You can tell a lot about someone’s outlook on reality by his choice of words. When speaking of the disaster that began to unfold in 2020, do you refer to it as the Covid “pandemic” or the Covid “lockdowns and vaccine mandates”? Obviously, the former emphasizes the virus-borne illness, while the latter underlines the government and other responses to the illness. I was at dinner on Friday night with a nice lady who spoke about the “pandemic,” and I said something along the lines that it was the lockdowns that really troubled me. 

She looked at me, confused, as if I had stopped speaking English. She asked, “The lockdowns?”

An Increasingly Urgent Need

Dr. Scott Atlas at Stanford’s Hoover Institution wrote an important piece on Monday in the Wall Street Journal addressing just this point. He’s noticed that the task of reforming our American institutions has come to be recognized as increasingly urgent. Why? What got this thinking started? His answer is the Covid response: “The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.”

Did he suddenly stop speaking English, too? From, “America Still Needs a Covid Reckoning”:

To understand why the pandemic finally forced us to address institutional failure, we must acknowledge the facts. The virus didn’t cause lockdowns. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns, which failed to stop the deaths and the spread. Lockdowns inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people. A review of 34 countries with available data found that through July 2023 “the US alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden.” A January 2023 paper in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control estimates that over the next 15 to 20 years, unemployment alone will cause 900,000 to 1.2 million additional American deaths — from the lockdown, not the virus.

More than massive incompetence by bureaucrats, more than a lack of critical thinking, we saw a failure of society’s moral and ethical compass so pervasive that we have lost trust in most institutions and leaders — trust that is essential to the function of any free and diverse society.

Especially in the U.S. — where the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” — it is stunning that liberty fell so quickly and thoroughly by government decree and with public assent.

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. 

Yes, it was the lockdowns not the virus that revealed all this. The very worst of it may be the school shutdowns that did so much damage to young people, in the name of their own safety, from which many have still not fully recovered. Yet these things are insufficiently recognized. Many of us remain firmly under the spell of “the experts.” The situation is particularly bad in states like mine. Here’s a timeline of shame for Washington State.

Very Much Like 9/11

Dr. Atlas calls for a “Covid reckoning” but doesn’t say exactly how that’s supposed to be achieved. On the Humanize podcast with our colleague Wesley J. Smith, Stanford health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been more specific. Currently awaiting confirmation to head the NIH, Bhattacharya has said he wants, as Wesley highlighted, “a national commission to investigate the country’s response to COVID.” It sounds very much like the attention that was paid to how the 9/11 attacks could have happened. 

Back then, Congress appointed a balanced group of Republicans and Democrats who published a lengthy report. How the lockdowns and the mandates could have happened in a free country is not less important. Atlas warns against the temptation to “turn the page,” and thus learn nothing as a country: “Failure to demand and issue official statements of truth about the pandemic management after the devastation endured by millions would eliminate all accountability.”

We have a refreshed set of leaders in Washington, DC, but I’m not hearing that plans in Congress for a Covid commission are afoot. Let’s not forget about that.