<!–

–>

November 3, 2022

In her recent article in The Atlantic, a Brown University professor, Emily Oster, is calling for “pandemic amnesty.”  She is telling me to “forgive and forget” everyone who was yelling obscenities at me for not wearing a mask in a public park or calling me a mass murderer for posting a picture with a friend visiting.  I must forget all this, the author insists, because all those people had nothing but my well-being in mind!

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); }

The author admits that many (if not most!) measures imposed on us by “the experts” were harmful and destructive.  But “dwelling on those mistakes” is “counter-productive.”  After all, people who made these mistakes had only good intentions.

“As we now know,” the author concedes, cloth masks are practically useless.  People who got vaccinated spread COVID as easily as those who did not.  Keeping children locked up at homes had disastrous consequences on their development.  And some of the COVID “mitigation” measures — like beach closures in California — were outright dumb.  But let’s not “dwell” on them — because those were “complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.”

“We didn’t know!”  the author laments.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); }

After three years of living through the pandemic, the author all but admits that “the experts” were just as clueless about how to approach it as your next-door neighbor.  “The experts” did not know even the most obvious things.

They didn’t know that wearing a dirty piece of cloth over your face would not amount to anything other than a sinus infection.  Seemed like even a third-grader could’ve figured that one out — and many did.

They didn’t know that walking on the beach was the safest activity one could do during a pandemic.  Sunshine and fresh air are the best disinfectants known to men, and a beach in early spring is the best place for “social distancing.”  You don’t need a crystal ball to understand that surfing in the ocean is not “a super-spreader event.”

They didn’t know that being away from school causes learning delays, especially for kids who don’t have a parent in the home.  For many kids, a school is the only environment conducive to education.  To learn online, kids require constant supervision — I got a firsthand experience with that when my high school–age son was tutoring during COVID.  He had to call the parents multiple times a day to return their kids back to the computer screen.  What about the kids who didn’t have a parent around, or access to a personal tutor?  It wasn’t a difficult conjecture to know that these kids would fall desperately behind.

After almost everything “the experts” told us has been proven false, they demand “amnesty” because of the “uncertainty” they were facing.  Yet, back then, they denied that any uncertainty existed.  Back then, they claimed they knew exactly what to do — until they didn’t.  Back then, they claimed that everyone who contradicted them, or doubted them, was “spreading misinformation.”  They proclaimed themselves “THE SCIENCE,” and they ordered everyone to follow their orders, or else.

You don’t need to know the future — only the past — to know that science does not require “blind following.”  Science involves debate, experimentation, and inquiry.  “The experts” and their admirers replaced real science with THE SCIENCE, also known as dogma.  And every time it clashed with reality, they turned around on a dime, and they absolved themselves of responsibility, citing “the evolution of THE SCIENCE” without providing any evidence as to how the science had “evolved.”