Redemption but not yet accountability

COVID and its victims

Five years ago this month, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 virus a threat to humanity, proclaiming a worldwide pandemic. At the White House, President Trump unveiled a 15-day “Slow the Spread” campaign, urging Americans to practice strict personal hygiene, wash hands regularly for at least 20 seconds at a time and wipe down surfaces in the home often. Disinfectant sales boomed.

Soon local and state governments imposed more draconian measures. Schools, businesses, restaurants, gyms and churches were closed. Masks were required, and Amazon quickly sold out. States closed parks, beaches, concert halls. The fifteen days soon stretched into years. Thanks to Zoom, working from home became a thing.

In October, a group of 80 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists — led by Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya — met in Great Barrington, MA. “We have grave concerns about the damaging physical & mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, & recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,” they wrote in a public manifesto, dubbed the Great Barrington Declaration.

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. … We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. … The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.

These good doctors were ostracized by colleagues and censored on social media platforms, derided by Google, Facebook, Linked In and Twitter for spreading what they claimed was disinformation. Francis Collins, NIH director, sent an email to COVID Czar Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published take-down” of Bhattacharya and his fellow scientists, calling them “fringe epidemiologists.”

Meanwhile medical journals and medical societies suppressed any studies or debate that suggested focused protection was a better strategy than lockdowns and, once they were available, governments mandated vaccines, on threat of losing jobs. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo authorized the transfer of elderly COVID patients from the hospital back to their nursing homes, where the disease spread rapidly, killing an estimated 6,000 seniors. He could have easily treated them at the hospital ship then President Trump (45) had anchored in the Hudson River. Instead, that year, Cuomo won an Emmy for his “masterful” daily press conferences on the pandemic.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis imposed a suggested close of business in March. After a few weeks, after studying the science, he reopened parks, schools and beaches. This was greeted with hysteria from those who clung to fear. Some donned Darth Vadar costumes and went to the beaches to accuse DeSantis of killing people.

What killed people were the mandates, masks and vaccines meant to save them.

Since the first confirmed U.S. case was reported on Jan. 20, 2020, in Washington state, at least 1,222,603 people have died in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — the highest COVID death toll in the world. Another one million Americans are still suffering COVID vaccine injuries. No one is quite sure of the exact number, because the government’s adverse reporting system was skewered to help Big Pharm avoid culpability. New HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., like Bhattacharya a vaccine skeptic, has vowed to replace it.

These numbers suggest a catastrophic response by most agencies, into the headwinds of the unknown. This week, when Bhattacharya went before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for his confirmation hearings to head the NIH, he rebuked the agency for its behavior during the pandemic, saying it had done great damage to public trust in science, and in government.

“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about Covid-19 when much of the rest of the world stayed silent about it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) told Bhattacharya. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you.”

But in a singular moment of clarity, one of those epiphanies in public, not a single Democrat, not one, mentioned Bhattacharya’s stance on COVID. Instead, they pivoted to blaming Elon Musk for eyeing cuts in the NIH budget. As Reason Magazine put it, the Dem silence during his confirmation hearing “proves the lockdown skeptics won.”

And yet, you might wonder, when do we, the public, get accountability? Where is the apology for the deaths, for people injured, for families traumatized, for years lost?

Far from being repentant, two days after the hearing, government researchers, bundled against the cold gathered near the Lincoln Memorial for a rally called “Stand Up for Science.” In their speeches it was clear they cling to the notion that they represent science, which at its essence requires an examination of hypotheses, an openness to questions, theories and debate. They exude moral superiority over MAGA. As Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) put it on The View the other day, Americans only voted for Trump because the US is going through its 'angry teenage years' - and their brains hadn't been 'fully formed' enough to vote for Kamala Harris.

Suffering from TDS, these protestors castigated the White House for daring to cut their budgets. Showing no remorse or self-awareness, they made no mention of their own fatal mistakes during COVID — denying the virus came from the Wuhan lab, dismissing the harms, especially to children, from lockdowns and school closings, forcing on us untested vaccines and silly rules like six-feet of distance, and ignoring the censoring and cancelling of critics like Bhattacharya. Oblivious to his hypocrisy, Francis Collins, who reigned at NIH during the pandemic, described the agency as “an institution with a stunningly positive track record.” Then he took up a guitar to play an old protest song he dedicated “to all the good people…joined in a noble dream.”

We tried that once. It was more like a nightmare.