by Kerry Dougherty
This is rich. The COVID extremists who closed schools, mandated masks and vaccines, laid down nutty curfews, dictated the number of guests we could have in our own homes for Thanksgiving, ordered the elderly to die alone and shuttered churches, now want amnesty.
Forgive and forget, they say, nervously. Let’s move on.
Two words: heck no.
Those of us who were right about almost everything concerning COVID want a reckoning. We want political leaders who supported these unconstitutional COVID measures booted from office and we want our former friends and neighbors who called us grandma killers when we refused to tie soggy bandanas on our faces to apologize.
Grovel, even.
This new, forgive-and-forget campaign started when vaccines began to fail. It accelerated with the release of national test scores last month.
Once health officials admitted that the vaccinated were spreading and catching the virus, vaccine mandates were unmasked as useless.
Once test scores plummeted, the selfish, narrow-minded morons who sacrificed America’s kids on the altar of COVID could no longer pretend that remote learning was as good as in-person instruction.
Now those who were behind those catastrophic policies want us to simply move on.
In an article in The Atlantic, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” Brown University professor Emily Oster pretends that all of the COVID restrictions were well-intentioned, but ineffective.
Nice try, lady.
But those of us who had both home ec in high school (yeah, I’m that old) and Biology 101 in college, were familiar with the size of a virus as well as the size of weave of fabric and knew from Day One that cloth masks were nothing but pandemic theater. Yet the governor of Virginia – a medical doctor! – demonstrated how to make a mask out of T-shirts or old scarves as he ordered even 5-year-olds to wear face rags in public.
This is the sort of madness the Oster family displayed during the pandemic:
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.
I don’t blame Oster’s kids who apparently behaved like obnoxious little Karens, shouting at strangers on a hiking trail to socially distance. They were taking their cues from their sanctimonious parents.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat…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.
Yes, we do want to gloat. We were kicked around for two years by these smug know-nothings.
Problem is, megalomaniac authorities used the pandemic as an excuse to stomp all over the little people. As a result of their raw power grab, the elderly died alone, people lost their livelihoods, the vaccine mandates cost Americans their jobs and eventually these horrific policies led to supply chain problems and runaway inflation.
They wrecked the country over a virus. Vote them all out.
Some of us will never forget. If we do, they’ll try this again.
This column has been republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.
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