“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”

November 7, 2022 in Columnists, News by RBN Staff

 

Editorial imagery example via: Slate – July, 2020

 

 [Let’s Declare a general amnesty for me and my little tyrant friends who wanted Americans rounded up into camps.]

By Je suis Spike (commentary in brackets in red)

 

Source: The AtlanticLet’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty

 

 

Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty

 [Let’s Declare a general amnesty for me and my little tyrant friends who wanted Americans rounded up into camps.]

Opinion by Emily Oster

A[Assignment: Stupidest Thing I Ever Wrote assignment; unforced error.]

 

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. [Why weren’t they on already?  Maybe none of you was suspected of having covid?  Neither were we and we were told that we were killing Grandma by not wearing a mask.  Or are you one of them there special leftists?  Some animals are more equal than others, hmmm?]  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”  [Look! Jew! Unclean!]

These precautions were totally misguided. [But, damn if we didn’t scream SOCIAL DISTANCING like a tyrant expecting obedience.] In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. [And nobody got it from someone who didn’t have it.  It was treated like the first disease ever spread by people who didn’t have it.] 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.  [But, we knew that OTHERS needed to obey what we then “just knew” was right.  Screw your rights!  Screw your facts!!  Screw you!!!]

 I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. [Lack of knowledge and Brown University used in the same sentence: textbook redundancy.]  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.  [You call it tremendous uncertainty now; you were DAMN certain then.  What did you call us then? Science Deniers.]

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: [Considering the failure that the US American “Edjakashin” System is, it should remain closed.]  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 not the children of the connected; they continued in their private institutions of learning.  How did Governor Newsom’s children do?  (Speculating, here, I do not know if he has any.  But the point is that some children are more equal than our children.  Yes, a broad brush.  Have you earned it?] But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. [But pointed fingers at others as though we were as certain as bowling balls drop when released and don’t float.]Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate. [“Reopening” debate?  Yes, it was closed, why was it closed? But, only one side accused the other of: being anti-science, when there was no science in their favor; killing grandma; wanting dead children, which is a laugh when one considers their nearly universal sacrament of abortion.  Reasonable people, indeed.  Not much of an apology here.] 

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.  [We also lacked determination regarding SAFETY and still do; but shoot people up with it we do.] 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.  [But, golly, we were certain that failing to get shot was evidence of being a luddite, a troglodyte a killer of grandma… and those were our good points.]

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. [Finally, Doctors Fauci and Birx get mentioned.]  Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? [No, I don’t.  But I do remember leftists in the press claiming that President Trump said things that he hadn’t said.  And they did spend a lot of time and resources doing that.] That was bad. [But from such good people.  Really, we are.  Better than most. Better than the unShot.] Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. [But it is useful to us, so we’re not stopping.] But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society. [Too repulsed by claims of magnanimity to comment.]

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. [If by “every position” you mean 2, as in RIGHT and WRONG, ok.  And, Emily, you were wrong.  And still are on this.  Apologize and hold your tongue, count to infinity before speaking and never tell anybody what to do again.] And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. [If only you would admit it, Emily, internalize it, and hold your tongue.]  In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons.  [Such as? Right for the wrong reasons.  What about you, you were wrong for the wrong reasons.] In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.  [Prescient? Sometimes, after all respiratory viruses aren’t new. But sometimes, just judging data as it arose and before it was taken off of the leftist social media sites, declared to be MISINFORMATION.]

