Retrospective: Dr Fauci’s emails obtained under FOIA, reveals on March 2, 2020 he was in communication with a Washington Post reporter, and he believed the point of social distancing is to suppress the disease so that it goes away, to “force” the R0 [R-naught] below 1. Fauci even says that with enough forced human separation “the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
The plan to lockdown was already in place, and in his email communication there is no mention of preserving hospital capacity; that line was yet to be invented to justify lockdowns!
The big flaw here is that the R-Naught [R0] in principle reveals what a virus “is doing” but it does not “cause the virus to behave in a certain way”. It is not possible to simply reduce the infection rate through a theory that viruses only spread in crowds (irrespective of immunity), yet that is what was used in the months following to justify shutdowns, lockdowns, and small business closures.