NO. The Atlantic calls for COVID amnesty.
Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers.
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.
So no, I will not forgive and forget, and neither should anyone else. These were not innocent mistakes, but the result of a plan to exploit people’s fears–fears that the elites did everything to stoke–for their own benefit. Trillions of dollars were transferred from ordinary people to billionaires, children suffered enormous learning loss, lives were ruined, literally. People still cannot enter the US (legally) without a COVID vaccine. It is insane.
Toddlers forced to wear masks:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1587149047634087936
Schoolkids’ development damaged. Families disrupted. Health issues that couldn’t be treated due to the lockdowns. Businesses shuttered. And since Oster mentioned Los Angeles in the above quote, let’s flashback to what a veteran of the L.A. Times was saying at the start of the year:
As Ace of Spades adds, “Should we all just ‘call it a draw’ with the Kathleen Parkers of the Democrat Party? The crazed cat-lady Karens, low-value and low-status women who thirst to exert control over everyone around them, and do so by shrieking until the Democrat Party sees a demographic complaint it can satisfy and exploit and begins encoding their hysterias into positive law? Should we just keep Turnkey Fascism in place so they can do this all again next time, the next time a Fauci Special escapes from a lab? No, we won’t be doing that, Emily. Never Again, Emily. Never Again.”
Related: Republicans in hot races put Democrats on defense over strict COVID-19 policies.
Well, good.