There is an understandable tendency among those who overestimated and overreacted to the COVID-19 threat to use ignorance as an excuse. How could we have known any better when all that was being directed at us was paranoia and panic? How could we have navigated the situation more rationally when it evolved so rapidly?
That is more or less the argument Dr. Emily Oster made in the Atlantic this week when she asked for “COVID amnesty.”
CATHOLIC SCHOOLS AVOIDED PUBLIC SCHOOLS’ LEARNING LOSS — MAYBE BECAUSE THEY WERE ACTUALLY OPEN
Oster, who, to her credit, was much more clear-headed about the pandemic than others, pointed out that government leaders’ zero-sum approach to the pandemic was both misguided and unnecessary. It’s easy to say so looking back, she said, but in the thick of the pandemic, it was difficult to know what the best course of action was.
She wrote:
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.I’d be much more sympathetic to this argument if the over-the-top government restrictions and social conformity lasted only until the data began rolling in. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the public was forced to live with school closures, mask mandates, and even draconian vaccine mandates for two years — long after we knew that schools weren’t superspreaders, that cloth masks didn’t work, and that vaccines didn’t stop transmission. Two years of forced social isolation, which kept families from holding funerals and weddings and blocked them from visiting loved ones in the hospital. Two years of back-and-forth restrictions, which crushed businesses and closed churches and did immense developmental damage to children with learning disabilities and special needs.
The damage is too great, the consequences too devastating, for us to move on and put it all behind us — especially since the majority of those responsible for the havoc wrought refuse to apologize for or even acknowledge the harm their policies have done. Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, for example, said in September that she would make “no apologies” for her decision to shut down the state’s schools despite the enormous academic and social setbacks students have suffered as a result. Disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likewise refused to admit that his policy forcing COVID-19 patients into nursing homes cost thousands of lives. And Dr. Anthony Fauci continues to insist that mask mandates were and still are a good idea and that their only downside is that no one wants to obey them.
These people don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They certainly didn’t give it to those of us who protested school closures, warned that cloth masks were ineffective, and argued that forcing the young and healthy to abide by restrictions that could only have ever benefited the old and at risk was nonsensical. Instead, we were accused of endangering the lives of those around us.
Until there is a reckoning, we cannot move on. Because until the officials responsible for the devastation of the past two years are forced to own up to what they did, there will be no guarantee that this won’t happen again. The power to control what the public can and cannot do is too tempting and the public health emergency excuse is too convenient for them not to try again. Already, Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist is saying he would bring back mask mandates if elected to combat the winter surge in cases.
While Oster is right that trying to navigate the pandemic at first was like trying to read a map in the dark, that is not an excuse. It didn’t take long at all for the lights to come back on. And instead of paying attention to the many road signs that warned us we were heading in the wrong direction, countless government officials covered their eyes and pretended that the lights were still off as they drove us off a cliff.
We will not forgive. And we will not forget.
