No, Despite Being Wrong Since 2020, There's Been No COVID Reckoning In Politics
In a spectacular feat of reality-denying partisanship, the political left has convinced itself that they've somehow admitted wrongdoing on their extremist COVID policies. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the truth.
As a reminder, the left, thanks in large part to Anthony Fauci, shut down businesses, schools, playgrounds, sports, and live events. They used curfews, capacity limits, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, created "tier system" reopening charts based on nothing, dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a racist conspiracy theory, and labeled anyone who disagreed with them.
None of the politicians involved in this inexcusable, world-destroying, anti-science policy-making has apologized for any of it. Not one has admitted they were wrong. Fauci, a far-left politician himself, has not only never apologized or admitted wrongdoing, but had the audacity to say that criticisms of him and his policy positions were inexcusable criticisms of science itself.
The most that individuals like Gavin Newsom or other prominent members of the left will do is say that they didn't know at the time what we know now. Except, of course, that's also a complete lie.
Jan 28, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; California Governor Gavin Newsom attends the NFC Championship football game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Left Wing Media Continues With COVID Reality Denial
The Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Chait revisiting COVID lockdowns around the fifth anniversary of "15 Days to Slow the Spread." And it made the remarkably inaccurate case that the left has engaged in a far-ranging "searching self-reflection" on their failed policies.
"Liberals have engaged in searching self-reflection—on school closings, the lab-leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs," Chait writes.
This is, of course, nonsense.
Where is the "searching self-reflection" on mask mandates? Where is the "searching self-reflection" on vaccine mandates? Or firing thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, for refusing to get a vaccine that did nothing to stop infection or transmission? Where is the "searching self-reflection" on the businesses that were shut down, in many cases, permanently, because Democratic governors and mayors turned into fanatical extremists for years on end?
Where's the apology for letting it all continue well after it was clear that their mandates and lockdowns weren't working?
Chait's delusional article only gets worse from there.
He claims that the shift in the lab leak discussion shows how self-reflective the political left is on COVID. Praising Zeynep Tufecki for her intellectual honesty.
"Conservatives, who generally assume that the mainstream media are as ideologically rigid as the conservative media, appear not to have noticed any of this until Tufekci’s most recent contribution to the genre, which produced an onslaught of football-spiking. (Tufekci herself was skeptical of public-health guidance throughout the pandemic)," he writes.
Except Tufecki helped shut down self-reflection on masking by demanding that a prominent scientific institution contradict its own evidence showing that masks didn't work. All because Tufecki herself, as a sociologist, had written an unjustifiable, inaccuracy-riddled paper with a software engineer demanding more masks.
READ: New York Times Pressured Scientists To Lie About Masks
She wasn't skeptical of public health guidance, she contributed to it. The CDC had correctly avoided telling the public to wear masks early on in the pandemic, only changing their mind after another inaccuracy-riddled piece of misinformation Tufecki wrote in the Times in spring 2020.
Chait is, as he so frequently does, completely misleading his readers in order to support his political party. Though at least he admits that he and the Times are left-wing media.
As always, he defends the left's historic atrocities during COVID by saying it was "an understandable bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events."
"I don’t want to suggest that the political left always followed the science. The initial response to COVID, after an understandable bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events, was afflicted with ideological rigidity," he writes.
"Liberals got some things about the pandemic correct and other things wrong, and over time, many of them have disavowed or at least moved away from their wrong beliefs."
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the truth. This is an objective lie. A purposeful lie, to avoid responsibility and accountability for his party. The left, including the high priest of politically-minded pseudoscience and quack "cures," Anthony Fauci, has done nothing to "disavow" or "move away from" their wrong beliefs.
Literally THIS YEAR, hospitals in the far-left Bay Area have been forcing hospital visitors to wear masks. This year. The head of public health in LA has threatened mask mandates every single winter since the start of the pandemic. Even after her own data showed they didn't work.
There's been no reckoning on vaccine mandates; it took a new administration, again, literally this year, to end vaccine-related discrimination for those seeking green cards.
READ: Riley Gaines Helps End US Government COVID Vaccine Mandate
Chait is, quite simply, lying.
And not just about the "self-reflection" nonsense.
We knew in 2020 that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), the mandates left wing media and politicians salivated over, did not work. Not just from observational data, which confirmed over and over again that mandates and lockdowns had failed. But from scientific research papers published in 2020 demonstrating that there was no noticeable effect from the incorporation of NPIs. Anywhere.
Here's a sampling of just one example.
"Given the observation that transmission rates for COVID-19 fell virtually everywhere in the world during this early pandemic period, we are concerned that these studies may substantially overstate the role of government-mandated NPI’s in reducing disease transmission due to an omitted variable bias. Moreover, given the observation that disease transmission rates have remained low with relatively low dispersion across locations worldwide for the past several months as NPI’s have been lifted, we are concerned that estimates of the effectiveness of NPI’s in reducing disease transmission from the earlier period may not be relevant for forecasting the impact of the relaxation of those NPI’s in the current period, due to some unobserved switch in regime."
Their conclusion is even more damning for Chait's "argument."
"One of the central policy questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is the question of which non-pharmeceutical interventions governments might use to influence the transmission of the disease. Our ability to identify empirically which NPI’s have what impact on disease transmission depends on there being enough independent variation in both NPI’s and disease transmission across locations as well as our having robust procedures for controlling for other observed and unobserved factors that might be influencing disease transmission. The facts that we document in this paper cast doubt on this premise."
"Our finding in Fact 1 that early declines in the transmission rate of COVID-19 were nearly universal worldwide suggest that the role of region-specific NPI’s implemented in this early phase of the pandemic is likely overstated. This finding instead suggests that some other factor(s) common across regions drove the early and rapid transmission rate declines"
Again, this is from August 2020. We knew then, as we know now, that government mandates and lockdowns were useless against the virus, and devastatingly harmful for society and the economy. Chait and his party refused to listen then, and refuse to listen now. Instead, they find it more mentally tolerable to lie, deflect, misinform and revise history. Acknowledging the role they played in a historic disaster is too difficult for them to accept. But no matter what they say now, that's exactly what they caused. With zero accountability for any of it.