President Donald Trump’s statement about the COVID-19 lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the report of the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have revealed COVID-19’s origin and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health’s culpability for fostering and then mishandling the pandemic.
Calls for accountability have grown accordingly.
Recommended Stories
- Can Democrats rebuild public trust after a decade of lies?
- Ban congressional stock trading
- Endangered Species Act overdue for major overhaul
After all, we naturally want those who made serious policy errors that needlessly killed 20 million people, cost U.S. households some $19 trillion in lost wealth, caused our national debt to soar by $5.6 trillion, and saddled our schoolkids with irreparable educational deficits to pay a price. We want to know who to blame, and we want them fired, disgraced, shamed, shunned, and if anything illegal was involved, jailed. And we know that there is plenty of culpability to go around.
Matt Ridley has done an excellent job of exposing much of the wrongdoing. Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) May 21 hearing, “The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines,” revealed how the CDC and NIH turned a blind eye to deaths and serious injuries from the vaccine mandates. Journalists Matt Taibbi and Alex Berenson prevailed over Internal Revenue Service harassment, debanking, and deplatforming to expose the Biden White House-Silicon Valley censorship complex that tried to keep Americans from learning the truth about the pandemic.
Plenty of culprits should be made to pay for their COVID-era sins, but even if every last one of them gets the treatment they deserve, it can’t be called a reckoning. That’s because culpability is only half of the accountability equation.
The other half is conformity, the impulse that made many Americans blindly obey the dictum to “follow the science” even when there was no science behind medical authorities’ decrees. The conformist impulse drove some to become enforcers for the regime, reporting neighbors who broke rules against gatherings and confronting those who dared appear in public without a mask.
Then there were the state governments and their hirelings. Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) says no church services? Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) says stores can’t sell garden seeds? Citizens must be confined to their homes under virtual house arrest? Desperate small business owners must watch their dreams and livelihoods die, braving arrest to protest vainly outside the governor’s mansion or statehouse?
Public servants, from state and local health officials to police and prosecutors, went after offenders. They say they were only following orders, like the police officers dragging a maskless man off a bus in Philadelphia. Never mind that 99% of the masks worn during COVID-19 were useless. Cloth coverings, sloppily worn, or medical-grade masks improperly fitted did nothing to stop the spread.
Masking was political theater, nothing more. The same is true of the 6-foot social distancing rule (inexplicably only 3 feet in Europe), which Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admitted wasn’t based on any scientific evidence whatsoever.
The Black Lives Matter riots should have been our collective “the emperor has no clothes” moment. If social gatherings of thousands of people in cities across the country were allowed, despite causing some 26 deaths and more than $2 billion in property damage, it should have been apparent to all of us that the rules were meaningless. There was clearly no epidemiological basis for shuttering schools and businesses, banning concerts, or outlawing family gatherings.
In fairness, Dr. Fauci did a good job stifling debate over COVID-19 measures and covering up the CDC and NIH’s lack of evidence for their preventive mandates. Journalists, some complacent and others complicit, fell unquestioningly into line behind the authorities. The government and Silicon Valley censorship cabal rooted out and silenced dissenters.
One of the few social media sites that allowed free discourse was LinkedIn. Swimming against the tide is my norm. Throughout the pandemic, I found and posted research and articles on topics ranging from Sweden’s decision to keep its schools open to the Great Barrington Declaration for my network of political operatives, current and former government officials, and journalists to contemplate. This was before LinkedIn imposed restrictions on “political” content last year, and spreading the word was my own form of protest.
What was yours? This is the question we all must ask ourselves.
By allowing our elected and appointed leaders to impose draconian measures without accompanying evidence to support them, we, the people, became the greatest threat to our own civil liberties and natural rights. Until we personally confront our conformity and how we knelt to authority, we will be doomed to relive this episode of nationwide spinelessness in the next crisis.
When it comes to government edicts or authority of any kind, including scientific and academic experts, we should bear in mind President Ronald Reagan’s advice to a group of high school students in 1982.
“I’ve had to answer some of your questions with some figures of what I claim are facts,” Reagan said, “Don’t let me get away with it. Check me out. Make sure what I told you checks out and is true.”
“But do that,” he continued, “to everyone else who comes before you and sings a song and tries to tell you something. Don’t be the sucker generation.”
John B. Roberts II worked in the Reagan White House and was executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. He is an author and artist. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.