Pandemic Amnesty is Pandemic Amnesia
There must be a reckoning for pandemic tyranny
“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”
COVID Twitter exploded yesterday with the release of a new article by Professor Emily Oster calling for a “Pandemic Amnesty” for the people who got the pandemic response so wrong.
On it’s face it seems to be a fairly tame call for civility:
“We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty….we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.”
I mean, she’s one of us right? Afterall, they called her names too!
But buried in this piece is also the following bread crumb:
“Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.”
Are you kidding me?
I’m sorry to be harsh but Professor Oster is nothing but a Covid-19 grifter who is actually advocating for Pandemic Amnesia, not Amnesty.
I know that quite some time has passed, but I think it’s important to remember some of the basic problems that brought us to this juncture.
Things We Should Never Forget
1: Lockdowns were Never Part of the Plan
The WHO and CDC had publicly available pandemic plans in place based on a century’s worth of experience.
Do you know what wasn’t in these plans? Widespread lockdowns and mask wearing.
Do you know what was in these plans but completely absent from the Covid response? Risk-benefit analyses and the consideration of ethical issues.
They threw the entire pandemic playbook out the window and instead decided to adopt the China Covid Strategy.
And it was a disaster…they just created greater hardship for millions of people as well as a host of second order events which we’re seeing today in terms of health, mental health, excess mortality, inflation, the economy, education of children, etc.
2: They Shut Down Access to Repurposed Drugs
The establishment not only shut down all debate about repurposed drugs (HCQ, Ivermectin), they also moved aggressively to even restrict access to such treatments under the supervision of your own doctor.
I believe that many lives could have been saved with early treatment. On the flipside, there’s no evidence that public health would have been negatively affected if it had turned out that these repurposed drugs were not effective.
There’s no reason for having suppressed this information or to have unilaterally interfered with Doctors’ ability to treat patients as they wish.
The science of repurposed drugs:
3: They Lied about the Nature of the Virus
They refused to acknowledge anything that was widely known to be true about the “novel” virus:
It behaves like other coronaviruses
There are significant numbers of asymptomatic cases
Pre-existing immunity exists (indicating T-Cell immunity)
Vaccines for respiratory viruses don’t provide sterilizing immunity, thus don’t stop transmission
Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and long lasting
4: Vaccine Mandates
Mandating somebody to get vaccinated with an experimental mRNA vaccine for a respiratory virus that, depending on age/health, poses fairly little risk is unethical and an abuse. Add in the fact that the vaccines don’t offer sterilizing immunity and now there is also no community benefit from the vaccine.
These things were pretty clear early on. Any discussion about mandates should have ended when it became clear that vaccines don’t stop transmission.
5: The Stupid Post-Vaccine Mandates
For some unexplained reason, they thought it would make sense to keep vaccinated and non-vaccinated people separate after everyone who wanted the vaccine was able to get one. Again, this makes no sense if the vaccine doesn’t provide sterilizing immunity.
Remember when they said this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? They lied.
The correct action would have been to go back to normal. Instead they kept us on pandemic watch indefinitely while establishing no endpoint for ending measures.
6: The Vaccination of Children
This one is particularly personal for me because I did not want to vaccinate my children, but circuimstanced forced me to do so with one of my daughters.
The risk reward proposition for these vaccines do not lead to the conclusion that children should be vaccinated. Even the notion that they’re saying grandma is garbage because they don’t prevent the transmission of the virus.
This is probably the most evil thing that they did during the pandemic and we must never forget this.
7: School Lockdowns
An update from the National Assessment of Educational Progress was released last week and the results were devastating according to the WSJ:
“It’s hard to understate the human damage that these dry statistics represent. The learning loss is considerable and will take years to make up, if it ever is. Children who fall behind in reading skills have difficulty learning other subjects. The numbers also mean that millions of young Americans don’t know even the basics of writing and arithmetic.”
Predictably, it was the most vulnerable children that were affected by these school lockdowns.
