By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
One of the cliches of the past few years is that
“nobody wants to remember a pandemic.” Over and over it was said that there
were many commemorations of the First World War, a civilization-redefining
event that impressed itself across the Western cultural consciousness through
poetry, fiction, film, and art in the following decades, leaving us a much more
cynical civilization than before. But so little was said about the great
influenza! Wasn’t that mysterious?
Well, I can understand why now. I lost friends
during the pandemic. Not to the disease, fortunately. To the moralizing.
The constant drumbeat from the authorities that the people themselves, by their
behavior, could control, slow down, and turn back the pandemic imbued all
action with moral significance and political meaning. This in turn meant that a
true Covid-era stickler could upbraid you as something like a traitor or mass
murderer for putting your garbage can on the street while not wearing your mask
properly.
This moralizing was based on a simple but utterly useless
truth: We really could have stopped Covid from spreading or mutating. All we
had to do was bury our children alive, and then ourselves — each and every one
of us. Having failed to do that or invent and administer a “sterilizing
vaccine,” nearly every individual on earth was destined to catch Covid, and
most of us have.
The highly charged arguments about Covid and our
interventions against it were not just across partisan lines on social media,
but within families, in the workplace, and on school boards. This was painful.
And polls show that Covid is fading in relevance as a political issue, with
people now rating the economy and inflation as their top issues.
Well of course. But the Covid era saw us take utterly
extraordinary steps with monetary and fiscal policy. The word “lockdown”
entered our normal political vocabulary — as if the measures used to quell a
prison riot were just the sort of thing that governors or the federal
government could impose on free citizens. An odd private–public partnership for
censorship emerged in which government information became the basis for mass
editing of America’s most important public forums: digital social media.
And the history is being rewritten as we speak. Dr.
Anthony Fauci this week has said two astonishing things. First, to the Hill’s
Batya Ungar-Sargon he said, “I didn’t recommend locking anything down.” He
continued: “I have always felt — and go back and look at my statements — that
we need to do everything we can to keep the schools open and safe.” In the
exact same interview, he said that if he could go back, he would recommend a
“much more stringent” response.
But as Noah Rothman helpfully reminds us at Commentary,
Fauci previously told reporters, “When it became clear that we had community
spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread — this was way
before there was a major explosion like we saw in the northeastern corridor
driven by New York City metropolitan area — I recommended to the president that
we shut the country down.” Not only that, but he urged against any school
reopenings in the 2020 calendar year.
But it’s worse than school closure; it’s also trust in
the vaccines. Earlier this week, Fauci was confronted on Fox News with a New
York Times article about how the vaccine affected menstrual cycles for women. The results, that nearly half did experience
irregularities after the vaccine, are not a surprise to anyone who lives in a
human society with a lot of women who got vaccinated and who felt free enough
of the era’s political taboos to talk about their experiences. This was talked
about commonly throughout 2021.
But officially, talking about it was a great way to get
lumped in with conspiracy theories about depopulation and vaccine “shedding.”
The mainstream media, in a froth to promote the vaccines, constantly asserted, “There is no evidence that any of the vaccines are
causal factors in those who experience irregularities in their menstrual cycles
after receiving any of the shots.” And of course any talk about this on social
media was subject to censorship or a right-of-reply by the government linking
to CDC’s information.
Fauci shrugged, “Well, the menstrual thing is something
that seems to be quite transient and temporary. That’s the point. That’s one of
the points. We need to study it more.” Oh, no kidding.
Or there is Dr. Deborah Birx, who this week unburdened
herself: “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,”
she said. “And I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it’s not going to
protect against severe disease and hospitalization. It will. But let’s be very
clear: 50 percent of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older,
vaccinated. So that’s why I’m saying even if you’re vaccinated and boosted, if
you’re unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It’s effective.
It’s a great antiviral.”
If Birx knew this, did Fauci? Remember he told people in
May of last year that vaccinated people would have a “very, very low
likelihood, that they’re going to transmit it.”
And if they did know, why did Fauci and public health get
behind vaccine mandates, which could make sense only if the vaccine actually
did prevent transmission? Even when the mandates were coming down, there were
studies suggesting that people who had simply recovered from a Covid-19
infection were less likely to get infected by a subsequent wave than those who were vaccinated.
I know women who were trying to conceive and who were
spooked by the reports of menstrual irregularities in their friends. Some of
them faced the prospect of being fired from their jobs for choosing what they
thought was best for their family. Millions of others calculated correctly that
they were at low risk to develop a severe case if they contracted Covid, and
they avoided the vaccine for whatever reason — because they’d had the disease
and recovered, or were young but once had a bad reaction to a shot, or had an
issue with blood clotting in their medical history. They faced ostracism or
unemployment because public-health officials and the government — backed and
amplified by social-media behemoths — were telling them lies about the vaccine.
Or “overselling” it, as Birx put it.
Scores of millions of parents figured out that their
children weren’t at serious risk and by the summer of 2020 could read credible
science showing their kids at school did not pose serious risks to others. Yet
they were shut down.
These millions of people have reasons privately to feel
vindicated. But they deserve to have someone in public life affirm the fact
that they weren’t crazy, that in fact public health did mislead them, shaded
the truth, and occasionally abused the trust placed in them.
All the other issues — including inflation, the youth
mental-health crisis, and the cultural battles over education in schools — flow
out of our pandemic response, and the mistakes we made in it. Auditing the
pandemic response should be a prerequisite for Republican governance after the
2022 election and for any Republican hoping to represent the party in 2024.
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