"Why does nobody want to talk about the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics in our lifetimes?" asks the Wall Street Journal's Scott Atlas.
The answer is wrapped up in how the world's elite institutions have circled the wagons and refused to confront their epic failures in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. They have chosen to "kill with silence," as the old proverb instructs. Rather than engage in debate and argument, they have simply pretended that nothing ever happened.
The elite institutions at fault include the media, Congress, the public health establishment, teachers, religious folk, big business, and the executive branch of the U.S. government. They were all wrong about many, many aspects of the pandemic and caused incalculable, generational harm to hundreds of millions of people.
There has yet to be a reckoning that will hold all of these individuals accountable.
What kind of a "reckoning"? Webster's defines "reckoning" in several ways, but I'm referring to the biblical definition of "reckoning."
"A reckoning can also mean a time of reckoning with past actions or a future judgment, often used in a religious context."
Indeed, an old-fashioned, rack-and-ruin plague was visited on the world. A large part of that plague was a disease, a cytokine storm that attacked the heart and lungs, killing 7 million people.
But tens of millions more individuals were harmed by a plague of incompetence, mismanagement, misinformation (deliberate and otherwise), and a grasping for power and control that visits all major world events as small men and women look to aggrandize themselves.
Some of those small men and women are scientists who gave up the search for truth in order to curry favor with politicians. “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives," reads the New York Times headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci’s March 16 op-ed. She wrote about the effort five years ago by the scientific community to stand behind Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, which lost a grant because it was going to perform gain-of-function research on bats at the same Wuhan lab from which a growing consensus of scientists now believe COVID-19 leaked.
When The Lancet published a letter signed by dozens of researchers and scientists claiming there was no chance that the COVID pandemic could have been the result of a lab leak, every major media outlet picked up the thread that only kooks and crazies believed that a lab leak started the pandemic. Even as scientific evidence began to accumulate that it wasn't only crackpots who believed the lab leak theory was possible, the media stuck with the notion that anyone who thought it possible was a kook. Some media still do.
It's not just the media that needs a reckoning. There's also the U.S. public health establishment, the chief pandemic spokesperson of which, Antony Fauci, was deified by the press even after it was revealed in congressional hearings that much of the official advice about how to protect yourself from COVID wasn't based on science at all.
Fauci was too quick to lockdown, and he was too hesitant to highlight research that would have opened schools and businesses far sooner and with far less damage to the economy and — more importantly — the education of our children. His advice on how to stay safe was constantly changing.
Why did people accept the lockdowns? Why did parents go along with school closures? There was some pushback, and some red state governors opened schools and workplaces far earlier than many blue state governors.
Why did free people accept Draconian and illogical lockdowns? The answer reveals the reason for the silence on the pandemic. Censorship and propaganda are part of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two lies—that there was a consensus of experts in favor of lockdowns, and that dissent from that false consensus was dangerous.
Yet that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is also that so many smart and influential people were complicit. They bought into and even advocated irrational measures that defied data, biology and common sense. That acquiescence—frankly, cowardice—and the failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that, understandably, no one wants to revisit.
Indeed, there's also the nauseating hypocrisy from many elites in and out of the media. Recall that large gatherings were forbidden in the early part of the pandemic. But when it came to Black Lives Matter protests, those same elites gave their blessing.
We'll never know how many people died who caught COVID at those marches, encouraged by Democrats and the left. There will never be a reckoning for that.
Every one of these changes happened without much reflection on why we had previously got it wrong. Every one of them spent credibility that was desperately needed with the American people. Every one meant treating people, frankly, like they weren’t very smart, and in the long run did incalculable damage to public trust.
So why hasn’t there been more of a reckoning? The primary reason is that there are incredibly powerful incentives for everyone involved not to participate in one.
Congress as a group, won't hold anyone accountable in any material sense, not even the teachers' union that defied science and logic to keep schools closed despite the massive harm being done to the intellectual and social development of children. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten may be responsible for ruining the future of millions of children.
Also for our VIPs: European Countries and Canada Issue 'Travel Advisories' For Coming to the U.S.
The most important casualty of the pandemic and why a reckoning is vital to our future is the loss of trust in our institutions. Admittedly, COVID didn't begin the process of the loss of institutional trust — it began in the late 1950s.
But the astonishing acceleration of institutional loss of trust during COVID is both worrying and expected. The American people are no longer sheep to be led around by the nose. A healthy (sometimes unhealthy) skepticism has been put in place. It's now up to our institutions to work to regain our trust and begin the process of making amends for their catastrophic response to the pandemic.