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. [We don’t want to gloat.  We want just, well, justice.  For those who couldn’t go to Grandma’s funeral after a Governor of an eastern state killed her by surrounding her with a deadly disease.  For those who lost their jobs for failing to get SHOT with an experimental, thoroughly untested “vaccine,” the meaning of which has been changed. And this after having worked in the front lines before there was a shot, often contracting COVID, recovering and going back to take care of the sick again; especially for them.  For those children who WILL suffer ill effect for their whole lives, as a result of getting SHOT.  For those who didn’t lose their jobs but got SHOT against their will.]  Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.  [You do, realize, Emily, you are nearer to them, the factless, than to right?]  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. [WHO THE HELL IS GLOATING? Culture wars?  You intimate fairness in social energy expenditure.  Many of the right cannot get their opinion/knowledge out because those you support(ed) do not allow truth on their sites when they do not like it.  War is ugly, but it is the ultimate in fair.] These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. [But NOT as deadly as your damn SHOT.] In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. [THAT MAY BE THE GREATEST INSULT I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE.] And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. [Right.  But insisting that you are right when you are not is a moral failing, Emily.] Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [No, the certainty we possess that people like you are going to do it again keeps US from moving forward. WE were always moving forward.  YOU were not.  YOU are not.  You will not.] 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. [No we don’t.  There were crimes committed.  We need to have those handled before we can do anything TOGETHER.] We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual ]misinformation [those who Emily supported] while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. [Had they admitted imperfect knowledge we might have allowed an error or two or even three. But they claimed TO BE THE SCIENCE, to BE KNOWLEDGE; yet they did nothing but err.] Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. [It NEVER made sense.  It was about control and YOU loved the control, didn’t you, Emily?  Admit it.] But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. [They were not mistakes.  They were actions about control. How about you let it go when somebody makes a mistake?  Show us how to do it like a good magnanimous person of the highest altruism. < < sarcasm > >] We need to forgive the attacks, too.  [Which attacks?  You’re killing grandma, you want the kids to die, you’re a science denier?  Those attacks? ] Because I thought schools should reopen [or at least never provably wrote otherwise] and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” [But those people spewing that hate didn’t know they were spewing hate, Emily.] It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. [The high and mighty were feeling, anyway.] And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.  [Emily says she was wrong, but for the right reasons, so don’t talk about it anymore.  Well we do not want to rehash it, either. We want it remembered, with crimes catalogued and punished.]

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve. [The pandemic created no problems.  People like you, Emily, created the problems.  And WE cannot move on until you stop saying things like “the pandemic created many problems.”]

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. [Test scores have gone from inexcusably bad, to worse.] We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. [INVEST= SPEND MORE OF OUR MONEY, throwing more money away on a failing system.  What is it with you people who think that money and control is the answer?] Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? [I think they have been getting high-dosage.] Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.  [Right. Focus on these questions until Emily doesn’t like the answer.  Then change the questions.  Or else erase the right answer and replace with Emily’s answer.]

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. [AND MANY MORE WERE DENIED CARE. Cancer screenings left undone.  “Elective surgeries” denied.  Annual checkups not completed.  That wasn’t the pandemic, that was the response by people like you, Emily, to the pandemic.] Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. [No, you need, Emily, to put your energy into proving to US that the “routine vaccinations” are safe and effective.  People not trusting the likes of YOU is an appropriate, or at least logical, response to this whole sorry affair.] Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates. [There you go, “consider school mandates.”  Do you not see, Emily, that part of the problem is that MANDATES were made before the facts were in and then after the facts were in the MANDATES did not go away.  YOU LEARNED NOTHING!]

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. [Forget history?  You are denying it.] But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. [Emily, history makes no mistakes.  People make mistakes.  And people with whom you agreed did not makes mistakes.  They MUST have lied, because they told us they were right; they claimed they knew, the claimed to be science.]  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.  [You did not make complicated choices. The choices were easy; our lives got complicated and harmed as a result.]

[This was the most unnecessary self-inflicted wound in the history of writing; Emily, you could have just shut up if you weren’t going to do it right.  Emily, you have done yourself harm; you did nobody any good in writing this.  When you have learned what you need to learn, write again.  You need to learn that you were in agreement with those who locked us up, denied us jobs, restaurants, medical care, sunshine and fresh air, “schooling” and social interaction for us and our children.  Until you admit your guilt and take responsibility for your actions, there will be no getting back to normal.  That’s on you.  

The powers that be knew they could not succeed in a frontal assault on our rights, specifically, to worship in accordance with the dictates of our consciences while harming no one, to speak freely, to associate with whom we choose when we choose, so they used a sneaky end-around calling it a pandemic and trampled every right they could.  That’s what this was, that is all this was and it was used to illegally change how people vote in order to cheat to win a Presidential election.  Yes, Emily, this is why you do not want to rehash it all; you and yours had nefarious intent, even if you are not conscious of it.]

 

Thank you for reading,

Je suis Spike