
As of March 24, 2020 the calendars had been aligned and this landmark meeting seemed to be a "Go."
"Re: meeting with the President in D.C. Have kept asking/putting gentle pressure, I think our ideas have infiltrated the White House regardless, I hope to have more news on Monday".
So what the heck happened between March 24 and March 28? How did this historic meeting go from "On" to "Oh, never mind?".
On March 25th, 2020 the US Senate passed the CARES Act, a stonking $2.2 trillion economic "Stimulus bill" which promised to go directly to adversely affected individuals, businesses, schools and hospitals and never ever ever be wasted, misappropriated, or brazenly stolen by ne'er-do-wells.
On March 26, 2020 three pretty big-deal things happened.
Whatever caused this critically important meeting to be canceled, it's now quite apparent that it would've been better had that meeting taken place.
https://brownstone.org/articles/most-important-meeting-in-history-of-world-that-never-happened/
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