LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY

We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

[OCS:  Pleading ignorance is not an excuse for harming a significant segment of the population by presenting credentialed individuals who purported to know “the science” and spoke with certainty – not admitting their lack of knowledge and lying to the American public.

If only Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Deborah Leah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and Robert Redfield. the virologist who served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the truth – hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Likewise, if there had been no political interference with cheap therapeutics that appeared to work, many more lives would have been saved.

And then there is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of senior citizens with his insane public policy of placing infected individuals in the middle of those most vulnerable to the virus – senior citizens sequestered in community living facilities without adequate safeguards against infectious diseases.]

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

[OCS: I call bullshit! The teachers’ unions were dictating public policies to politicians – milking the system, as it were. Science was subservient to big-money politics. Most culpable was Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president.]

Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.

[OCS: The most significant unknowable was a vaccine's long-term side effects and efficacy, as there is no way to simulate the passage of time. However, the known data was sequestered and heavily guarded against public exposure and debate. When key data became known, equally credible and experienced medical and scientific practitioners who dissented were silenced by the regime – an effort that is ongoing today.]

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

[OCS: You cannot claim ignorance and then point to other data and claim misinformation or disinformation. Labeling something misinformation without open debate is little more than a justification for censorship and canceling the platform access to dissenting voices – gutting the first precept of scientific inquiry – skepticism.

As for people with good intentions – they were ignorant that they were paving the road to hell and violating the prime directive of medicine: first, do no harm.]

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

[OCS: Where were the leadership's admissions of faulty methodologies and assumptions? Those who were eventually proven right still suffered reputational damage and continued to be shunned, while the media propagandists still featured those who are wrong.]

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But 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.

[OCS: Bullshit. There should be consequences, including fines, penalties, including prison, for those who willfully obstructed or censored information critical to the understanding of the risks involved with newly-engineered vaccines and the use of effective low-cost therapeutics..]

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

[OCS: Move on, is the mantra of the progressive communist democrats when they have been caught red-handed in malfeasant (Misconduct or wrongdoing, especially by a public official.) activities or criminal actions.]

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

[OCS: Spoken like a true progressive communist democrat believer who wants to erase history and the wrongdoing of the perpetrators.]

Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University. She is the author of The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years and Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know.  <Source>

Dr. (MD, MPH) Vinay Prasad's List of offenses

• Discouraging people from outdoor activities
• Lying about the evidence for cloth masks in community settings
• Lying about the evidence for masking outside
• Closing beaches
• Pouring sand into outdoor skateboard parks
• Not running any randomized control trials of masking in high-income nations
• Pushing masks on 2-year-olds in contrast with world health organization recommendations, evidence, and basic common sense
• Culling animals
• Using the police state to enforce lockdown
• Not letting people hold their father's hand when their father dies.
• Not letting people visit their mother when she's hospitalized
• Closing schools -- But just for poor kids who go to public school, rich kids get to go to school
• Making testing companies rich by recommending unproven testing
• Inventing a 6-ft distance
• Enforcing stupid distances to make it hard to run school buses
• Lowering the regulatory bar for vaccines
• Lying about myocarditis after the safety signal is found in Israel
• Never making drug companies test lower doses in young men. Doing absolutely nothing to mitigate the risk.
• Repeatedly lying about it so you can force boosters on people who've already had covid, despite no evidence, and lacking biological rationale
• Continuing the emergency state long after it's appropriate.
• Continuing emergency powers when the emergency has passed
• Vaccine passports
• Discriminating against people by vaccine status.
• Preventing Novak Djokovic from competing in US Open
• Making children wear masks to go to the zoo in California in November 2022 to protect the animals who shouldn't be close to the kids anyway, and they're all outside anyway
• Firing healthcare workers to the point that no one wants to work in healthcare anymore, and it is hard to staff
• Discouraging people from getting routine health care.
• Publishing propaganda in MMWR to justify your broken agenda
• Funding the Ecotrust dude after all the issues about where the virus is coming from.
• Spending 10 billion on Paxlovid without randomized data in vaccinated people
• Spending billions on Remdesivir when it doesn't do s***.
• Spending so much money on useless tests, that faculty members quit universities to go run testing companies selling said useless tests
• Using useless tests to keep kids out of school.
• Inventing unproven Quarantine policies to keep kids out of school
• Closing Palo Alto schools, but leasing the space, so parents can drop their kids off in zoom school, where an instructor who's an underpaid worker opens a laptop so they can take a class with their teacher.

And doing all this without running a single cluster randomized trial to figure out anything. To just do it on a whim without data.