The great COVID lockdown whitewashing has officially begun

An attempt to bury the humiliating and destructive past

Do you remember when we shut down the world for a virus with a survival rate somewhere north of 99.5% or so? Like, we just told everyone to go home and stay there, and we shut down nearly all businesses, and closed schools, and shut down churches, and forbid people from getting together for birthday parties or dinners or funerals, and forbid family from seeing dying loved ones, and mounted a relentless Wehrmacht-level public shaming campaign against anyone who voiced even the tiniest objection to this demented, clinically insane new paradigm, and all of this insanity led to an unprecedented explosion of mental health crises as well as looming economic catastrophe?

Wow! I remember that too. Heck, I’ll never forget it, not if I live to be 99.5 years old. But there are a ton of people who really, really don’t want you to remember that they were all in favor of this and/or did absolutely nothing to stop it, and now they’re quietly creeping out to try and do emergency damage control. Here’s British Conservative MP Rishi Sunak this week, for example:

The Conservative leadership hopeful was criticised for his account of the discussions at the heart of government when he was chancellor amid frantic attempts to curb the spread of the virus and avoid the NHS becoming overwhelmed.

Sunak said he was effectively blocked from raising concerns about the negative “trade-offs” of lockdown, such as the surgery backlog and most children being home schooled – and too much effort was put into peddling a “fear narrative”. …

“Everything I did was seen through the prism of: ‘You’re trying to be difficult, trying to be leader’,” Sunak claimed. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off. The script was not to ever acknowledge them.”

Oh, there was a “script?” I wasn’t aware of that. I was over here thinking that Rishi Sunak could just say whatever the hell he wanted if and when he observed that his government was engaging in a suicidally insane policy of shutting down a society of 67,000,000 people over a virus with a 99% survival rate. Here I am under the impression that he could have spoken out against such a nuclear-level destructive course of action whenever he chose to. Silly me.

In New York this week, meanwhile, Gov. Kathy Hochul—who fell upward into the position after Andrew Cuomo got caught making dog sex jokes to female staffers—is admitting a bit of a mea culpa in the state’s handling of the corona thing:

"We're going to peel back every dynamic and let's look at not just in the workplace, but what happened to women when the decisions were made to have all the kids go home and learn remotely. Wow. Wow. What a [mistake] that was. What a mistake that was," she said, according to a transcript by Gothamist reporter Jon Campbell who tweeted them out. "Women couldn't go their jobs. They lost their jobs, or they thought they're back at their jobs and one child in a classroom tests positive, the whole class goes home for a week and a half. It was chaos, nothing short of chaos, and it just seems to have not ended."

“Wow. Wow.” Wow! What statesmanship, what bravado. Imagine having the hindsight to recognize, two years later, that it was a really stupid idea to “have all the kids go home and learn remotely.” With that kind of political acumen, Her Honor deserves every one of the votes she’ll get in November. I mean, sure, some of us recognized in media that it was a truly terrible policy, not just because women “couldn’t go to their jobs,” but also—more importantly—because it derailed the development of a generation of children, handicapping them in innumerable ways and rendering their already sub-par educations even more useless than before. “What a mistake that was.” Doy! If only Kathy Hochul had been in some sort of highly prominent and visible and influential position to criticize the policy at the time, maybe she could have done something about it. But she was only Lieutenant Governor. Don’t blame her.

A few weeks ago, meanwhile, NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz sheepishly admitted that she and her buddies didn’t quite do enough to counteract the wholesale destruction of roughly two years’ worth of millions of childhoods:

“I knew that we didn’t have a scientific consensus” around the need for school closings, she told me recently. “We needed social science expertise, not just medical expertise, to decide what was best.”

Kamenetz also stands out among most education journalists for being willing to reflect and comment publicly about media coverage — hers and others’.

In a recent phone interview, she described herself as having been “too timid” about taking risks involved in field reporting on vulnerable kids most adversely affected by forced homeschooling.

Most of all, she says that she and other education reporters didn’t “talk loudly enough and in enough detail” about the harms to kids that would likely result from blanket school shutdowns that were often prolonged.

“It was all easy to predict, so we could have been a lot louder.”

Yeah, you “could have.” But you didn’t. Why? Because more than anything, the COVID era has been marked by supreme cowardice, abandonment of duty, a comprehensive and willful lack of foresight, a refusal to acknowledge trade-offs, a willing surrender to fear and paranoia and hysteria over science, reason, logic, compassion. This is what we have endured for more than two years. This is what so many people allowed to happen.

So I get it. We seem to be at the tail end of this thing; most people aren’t as cripplingly obsessed with COVID as they were even half a year ago, anyway, and now the folks who helped create this era of high panic and antiscientific terror, who contributed to what was effectively mass child abuse, and whose policies led directly to the global economy being on the cusp of a recession—well, they’d all rather quietly sweep aside the fact that they were involved in it in some way. This is only the beginning of what will likely be a years-long rehabilitation tour from countless people. They want you to forget what they did. Do not let them.