THEY’RE WORRIED, AND THEY SHOULD BE: The Atlantic calls for COVID amnesty.

First of all, let me get this out of the way: Emily Oster, the author of the article I am about to eviscerate, doesn’t deserve the scorn I am about to heap on her.

Honestly, that’s true. She has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect.

Yet I am going to dump on her anyway, because while she as a person and thinker doesn’t deserve ridicule, her latest article in The Atlantic surely does. And since I am (usually) more concerned with ideas than personalities I am going to take liberties here. Still, I sincerely pre-apologize to Dr. Oster, and I hope that she can be as forgiving to me as she asks us to be toward COVID fascists. . . .

I in fact hold no animus towards people who made mistakes early on during the COVID pandemic. Either for the people who dismissed it as a minor problem (it wasn’t exactly minor–tons of people died), nor those who feared it could be the next Black Plague (even early on it clearly wasn’t, but given China’s very scary behavior before COVID spread outside its boundaries, it wasn’t irrational to fear that it was super dangerous).

Given these facts, I am and always was inclined to be generous in forgiving initial mistakes made when the pandemic hit. We saw citywide fumigation in China, hundreds in body bags, the inevitable media hype for ratings, and the initial inclination to overreact rather than under-react to avoid disaster. How can you not be scared?

Then facts came out, and not too long after the initial panic. It was clear that the COVID-19 virus was nasty, but was no plague, nor even a 1918 flu virus. It was a seriously nasty bug that targeted certain vulnerable populations, but left most people with a period of illness followed by a relatively quick recovery. Even “long-COVID” was more similar to Lyme disease than anything else. Nasty, unfortunately, but we live with worse.

In other words, the wisdom of the viciously attacked–to this day, mind you–Great Barrington Declaration has been vindicated. Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.

COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.

I agree 100%.

UPDATE: A friend comments: “Best I can do is military tribunals.”