No, We Will Never Forget What You Did to Us in Covid

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Dr. Rachel Bedard – who specialises in “medicine and criminal justice” – said the world needs to move on from the whole Covid catastrophe, the pandemic response, the wholesale destruction of liberties.

In complaining about the possibility that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be appointed by a – horrors! – potential Donald Trump administration, she had this to say:

The COVID-19 pandemic was a divisive crisis for Americans. I worry that appointing Mr. Kennedy to a top health job would entrench the maddening, counterproductive, personality-driven dynamics that have dominated the politics of health and medicine for the first half of this decade, especially post-Covid. …

The future will surely bring both predictable and unforeseen public health crises that will require cool, experienced, nonpartisan leadership. Should Mr. Kennedy be appointed to the federal Government, he is unlikely to use his power to turn down the temperature. We should learn from what the pandemic revealed about our culture’s deep divisions. If Mr. Kennedy is in the administration, I fear we never will.

Arrogance aside, Bedard’s opinion piece screams enforced forgetfulness. While she may claim her position is about being able to “learn” from the pandemic, her statements belie that.

Her version of learning is about learning how to trust the public health complex that lied to the world for four – and counting – years about the dangers, origins and potential treatments for Covid.

Bedard does admit that much politics was played and that maybe kinda sorta the pronouncements from the likes of Anthony Fauci were too “prescriptive” rather than “persuasive”, which is the best way to handle discussions in the midst of any public health crisis.

She says RFK Jr.’s pronouncements are about power rather the necessary “nuance” needed and he is therefore unfit for office.

One assumes one can replace “nuance” with “I was just following orders”, but, either way, Bedard whitewashes fault and then – for purely pejorative reasons – goes into a tangent about raw milk.

Pejorative because it seems that people who go beyond the socially acceptable “farm to table” and “non-GMO” and “certified organic” to demanding purer foods are weird stupid people who are endangering the rest of the population, even though the rest of the population will most likely stick with things like pasteurised moo juice.

It’s a red non sequitur herring, intentionally included to try to lump various types of officially designated-crazy people together.

Kennedy’s appointment, Bedard frets, would lead to people remembering what happened during the pandemic and may even lead to investigations into exactly why it happened.

And that would be bad because it would not allow for the enforced amnesia, the demand for the Great Forgetting.

Prior to this, the folks that did very, very well during the pandemic asked for “Covid amnesty” for the public health experts who led the effort and their terrifying minions who did things like yell at people who were not wearing a mask and refused to allow family members to attend Thanksgiving if they were not vaccinated. 

The argument – made by Brown University economist Emily Oster, whom no one had ever heard of before the pandemic – for amnesty was that “everyone tried their best, no one did anything intentionally bad, we now know better, we’re not bad people, we didn’t really know”.

In other words, we did the best we could, be nice, can’t we all get along?

The hubris of Oster’s argument is shown up by a very simple observation about what the pandemic response did. Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal over-reaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbour. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street. The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonisation of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus or the absurdity of the useless public theatre that made up much of the programme. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends. The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable – that had been tested and succeeded before.

What Oster forgot – and what Bedard wants everyone to forget forever – is the fact that, despite the heroic efforts of the public health establishment, a million people still died.

Note as to the use of the one million figure, it is absolutely true that the number of people who died “from Covid” alone or primarily is, of course, nowhere near one million – pretty sure even the CDC is side-of-the-mouth admitting that now.

Co-morbidities and advanced age played a huge role in the toll of the virus, and then there were the people who died in a car accident and tested positive at the hospital and were listed as dying of Covid, etc.

That issue is another massive scandal that we will not know the actual truth for years.

But I chose the one million number because that is what they – the experts, the scientists, the public health officials, the pandemicists, the media, etc. and all the people who lied to the public and caused massive societal disruption – use as a figure. 

And since they – Oster is not the only one thinks as she does – claim they did the best they could, they had good intentions, they tried really hard so please don’t be mean to us, it demands a question be asked: if one million people died while you were doing your best, exactly how awful are you at your job, why should anyone trust you about anything ever again, and why should anyone forgive your gross incompetence, negligence and systemic dissembling? And that’s not even considering the fact that you now admit you knew the damage you were causing while you were causing it?

In other words, if they are going to claim the pandemic was so serious it cost a million lives, it makes the request for “amnesty” even more unconscionable.

And never forget that the people who asked for amnesty and, when that was laughed out of the building, are now demanding amnesia, again, did well during the pandemic.

Oster kept her job. Oster got famous. The pandemic was good for Oster.

The pandemic was also good for bureaucrats, multi-national companies, putative experts, the mindless media and internet scolds. It was good for woke adults who want to remain children, it was good for the national security-industrial complex, it was good for hiding behind, it was good for expanding societal power.

It was not good for people.

Dr. Bedard – we will never forget that.  And don’t ever ask again.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore, California and a former newspaper reporter. Subscribe to his Substack here.