Five years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit our shores and forced us into our homes, we’re in the midst of a strange sort of denialism.
You may remember schools being shuttered, small businesses being destroyed, and small children developing speech impediments because they were unnecessarily forced to wear masks. I certainly do.
But now it turns out no one supported any of that, and none of it was anybody’s fault.
It’s not just Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who’s been popping up every few weeks to lie that she super-duper, really and truly wanted schools open in 2020 and 2021, despite actually being the villain who kept the poorest kids out of classrooms for years.
Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait and others have attempted it, too.
Now influential economist Tyler Cowen says we’re being too hard on the people who caused us so much needless pain and misery.
“A lot of people do not want to admit it,” he wrote this week in the Free Press, “but when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right.”
Cowen weaves many unrelated pandemic measures together into a narrative that neatly absolves the elites of blame.
Yes, Operation Warp Speed produced a vaccine quickly — but no, most of the economic activity our businesses lost was not “going away in any case,” as he asserts.
Sure, he admits, “most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner” — then claims they “mattered less” than we all recall.
Furthermore, he declares, “those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.”
Gaslighting at its finest.
When our family fled for Florida in January 2022, my children were still forced to mask between bites as they ate their lunches outside on the frozen ground at their New York City public schools.
New York and California have still not recovered from their long forced shutdowns. Their unemployment rates have remained stagnant since the start of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, unemployment in Florida and Texas has declined. Turns out it’s not as easy as it looks to switch an economy off and then on again.
Cowen does admit, “Not reopening the schools was a big mistake and meant a lot of lost learning” — but insists, “plenty of elites protested at the time.”
Did they? When? And where were these elites “protesting,” exactly?
Some of them were in my direct messages on social media, saying they agreed with me on sending kids back to school but obviously couldn’t say so lest they be excommunicated from their liberal tribe.
And that, in fact, was the core problem of that era: Many of the “mistakes” made during COVID were actually just the shoring up of political alliances.
Toward the end of President Trump’s first term, groupthink on the left had become overwhelming, as virtue-signalers policed one another to make sure no one stepped out of line.
The COVID era collided with cancel culture and created a uniquely poisonous herd mentality.
In his new book “Abundance of Caution,” David Zweig lays out how one narrative developed to enforce the liberal line on COVID policies.
On June 29, 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement to support reopening schools in the fall. The group “strongly advocate[d] that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”
But when conservatives cheered, the AAP realized that opening schools was becoming a Republican-coded ideal — and, to its horror, Trump started citing the AAP statement to push local political officials into following its recommendation.
Just two weeks later, on July 10, the AAP issued a coded about-face: “Public health agencies must make recommendations based on evidence, not politics.”
That statement was joined by three powerful special-interest groups that don’t normally act in concert with the AAP — Weingarten’s AFT, the National Education Association, and the School Superintendents Association.
It was clear the unions had gotten the pediatricians’ collective ear. And of course, the new missive pushed for more federal funding for schools.
Anthony Fauci, too, politicized school openings, flip-flopping on the issue before ultimately, in February 2021, settling on an argument that then-President Joe Biden’s boondoggle spending plan would have to pass Congress before kids could go back to class.
By then, of course, schools had been safely operating for months in red states.
So which elites, exactly, were right in all this?
All of us, of course, were operating in the dark when the pandemic first hit. We didn’t know a lot, and the fear was very real.
But some of us adjusted to new information as it became available — and didn’t put politics first.
No one is waiting for the left to take responsibility for their devastating COVID actions. But the ongoing history rewrite cannot go on unchecked.
Mistakes were made, yes — and the people who made them should get no pass.
Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