But these are the same children that health authorities claimed to be protecting when they declared “racism a public health emergency”.
The hypocrisy has no end…
Ultimately, school lockdowns are the perfect example of policy making bereft of any risk/benefit analysis.
Final Thoughts
I’ve tried to link some of the threads I wrote over the pandemic covering the things that we should not chose to forget because:
They were a big fricking deal while they were happening.
Just like I have documented this throughout the pandemic by repeatedly pointing out obvious policy mistakes, so have many many others.
There have been many loud and prominent voices calling for a different approach…one based on objective reasoning…not the subjective argument of “any death is unacceptable”.
In facts we’ve been screaming these things, despite the threat of being suspended or banned.
@Justin_Hart has the receipts:
Funny, I don’t remember anybody on the other side asking that we receieve Amnesty…in fact I think they wanted us all gone.
Seems like they want one rule for thee and another for me!
So what should we do beyond remembers?
I’m sharing this article written by @AJKayWriter because she did a great job in calling for some commonsense measures which have to occur before there is any talk of moving forward:
AJ Kay Writes:
“Here is our best shot at some semblance of stability in the short term :
Acknowledgment – We won’t get anywhere until the people who affected these catastrophic errors acknowledge their harm. This isn’t about “being right” – it’s a matter of human decency. Admitting a mistake - especially one that hurt people - goes a long way toward healing. The longer people refuse to admit their errors, the more the harm will continue to compound.
Accounting – We need to know what decisions were made and by whom. I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is to moving forward. We cannot solve problems if we don’t know who or what caused them. And it should be understood that anyone who resists this process does not have problem-solving as their primary motivation.
Accountability – The people who made those decisions need to be held accountable. Leadership is not just about the right to make decisions – it’s about taking responsibility for those decisions. If an elderly person died alone at your direction, you are disqualified. If children were denied schooling, safeguards, and social interactions under your watch, you’ve already had your interview and failed. People who were hurt don’t want those who caused the disaster in charge of the recovery efforts. The judgment of these ‘leaders’ has been tested and found lacking.
New Leadership/Representatives – The people who orchestrated and carried out these policies should step down/be removed and replaced, ideally with people who, throughout the hysteria, kept a cool head and proposed viable solutions. Without new leadership, we can expect the same results next time.
Safeguards – We need policies that check the powers that allowed this to happen. Endless emergency declarations and science funding mechanisms that hold researchers’ careers hostage to a prescribed narrative, for example, both need to be eliminated.
Commitment – The clean-up required here is immense and may take generations of repair. We must commit to checking out every second and third-order effect and correcting it to stay on course.”
If we choose to forget the tyrannical policy disasters of the pandemic without even acknowledging them, much less fixing them, then we are all complicit. It’s that simple.
I’ll end this article with a message I received from a friend that I found to be pretty spot on:
“Demanding that the people who are still excluded from power give “amnesty” to the evil people who still wield power is a take, I suppose. Really she is calling for unconditional surrender the moment we have a slight opening. So many people on our side (rationality and data) fell for Oster’s game because they were so happy to see a woman with class and respectability siding slightly with us, but she was always playing a game.”
Of course it’s all a game.
Needless to say: Randi Weingarten of the teacher’s union would very much like for us to develop “Pandemic Amnesia”:
But we’re not having it. We can’t.
"we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go." If they were really mistakes, she would have a good point. Unfortunately, I don't believe the perpetrators made these "mistakes"; they were deliberate actions that were known to cause harm. They participated in deliberate mass murder, plain and simple, and for this there should be no amnesty, only the harshest punishment possible!
Some of the people who are saying that amnesty should be given due to 'no one knew any better 'argument:: You will find that many did know better. If one goes up the hierarchy we see more and more complicity, money exchanging hands, and dirty doings. Let's just pray jail time occurs because our rights were taken from us by govt illicitly using big tech and media to censor. Yet, many saw thru the fog and pursued alternate ideas. This academic is apparently stupid, as are many people who cling to NPR and NYTIMES, etc