By\u00a0Karol Markowicz<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Five years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit our shores and forced us into our homes, we\u2019re in the midst of a strange sort of denialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You may remember schools being shuttered<\/a>, small businesses being destroyed, and small children developing speech impediments because they were unnecessarily forced to wear masks. I certainly do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now it turns out no one supported any of that, and none of it was anybody\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not just Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who\u2019s been popping up<\/a> every few weeks to lie that she super-duper, really and truly wanted schools open<\/a> in 2020 and 2021, despite actually being the villain who kept the poorest kids out of classrooms for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait and others<\/a> have attempted it, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now influential economist Tyler Cowen says we\u2019re being too hard on the people who caused us so much needless pain and misery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA lot of people do not want to admit it,\u201d he wrote this week in the Free Press, \u201cbut when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cowen weaves many unrelated pandemic measures together into a narrative that neatly absolves the elites of blame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, Operation Warp Speed produced a vaccine quickly<\/a> \u2014 but no, most of the economic activity our businesses lost was not \u201cgoing away in any case,\u201d as he asserts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sure, he admits, \u201cmost states should have ended the lockdowns sooner\u201d \u2014 then claims they \u201cmattered less\u201d\u00a0than we all recall<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, he declares, \u201cthose restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaslighting at its finest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When our family fled for Florida<\/a> in January 2022, my children were still forced to mask between bites<\/em> as they ate their lunches outside<\/a> on the frozen ground at their New York City public schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, unemployment in Florida and Texas has declined. Turns out it\u2019s not as easy as it looks to switch an economy off and then on again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cowen does admit, \u201cNot reopening the schools was a big mistake and meant a lot of lost learning\u201d \u2014 but insists, \u201cplenty of elites protested at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did they? When? And where were these elites \u201cprotesting,\u201d exactly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t say so lest they be excommunicated from their liberal tribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that, in fact, was the core problem of that era: Many of the \u201cmistakes\u201d made during COVID were actually just the shoring up of political alliances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toward the end of President Trump\u2019s first term, groupthink on the left had become overwhelming, as virtue-signalers policed one another to make sure no one stepped out of line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The COVID era collided with cancel culture and created a uniquely poisonous herd mentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his new book \u201cAbundance of Caution,\u201d David Zweig lays out how one narrative developed to enforce the liberal line on COVID policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKids\u2019 education suffered irreversible damage during COVID pandemic lockdowns \u2013 new book holds media, pols accountable<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n