The COVID tyrants don’t want to talk about their ‘mistakes’

Twitter erupted over the weekend when podcaster
Joe Rogan
invited
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist at Baylor University, to debate presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a
vaccine
skeptic.

Hotez declined the invitation, triggering a fuss. Rogan supporters accused Hotez of being ethically compromised and afraid to debate, while Hotez’s defenders called RFK Jr. a quack unworthy of debating.

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While
little of the discussion
was constructive, an exception was comments from billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who tweeted on Monday that discussions were necessary to restore the collapse in trust in public health.

“Trust emerges from transparency, accountability, and ultimately from positive outcomes from the policies implemented,” Ackman
wrote
. “In the fog of the Covid war, many mistakes were made by our government and our public health officials.”

The mistakes government officials made
were legion
and included claims that vaccinated people could not get COVID-19, asymptomatic spread was a major driver of the virus, and lockdowns could eliminate or significantly slow the spread.

Evidence shows
that people such as Hotez, who tried to silence dissent and attacked those who speculated the virus may have come from Wuhan, bear some responsibility for
the collapse of trust in public health
that occurred during the pandemic. This explains why an honest and open discussion is something Hotez is not interested in having, and he’s not the only one.

Just last week, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA)
asked
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra a simple question, six times, during a congressional hearing.

“Did forcing 2-year-olds to wear masks save lives?” Kiley asked.

Becerra refused to answer, resorting instead to vague platitudes and deflections. There’s an obvious reason Becerra clamped up: The science
isn’t on his side
.

As Kiley noted in his questioning,
a 2022 NPR article
pointed out that U.S. health agencies were the oddity when it came to masking toddlers. The World Health Organization
did not even recommend masks
for children under 5, let alone mandate them. The same goes for the European equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), which
never recommended
masks for children under 12.

The ECDC and the WHO understood children had the least to fear from COVID-19 and that there was little evidence to suggest that masking schoolchildren would reduce the spread of the virus. Indeed, as the Atlantic
pointed out in 2022
, the CDC’s own study in Georgia failed to find a statistically significant decrease in COVID transmission in schools that mandated masks for students. (Naturally,
the CDC buried this finding
.)

That Hotez and Becerra may not want to revisit these mistakes should come as little surprise, but as Ackman points out, it’s a conversation that must happen if we’re to learn from these mistakes and understand how they occurred.

Economists
have long understood
that no policy comes with only its intended effects.

Lockdowns came with more unintended consequences than we can count, including a collapse in learning. (The New York Times
reported
on Wednesday that test scores in math and reading among 13-year-olds hit the lowest level in decades.)

Masking small children also came with unintended consequences, something countless parents learned the hard way.

“Masking has harmed our son’s language development,” CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen
wrote
in a 2022 Washington Post article, in which she explained she would no longer be masking her children despite previous support of mask mandates.

These realities seem obvious today. Yet it was verboten to speak of such things in 2020 or 2021. Throughout the pandemic, people were told to pipe down and listen to “the science.”

Yet there was never anything close to a consensus that masking toddlers was sound public policy or “scientific.” Nor is there scientific evidence to support
Hotez’s suggestion
that the First Amendment right to gather peacefully in protest depends on what one is protesting.

The truth is when Americans are told to “
follow the science
,” what they’re usually being told is to follow orders. And people issue orders, not science.

Many people rightly want to have a discussion on science in the wake of the pandemic. What many fail to realize is it was never a battle over science. It’s a battle over, in
the immortal words
of Thomas Sowell, “who gets to choose.”

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Jon Miltimore (
@miltimore79
) is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education. Follow his work 
on Substack
.