Practical Eschatology: Liberal Professor Rolls Over And Shows Her Belly

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Liberal Professor Rolls Over And Shows Her Belly

I am, of course, referring to Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, and her piece at The Atlantic, "Let's Declare A Pandemic Amnesty." You can tell how deranged she must have been as she relates how her family, masked of course, were hiking when another child got too close to her 4-year old son and her 4-years old yelled at the child: "Social distancing!" Wonder where he learned that.

But now she wants us to set it all behind us:

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

And that is the whole theme of her piece: We--speaking of the the elite that foisted ruinous policies on everyone--didn't know.

To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

She touches on vaccines, as well, but only to admit confusion over whether to go with Johnson & Johnson's standard vaccine or the mRNA variants; not whether the vaccines should have been required. (And, in fact, Oster's tweets show that she believed people should have been forced to take the vaccines). She also throws out a story to the effect that the elites saved the stupid rubes from themselves, citing to concerns of people injecting themselves with bleach to kill the virus.

Oster continues:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. ...

She wants us to forgive those that needlessly closed down public spaces like parks and beaches, those that insisted schools close and remain closed although it lead to historic declines in reading and math skills, and the fact that people were unable to get necessary medical care. Rather, she wants us to concentrate on things that can reward her, and others like her, with rich government contracts, like examining why some students in some states and school districts faired worse than others, work to get people back in to seeing their doctors, and consider school mandates for vaccinations!

What is completely lacking from her piece is suggestion that the elites should apologize, take responsibility, or suffer any consequence for their malfeasance. Rather, as she concludes, "Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated," not incorrect or wrong choices, but "complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward."

She's lying. The so-called experts knew. Fauci initially was against masking because research had long shown that simple cloth or paper masks were ineffective for containing the spread of viruses, but changed his tune when it was apparent that was the direction of the political wind. And it wasn't just a mistake made in spring 2020, but was continued and enforced by the elites throughout the pandemic. Senator Rand Paul, for instance, was censored in 2021 for saying cloth masks were ineffective.

The evidence against the necessity of school closures was also there for all to see. The BMJ journal (fka The British Medical Journal) noted in the summer of 2020, that children were neither Covid super spreaders nor were particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of the disease, even if contracted. Moreover:

"Schools remained open in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy in late 2020 and early 2021," because policy makers relied on "reports that schoolchildren did not play a major role in community transmission." In addition, "evidence from Ireland, Singapore, Norway, Israel, South Korea, and North Carolina" showed that "young children were less likely than adults to get severely sick from COVID."

Oster, herself, had written in October 2020 that schools weren't super-spreaders and warned about the educational impact of closing schools. She wrote in that article:

One might argue, again, that any risk is too great, and that schools must be completely safe before local governments move to reopen them. But this approach ignores the enormous costs to children from closed schools. The spring interruption of schooling already resulted in learning losses; Alec MacGillis’s haunting piece in The New Yorker and ProPublica highlights the plight of one child unable to attend school in one location, but it’s a marker for more. The children affected by school closures are disproportionately low-income students of color. Schools are already unequal; the unequal closures make them more so. Virtual school is available, but attendance levels are not up to par. Pediatricians have linked remote schooling to toxic stress.
Parents are struggling as well, not just children. Cities have recognized the need for child care for parents who cannot afford to quit their jobs to supervise their kids, but this has led to a haphazard network of options. Houston, for example, has opened some schools as learning centers. L.A. has learning centers set up for low-income students in alternative locations. These spur the questions: If school isn’t safe for everyone, why is it safe for low-income students? And if school is safe for low-income students, why isn’t it safe for everyone?

She concluded that "[w]e do not want to be cavalier or put people at risk. But by not opening, we are putting people at risk, too."

Even the death rates to justify all of this were obviously wrong. I want back through some of my blog posts about Covid in 2020 and 2021 and was struck by the repeated stories I had cited showing that death rates were consistently far lower than than shown by the models relied on by the elites to justify their atrocities.

But there was no hint from the elites that they were making "complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty." As Joy Pullman, writing at The Federalist points out:

We the people were never told by the Covid totalitarians that their predictions were “uncertain” and “complicated.” They were so certain of their false claims that they sent police to record the license plates of people who attended church on Easter, a constitutional and human right. They shut down schools while keeping abortion facilities and marijuana dispensaries open. They were so sure of their moral righteousness that they seemingly gleefully threatened people’s ability to feed their kids if they didn’t take experimental injections for a disease that may have posed little risk to them. The vaccine mandates led to dangerous employee shortages at hospitals, police departments, and now in the U.S. military.

She further explains:

None of this deliberately inflicted mass suffering was necessary, and that was all known early on. It wasn’t, as Oster claims, a matter of “deep uncertainty.” Among others, Dr. Scott Atlas very publicly presented strong evidence that mask mandates and shutdowns were poor policy choices throughout 2020. He was brutalized in the media and his own Ivy League university for pointing out this data. So were the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that made similar data-based arguments, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff.
It had also been long-established that lockdowns should never be employed and that forcing people into isolation and medical treatments they don’t want are bright red, flashing human rights violations. Multiple Western governments and nongovernmental organizations including the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considered the idea of lockdowns and mass quarantines years before Covid emerged and rejected these policies for both practical and ethical reasons.

In fact, as Pullman continues:

Covid wasn’t that “complicated.” The global left simply believed Covid chaos would benefit their forever goal of consolidating power. So they simply suspended our constitutional and natural human rights to worship as we believe God commands, to speak and assemble freely, to be protected from search and seizure, to use our labor freely, to decide what medical treatments we will accept into our bodies, and to be governed by officials we can vote in or out instead of lifelong bureaucrats who are endlessly rewarded for devastating failures.

Given her stance in the fall of 2020, one might consider why she is now calling for the public to simply forget the hell that they were put through. Her snide comment about the Trump Administration might be part of the answer. Spiked! is warning that "parents are extremely angry about what is happening in America’s schools. We should not be surprised if this anger spills over into the ballot box." That is, as Emily Burns argues, "With whom does Emily Oster want an amnesty? Moms, so they will return to the democratic fold."

The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Kevin Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. ... They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and causing all sort of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.
Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.

She continues:

First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like these women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit their freedoms. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of your living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose a true threat to you as a woman.

I don't know what is Oster's motivation. If it wasn't for her continued support of mandatory vaccines, I would have thought that perhaps she was trying to head off the public anger that will surely erupt when it becomes unmistakably demonstrated how dangerous are the vaccines.

But there needs to be an accounting. We wouldn't expect someone that turned a corner and struck a and killed a pedestrian in a crosswalk to get off scot-free. Even if that person was not charged with vehicular homicide, we would expect that person to be civilly liable for negligence. The same holds true in this case.

New York Governor Cuomo ordered that patients with Covid be placed into nursing homes for care resulting in thousands of needless deaths. He should be charged with homicide, as well as any other officials that were involved in formulating or carrying out his policy.

The officials that were responsible for destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions should also be punished: they violated people's civil rights which is, itself, a crime under federal law. And certainly the terrorizing of a nation and the destruction of the economy should qualify as crimes against humanity. "I was just following orders" wasn't an acceptable excuse for Nazi officers at the Nuremburg trials and the equivalent "just following CDC guidance" shouldn't be an excuse now.