My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course.

Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit.

The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.