The establishment has COVID regrets. Its media, like the Atlantic, has lost tens of millions of dollars.
It seems that people would instead rely on the “misinformation” on the Internet than place their trust in the propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex.
Thus, establishment mouthpieces like the Atlantic are trying to save themselves.
“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” reads a headline by columnist Emily Oster.
Oster writes, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
“These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.”
But here’s the thing: We did know.
COVID Regrets
Oster writes, “Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.”
That is the crux of her COVID regrets thesis. “We didn’t know,” and “We were working for your best interests.”
Never mind that only YOU can determine what is in your best interest. But “individualism” was a problem in 2020. That’s supposedly why places like Taiwan and South Korea fared better. They have a more “collectivist” outlook on life.
Of course, South Korea and Taiwan don’t trust the Chinese Communist Party. And they had testing capabilities as early as March 2020.
So that had something to do with it.
But Emily Oster is attempting to rewrite history. You don’t have to be a Joe Rogan podcast listener to realize that by April 2020, the coronavirus was more hype than substance.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” stretched into infinity because fear ruled the day. Anyone who wasn’t afraid was considered a sociopath that wanted your grandparents dead.
Anyone who didn’t let fear run their lives dealt with the hostility of their neighbours and coworkers.
The State uses scapegoats to consolidate its power. It’s one thing to read about in history books, but it was another to see it play out in real-time.
But forgive and forget, right? That’s what Emily Oster from the Atlantic wants.
“Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020,” she writes. “Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.”
I wonder if she’d write the same about George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. Ex post facto, Chauvin murdered Floyd. But police need to learn from their mistakes, and the black community needs to let things go.
Something tells me that won’t be in her next column…
Listen to the Experts
Emily Oster wants us to continue to listen to the experts. Her COVID regrets don’t include placing her faith in the “public health” establishment that ignored the Great Barrington declaration and attacked professionals with dissenting opinions.
“In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck,” she writes. “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.”
You only get one birth and one death. You can’t control your birth, but with luck, you’ll die peacefully surrounded by friends and family.
But if you got COVID and died in the hospital, you either died alone or surrounded by masked nurses itching to get out and make another Tik Tok dance video.
That is criminal, and far from “forgiving” the monsters behind this policy, we should put them on a type of Nuremberg trial. (Back then, they even hung the “journalists” for the Nazi regime).
A Pandemic Scorecard
The government’s response destroyed people’s businesses. While Amazon and Wal-Mart made record sales, governments prevented small to medium local companies from operating.
But this wasn’t a “moral failing” on the part of our wise overlords. These were merely public policy choices. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t. But we shouldn’t, says Oster, treat them as points on a scorecard.
You can understand her point of view. If we took the scorecard approach, the “grandma killers” would come out on top, having been right every step. While the COVID fanatics would be seen for what they are: religious zealots.
Here’s a suggestion for Oster and people who think like her: if you want to subject innocent people to restrictions in the future, you’ll have to demonstrate cause and effect.
For this all talk about combating misinformation, what’s more insidious than declaring subjective value statements as scientific facts immune to criticism?
Lockdowns? Vaccine mandates? Mandatory masking? School closures?
Not a single policy was supported by randomized control trials. We will not “put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty,” because this is the issue.
Oster’s COVID regrets involve asking whether the choices made were correct or helpful. But the fact that governments made those choices to begin with is never addressed.
Moving on from COVID Regrets
“Moving on is crucial now,” writes Emily Oster, “Because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.”
Statements like this are why we shouldn’t take claims of “misinformation” seriously. Is there a statement more misinformed than blaming government interventions on “the pandemic?”
It’s like people who blame “capitalism” for all of society’s ills from the comfort of their smartphones.
The pandemic didn’t cause inflation, supply chain issues, censorship, or economic depression.
If it hadn’t been for the corporate press and disastrous government policies, would you have even known there was a pandemic?
Remember H1N1 from 2009-2010? Very few do. It killed over half-a-million people. The corporate press amps up the fear factor every time there’s a new coronavirus.
For some reason, in 2020, the hysteria stuck, and now here we are. Almost three years later, and the establishment’s propaganda arm is trying to reverse course.
“Forgive us,” they write. But they haven’t learned a damned thing. In Oster’s column, she notes that public-health officials and politicians “need to consider school mandates” to get vaccination rates up.
They want us to forgive and forget. But we cannot do this. They don’t even understand what they did wrong.
COVID Regrets & Cannabis Promises
The tyranny of public health is no surprise to Canada’s cannabis connoisseurs. While other jurisdictions legalize cannabis because people have a right to their bodies, in Canada, cannabis legalization took the form of “public health.”
But like the “public health” approach to COVID, there are unintended consequences.
THC caps to limit how high people can get? That just means they’ll consume more (and spend more money) to achieve the same results.
Child-resistant packaging? That just means more plastic waste for an industry that could easily be carbon-neutral and sustainable.
Government distribution to protect people from themselves? An even larger carbon footprint since growers can’t deal directly with retailers or consumers.
These failures scratch the surface of Canada’s disaster with big-government cannabis legalization. But like Emily Oster’s COVID regrets, it’s a consequence of placing faith in government bureaucracy.
You’d think we would have learned this lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. But history isn’t for learning. As Emily Oster writes,
“The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.”
No, “we” didn’t make complicated choices. They were thrust on us by a power elite who used intimidation and censorship to silence dissident opinions.
Instead, let’s acknowledge that there’s a class struggle—those who earn wealth by creating goods and services or trading their labour.
And those who earn wealth by stealing it.
Those who steal it are making the rules. And COVID was their excuse to steal even more. But now they’re having COVID regrets because they overplayed their hand.
Emily Oster, a propagandist for the murderous thieves, wants us to forgive and forget.
Like hell.