Some 15 months ago, after packing up our MacBooks and departing our offices, your friends at the Washington Examiner have returned to our office in downtown Washington, D.C., and, presumably, to normalcy. But it’s not the same for the bartenders at Post Pub who poured us pints during happy hours or the waiters at Toro Toro who served us some company lunches. Those jobs, those businesses, and those livelihoods are gone. Our national health experts killed them. For 15 months, while the white-collar class had the privilege of decamping to the Hamptons while conducting their whole worlds on Zoom and Postmates, we sacrificed thousands of businesses, tens of millions of jobs, hundreds of thousands of lives lost to overdoses and self-harm triggered by the despair of lockdowns, and countless victims of domestic abusers allowed to run rampant thanks to the benevolence of social distancing.

With domestic vaccinations on pace to beat new coronavirus variants, it seems that we are finally about to beat the pandemic. But we did it at a cost, and according to President Joe Biden’s former top coronavirus adviser, Andy Slavitt, we failed to sacrifice enough.

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“We denied the virus for too long out of the Trump White House,” Slavitt, in the middle of promoting his book on the pandemic, told CBS. “There was too much squashing of dissent and playing on divisions, but I also think we all need to look at one another and ask ourselves, what do we need to do better next time? And in many respects, being able to sacrifice a little bit for one another to get through this and save more lives is going to be essential. And that’s something that I think we should all have done a little bit better on.”

Really? Is that what happened? Us plebeians were simply too selfish to stop, as Slavitt has branded it, a completely “preventable” pandemic? Unsurprisingly, the facts tell another story.

While the entire government demanded we lock up shop, keep ourselves indoors, and hope like hell that our congressional overlords put aside partisan politics long enough to mail us a $2,000 check to cover an indefinite period of unemployment, it did just about everything to hasten the spread of the virus.

For weeks, our supposed “experts” such as Anthony Fauci insisted that masks provided absolutely no protection from the coronavirus, an assertion he later conceded was a calculated lie. Former Surgeon General Jerome Powell went a step further and actually claimed that masks exacerbated the risk of contracting the virus. Only weeks after plenty of us were reading the science for ourselves and masking up in supermarkets did the expert class finally reverse course. And shortly after “don’t wear a mask!” became “you must wear a mask,” the mandate extended to 2-year-olds and public parks and beaches. And now we know that while masks absolutely retarded the transmission of the virus in indoor spaces, the virus’s transmissibility outdoors is asymptotically close to zero. Is it any wonder we have vast swaths of the (disproportionately unvaccinated) public who now refuse to trust the science on masks?

And that brings us to the great outdoor transmission lie. For a year, tyrannical governments made you slap masks on your toddlers to go for a walk in the park and newsrooms shamed random bystanders for going for maskless swims on the beach. Even when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention geared up to downgrade mask requirements, it claimed that less than 10% of coronavirus transmission occurred outdoors, a figure orders of magnitude greater than the real statistic, which is likely a fraction of a percent.

From closing the schools, which we knew since last summer are not a statistically significant vector of coronavirus transmission, to the hygiene theater of face shields and scrubbing down surfaces, the list of demented and depraved lies the experts tried to sell us goes on. And seeing as this is not the first, and probably not the last, virus unleashed upon the world by the Chinese Communist Party, it’s imperative, not just morally but practically, to game out how we could have spared fewer lives.

Imagine if the experts told us honestly, from the start, that to preserve PPE for essential workers in those perilous early days of the pandemic, we ought to craft our own cloth face masks of multiple layers, not unlike the ones plenty of people wear today. And rather than force the entire nation to sacrifice their mental health and community by staying inside for months on end, we immediately prioritized the sort of outdoor, distanced socializing that restaurants and bars were only allowed to facilitate a season and a half into the pandemic. And, of course, if we reopened the schools in autumn of 2020, not a full year later. No, this wouldn’t have prevented any pandemic, a feat that only would have been achieved if the Trump administration and the world treated the CCP as the existential threat to Western civilization that it is. But would more than half a million people in the United States have died of the coronavirus? Would the restaurants and bars that died before the government allowed outdoor dining still be alive? Would millions of women have been forced out of the workforce to aid in the sham of “distance learning”? And would some of the addicts who overdosed, the mentally ill who succumbed to self harm, and the victims battered by domestic violence still be alive today?

The children, the small-business owners, the wives of abusers, the workers, and the rest of us sacrificed a hell of a lot. Some sacrificed everything. It wasn’t they who failed to stop the spread.