From the October 31st issue of the Atlantic, we read this "cya" (that's short for "cover your arse") piece from Emily Oster.
LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
Let’s focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
END OF SNIVEL-PIECE
I can sum all this up in a few words: "Oopsie-boopsie! Some mistakes were made! Well, why don't we just let bygones be bygones and forget about making amends?"
Emily et al, it doesn't work that way. Either you're hopelessly clueless or flat out lying. I think it's the latter.
One thing that sticks out is the ridiculous "we didn't know" nonsense. You had no excuse for not knowing. Sensible people had been saying all along that the shutdowns and vaccines were harmless. For their attempts to spread the truth, many of them lost their livelihoods and even suffered legal sanctions. Social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter were unabashed in cancelling any viewpoint that didn't tow the Fauci line. To this day, Facebook continues to wag its finger at me and others if we dare post a meme that shows the vaccine narrative to be a complete farce.
In that entire screed of Oster's, I saw no hint of apology for:
- The small businesses that were forced to cease operations, bringing financial ruin to their owners.
- The ever-increasing count of young people who are "mysteriously dying" from heart issues, often from vaccine-induced blot-clots. Where are the apologies to their grief-stricken families?
- The elderly who were in nursing homes who were exposed to Covid patients when liberal governors had them transferred to the homes?
- Many sick and elderly people in hospitals who were isolated from their families, being forced to die alone.
- The millions of children who had their intellectual and social development stunted by both social isolation and the inane masks.
- The uptick in substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce, and even suicides due to enforced isolation.
- Those patients falsely diagnosed with Covid so that hospitals could get their per-covid-patient grants?
- The absolutely unethical withholding of information regarding the benefits of ivermectin, hydroxichloroquine, zinc, quercetin, vitamins D3 and C.
- The poisoning of people via the usage of remdesivir.
- The draconian punishments and even imprisonments of common-sense people who refused to be masked and/or isolated.
- Those who were fired from jobs because they refused to be injected with the vaccines.
- Any other deleterious effects of this pandemic nonsense
Until there's some accounting for these crimes, there will be no amnesty whatsoever. We demand accountability and we will make those demands heard on November 8.
P.S. - Francis, bishops et al, that means you too. In addition to the above, you must answer for all the Catholics who were denied the Sacraments at the cusps of their deaths, some of whom may have died in mortal sin. You must answer for the shuttered Churches, the denial of Holy Mass. You must repent and it must be public repentance for the public harm done.
