Public Health Elites Who Pushed Anti-Science Policies Deserve Accountability, Not ‘Amnesty’

The failures of Covid health policies are legion. Absent, curiously, are any serious acknowledgments of the harms caused by these policies from the people who promoted them throughout the pandemic.

Recently, Professor Emily Oster of Brown University, admitted in The Atlantic that interventions like social distancing and outdoor masking “were totally misguided.” She decried the “wildly irresponsible claims” of many in positions of power and admits that school closures have led to “historic declines” in student test scores.

Oster acknowledges the obvious: these policies had serious unintended consequences. Oncologist reports note that nearly 50 percent of cancers went undiagnosed during the federal lockdowns because people were too scared to seek treatment. One study estimated that we may have missed over 200,000 cases of domestic abuse during the spring of 2020. Sharp-eyed teachers and administrators are usually the first ones to uncover these sad incidents, and our kids weren’t in school. Well into 2022, I was asking aloud: “How many bruises on a mom’s face were hidden because schools required masks for drop-offs?”

Did anyone weigh the true costs of shutting down the country and closing schools? What should be our position towards policy-makers who forced these ill-founded interventions on the public? What attitude should we strike with key influencers who knew of these harms but did little to call for changes?

Oster seems to recognize that the other shoe is dropping and which is why she launches a pre-emptive request for forgiveness:

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.

The professor was not an uninterested bystander. Oster and her team had collected invaluable data on Covid cases in school settings for nearly a year starting in August 2020. The data also mapped differing interventions by state, county, and district – allowing a real-time lab of comparisons. Our team charted her data and found that students in masked schools had a 21 percent higher case rate than students in schools with no masks. Oster published a study coming to similar conclusions.

Then, she dropped out of the discussion and refused to push her study for peer review and publication.

Numerous influential academics like Emily, under pressure from peers and establishment leaders, caved, stayed silent, and mothballed their data altogether. It’s difficult to separate intimidation from self-censorship – but a blanket amnesty seems premature.

Of course, no apology will be forthcoming from Dr. Anthony Fauci. During numerous media interviews in the last several months, he has refused to acknowledge any mistakes. Apparently, he fears that the slightest mea culpa would be taken “out of context.” Fauci’s only tool was fear and he’s not going to give up his tactic.

Dr. Scott Atlas, a one-time advisor to President Trump’s Covid-19 taskforce, recounts how he confronted Fauci and asked: “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?” Fauci reportedly replied: “Yes, they need to

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