About That Reckoning You Wanted....

The great recurring theme of the five-year anniversary — you know which one I mean — was about the way all the bad actors escaped punishment. All the lies, all the abuse, all the destructive behavior, and no one has paid for any of it. Emily Oster’s infamous call for a “pandemic amnesty” seems to have been completely unnecessary, since no accountability was ever on the table in the first place. Why? The New York Times recently went so far as to acknowledge that we were misled, us and the New York Times, equally:

But all of this misses the point. Why aren’t we talking about the lessons we learned? Oh, we are. Here’s the New Republic this week, warning that we never had a reckoning over all of the governmental failures that took place during the pandemic. But they maaaaaay mean something a little different than what you’re thinking, and read the subhed carefully:

“The plague years,” like we lived through the Black Death. Sample claims:

It’s not lost on me that if the Trump administration had declared a lockdown a few days earlier, maybe this wouldn’t have happened to me. Maybe I would have my pre-Covid life back by now. Maybe I’d be one of the freewheeling many, living in seeming ignorant bliss despite the millions dead and disabled from Covid. A tiny twist in my tale might have been enough to alter my fate. But even if I’d have ended up standing on the bright side today, that wouldn’t change the fact that a shadow still remains.

This goes far beyond my personal health relative to others. This is a story about public policy and the nature of citizenship, as well. This is about the health of a nation, and the world, and the lessons we could have learned. Five years later, it is sad to think about what could have been. For a moment, we had universal basic income and health care. For a moment, we banged pots and pans each night to thank our health care workers. For a moment, there was a sense that we cared about the vulnerable. There was a moment of solidarity, somewhere within the trauma.

This is about the lessons we could have learned. The lesson of Covid-19, you see, is that government didn’t go hard enough. Trump didn’t do enough. We needed to mask much harder. We needed much more aggressive lockdowns. We needed far more severe vaccine mandates. We needed to be serious about school closures, you absolute Nazis. “It was seemingly impossible to truly come back from the initial politicization of Covid that demonized mask wearing, and precautions were never presented in a way that the public found palatable….Any lesson we seemed to learn early on was seemingly unlearned.”

The lesson of the pandemic is more government, more intervention, more coercion. There was a virus, so “for a moment, we had universal basic income.” It’s socialist germ theory.

The big finish from New Republic writer Laura Weiss is that “there is no justice without health justice for everyone,” and we should stop “acquiescing to this status quo.” That’s the lesson learned.

Similarly, New York magazine has published a major new warning about bird flu, which the government is failing to fight.

We are, once again, in grave danger from the terrifying choice of not doing enough stuff: “This was, and is, a crisis that seems to demand an overwhelming response.” And yet:

….we’ve had a replay of the first year of the COVID pandemic, overseen this time, until recently, by a Democratic president: Early detection gave way to months of confusion and inaction. Good guidance was circumvented or ignored. Each state had its own rules about how to handle an outbreak or whether to test for one in the first place. We are now approaching a moment when our final line of defense for both people and animals may be an effective vaccine — just as the most anti-vaccine administration in history has taken power.

Our final line of defense is being breached! Where are the public health armies, the vaccine mandates, the government-ordered quarantines? Where is the overwhelming force?

And then, eleventh paragraph: “Most of the 70 human cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been mild. A bad case of pink eye, maybe a fever, then a full recovery. But in January, when authorities in Louisiana announced that a man had died after being exposed to sick and dead birds in his backyard flock, it seemed to signal an ominous turn. Of the 964 human cases of H5N1 reported to the World Health Organization since 2003, nearly 50 percent were fatal.”

A man died in Louisiana. WHY IS SOCIETY STILL OPEN!?!?!?

There’s been no reckoning over the pandemic because something approaching half the country thinks the failure ran in the other direction. And they’ll go on believing this. Seventy people have had pink eye, where is the overwhelming response?

We’re not moving on to the truth and reconciliation phase because we’re still culturally in the opening act. What a remarkable thought.