SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. THIS IS SOMETHING. THEREFORE. . . “We had to do something.” Joe Nocera joins John Tierney to discuss the government’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic.

Now, the problem with the strategy, if the purpose of this strategy is to relieve the pressure on hospitals over a very short term, three weeks or so, there’s nothing wrong with it. If the strategy is that you’re going to lock everybody up and the pandemic is going to go away, that’s insane, because A, the pandemic doesn’t go away. It just kind of lurks around, waiting for you to leave your house, and B, all these virtuous people who are members of the Zoom class, they got their food from a guy from DoorDash, and they got their goods from some guy in an Amazon warehouse and FedEx and UPS and meatpackers, who got Covid like crazy. There was this whole sense that the working class and the poor had to put their lives at risk so that the Zoom class could feel virtuous.

I had not realized that D.A. Henderson, who was the man who ended smallpox, was against lockdowns and mask mandates.

Related: The COVID lockdown scolds killed people — but they still have no shame.

Also: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

The pandemic saw a huge amount of power and money transferred to what Michael Lind calls the “overclass” of politicians, corporate managers and bureaucrats. Small businesses shut down while big-box stores deemed “essential” remained open. The laptop class worked from home — to the delight of many of its members — while the working class brought them stuff. Federal money flowed like water to the connected. The national debt went from scandalous to essentially absurd, an amount of money that no one expects to be repaid.

The Chinese Communist Party used the threat of the pandemic and lockdowns to crush a rebellion in Hong Kong. The American powers-that-be did something similar: People who demonstrated for the wrong causes were called granny-killers and shut down; people who demonstrated for overclass-approved causes (like New York’s “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally, featuring thousands and endorsed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as he welded the gates of a Jewish park closed) received letters of support from “public-health” people who assured us that racism is a bigger public-health problem than COVID, even as they used COVID as an excuse to remake American society.
see also
Closed doors of the Pasadena Community Job Center in Calif., during the coronavirus outbreak.
Ongoing COVID lockdowns cost countless jobs

From the beginning, of course, the public-health crowd itself failed to perform.

Did they ever. We live in an era of massive institutional failure and corruption, and yet they still take the cake.