After years of causing great and preventable harm, the so-called expert class, saturated with far too many higher education degrees, wants to call a truce over their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Let's declare a pandemic amnesty," Brown Professor Emily Oster writes in The Atlantic. "We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID."
Let's start where I can agree. There's some room for grace in the earliest months of the pandemic. In February 2020, the Chinese Communist Party, in partnership with the World Health Organization, lied about the seriousness and spread of the disease, which quickly led to the Wuhan coronavirus quickly becoming a global problem. We knew people in China were dying, and the Chinese government made the situation seem dire as it welded shut apartment buildings and disappeared doctors who eventually succumbed to the virus.
But by May 2020, we were no longer "in the dark." We had all the data and information needed to reopen the country and return to normal.
First, we knew the virus was potentially fatal for the elderly and obese. Children were not at risk of death or even serious illness.
"It's so clear that the overwhelming weight of serious disease and mortality is on those who are elderly and those with a serious comorbidity: heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory difficulties," Dr. Anthony Fauci said on March 9, 2020. "There will be outliers, as we've seen with influenza, [a person] who is young and healthy who winds up getting COVID-19, seriously ill and dies. But if you look at the weight of the data the risk group is very, very clear."
We also knew at the time that lockdowns weren't working. New York City, ground zero, showed us this.
"Most new Covid-19 hospitalizations in New York state are from people who were staying home and not venturing much outside, a 'shocking' finding, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday. The preliminary data was from 100 New York hospitals involving about 1,000 patients, Cuomo said at his daily briefing," CNBC reported on May 6, 2020. "It shows that 66% of new admissions were from people who had largely been sheltering at home."
And yet, the draconian lockdowns, denial of other medical care, and the shuttering of schools continued. Businesses were told they could not reopen and workers were prevented from earning a living. Employers who dared to reopen were fined thousands of dollars per day and threatened with arrest.
The more data we had that contradicted the "experts" and bureaucrats in charge of the response, the harsher they became.
People were forced to die alone in hospitals due to COVID policies. Pregnant women were forced to give birth without their husbands and separated from their newborn babies if one of them simply tested positive for the virus. Schools were closed for years, putting America's students a generation behind. Other medical emergencies were ignored and addiction treatment was halted. Surfers and parents were arrested for going outside. High school and college graduations were canceled. Funerals were held on Zoom, if at all. The prime years of life for young adults were wiped away, leading to an exponential increase in suicide, depression, and death from alcohol abuse. Americans were told to cancel family gatherings, throwing away precious time as if there would be more. For many, there wasn't.
When the experimental vaccine became available, things worsened with anti-American social credit scores, vilification based on false fear, mandates, and some doctors claiming "the unvaccinated" should be kept as prisoners.
"We need to start looking at the choice to remain unvaccinated the same as we look at driving while intoxicated. You have the option to not get vaccinated if you want, but then you can't go out in public," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said in September 2021. "The vaccinated should not have to pay the price for the so-called choices of the unvaccinated anymore."
At this point, we knew the vaccinated were infecting the unvaccinated, but Big Tech was censoring that fact.
The tyrants also threatened a vaccine passport requirement for train and plane travel, preventing Americans from seeing their loved ones or exercising their rights to move about freely.
Firefighters, police officers, nurses, doctors, and other frontline workers in places like New York City were fired from their jobs and banned from restaurants and office buildings. "Papers, please." This, despite putting their lives on the line in the earliest days of the pandemic and obtaining natural immunity through infection. Hell, President Joe Biden attempted to use OSHA to force nearly every worker in the country to get jabbed.
All of this was happening despite the vaccine obviously being flawed and failing to stop transmission, as fully vaccinated individuals were still contracting the disease. And yet, it took a year for the CDC to admit vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals should be treated the same, long after "the unvaccinated" were vilified and run out of society. Natural immunity was never studied by the agency. Instead, it continued to push Pfizer's fraudulent product with a big dose of fearmongering.
"For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you're unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm," Biden claimed in December 2021. "But there's good news: If you're vaccinated and you had your booster shot, you're protected from severe illness and death — period."
This, of course, was a total lie.
Bureaucrats had the data early, yet they moved forward with tyrannical, cruel, and inhumane policies for years. Pandemic amnesty? It takes nerve to even suggest the idea. Americans deserve accountability, not amnesty. They are owed damages and assurances their lives will never be taken over by the government in the same fashion ever again. In the aftermath of the abuses, limited government politicians, bolstered by the U.S. Constitution, must use government to pass laws that protect the citizenry from the government.
"We need to forgive one another for what we did and said."
Many of us never engaged in this type of despicable behavior. It's a damn shame so many people did.