The COVID pandemic seems like a distant memory we all wish we could forget. The closing of businesses, the shutting down of schools, the ridiculous masking requirements, the mandates and shaming… The putative theme of the pandemic was “we’re all in this together,” but we most certainly weren’t. The pandemic may have even brought out the worst in us and our elected (and unelected) leaders, all under the guise of the public good.
At this point, we all know the harm the lockdowns caused. Kids were out of school and their education suffered. The isolation did nothing good for anyone’s mental health. Big corporations were able to stay in business, weathering the storm, while small businesses struggled to survive — and many didn’t. Our health experts convinced us we were doing the right thing, though over time, many of us realized that something else was afoot.
And when the vaccines came, there was widespread relief that our national nightmare would be over. “Just get vaccinated,” was the message. But when people started asking questions, things got really ugly.
Related: Teachers Get Their Due Two Years After School System Fires Them for Not Getting Vaxxed
Vaccines often take years to develop. On top of the rather quick (and admittedly impressive) timeline for the COVID-19 vaccines to be developed and brought to market, we were also being sold on this new vaccine technology: mRNA vaccines. That was difficult for a lot of people to blindly accept. Worse yet, these vaccines were being pushed for children, too — despite the ample evidence that COVID-19 wasn’t particularly harmful to young people.
And so, Americans who weren’t willing to be guinea pigs for a new vaccine based on new, untested technology were treated like evil people who didn’t deserve to live.
Never forget that.
This video compilation is horrifying. These media figures used their privelege to ostracize a whole class of people, while public health officials applauded. They will go down in history as a shameful example of how not to communicate with the public during a pandemic. https://t.co/i4mYGHWINO
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) May 14, 2023
There were plenty of people with co-morbidities that put them at high risk from COVID who got vaccinated, and I don’t begrudge them that. Heck, I got the J&J vaccine because I was promised that I could resume a normal life if I did. I only got it because it wasn’t an mRNA vaccine. I’ve never been boosted, so I’m not ever considered “fully vaccinated” anymore. But the majority of Americans were never at significant risk from the virus. For them, the potential dangers of the vaccine outweighed the risks of the virus — particularly young people.
Yet, anyone who refused to get vaccinated or refused to vaccinate their children (like me) was treated like a murderer and was the target of a pressure campaign and a scare campaign. In 2021, Joe Biden falsely dubbed COVID a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and told unvaccinated Americans that they were facing a winter of “severe illness and death.”
The tactics used against unvaccinated people resembled tactics employed by totalitarian regimes to vilify those whom they believed to be undesirables. Of course, we knew these attacks were nonsensical. If the vaccines protected people from COVID, then the unvaccinated were only harming themselves by not getting jabbed. It wasn’t until last month that the FDA finally admitted that the COVID vaccines didn’t prevent infection or transmission. Well, gee, what was the point of getting them, then?
There are many vaccines that have proven themselves repeatedly and stood the test of time. It was well within reason for people to question the novel COVID vaccines. But neither the mainstream media, our health officials, nor the Biden administration saw it that way, and we must never forget the way they demeaned Americans for daring to question them.
