JOHN TIERNEY: A California Covid Postmortem.
No state was in a better position than California to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. It had a relatively young population, a climate that encouraged people to spend time outdoors, a tech industry that profited from the pandemic’s surge in online traffic, and top-flight medical and research institutions with some of the world’s leading experts on public health and epidemiology. But no state inflicted so much needless suffering for so long on its children and adults.
When the pandemic began, researchers in California were the first in the United States to analyze the threat accurately and offer sensible advice, urging focused protection for the elderly, while warning that school closures and lockdowns were futile and destructive. But instead of heeding their expertise, the progressives dominating the state’s public and private institutions launched campaigns to defame, ostracize, and silence them. These experts, like so many other fleeing Californians, had to leave the state to find leaders who embraced scientific analysis and rational policies.
No other state infringed upon individual liberties more zealously. California was the first to lock down and the last to end its state of emergency (at the end of February of this year). It closed not only schools and businesses but also playgrounds, parks, and beaches. A police boat in Malibu chased down a solitary surfer so that he could be arrested and handcuffed; another surfer was fined $1,000 for endangering precisely no one. Church gatherings were outlawed for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court finally overturned the ban. Other courts had to intervene to keep public schools in San Diego and Los Angeles from mandating vaccines for students.
As Juliette “Baldilocks” Ochieng wrote yesterday, “I-10 West leads to the 405, and obviously to all points west of that like Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and Beverly Hills. And the 405 North leads to cities where people of means live: entertainment professionals, actors, producers and the like — in other words, rich people. So, all these fine, working gentlemen were heading out to service the houses of these people — to cut their grass, to service their swimming pools, to fix any construction and plumbing issues, and so on. You have to remember how afraid everyone was back then — that some kind of new, virulent disease was destined to kill us all. But the rich did not believe it, and neither did I.”