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Covid Amnesty? No, Thanks.
Leave it to the corporate media to come out for amnesty for all of the poor public policy decisions pushed by the federal bureaucracy, corporate media, and teachers’ unions.
Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.
So no, I will not forgive and forget, and neither should anyone else. These were not innocent mistakes, but the result of a plan to exploit people’s fears–fears that the elites did everything to stoke–for their own benefit. Trillions of dollars were transferred from ordinary people to billionaires, children suffered enormous learning loss, lives were ruined, literally. People still cannot enter the US (legally) without a COVID vaccine. It is insane.
They realize most of the things they pushed for — shutdown of schools, of the economy, face masks were wrong. It was known fairly early on that this virus affected the elderly more than the young, but that did not stop hacks like Randi Weingarten from shutting down in-classroom teaching. We won’t forget how they praised Cuomo, who pushed for lockdowns, while denigrating DeSantis for wanting to open up.
Published in General
We are still paying the consequences for the misguided and heavy handed way this pandemic was dealt with, both financially and otherwise. Forgive and forget may be a feel-good phrase but it does nothing to support the kind of learning from mistakes (or worse) that leads to better outcomes when this type of problem arises again. And it will happen again and again.
There cannot be universal agreement as to what the proper response should be next time but there absolutely must be open discussion from all sides, the very thing that was proscribed during the panic, or we will simply repeat past mistakes.
In all things at all times please remember that anyone who seeks to shut down open communication has either a weak position or nefarious motives or perhaps both.
I grant amnesty to the CCP. It’s as far as I’ll go!
The treatment of people like Dr Jay Bhattacharya by Fauci et al is despicable
The proper response to such inane amnesty hogwash:
This sums up my attitude to Covid amnesty:
God will, but I won’t
A call for mercy and forgiveness from those who showed no mercy.
I can forgive honest errors by honest people, especially as events first unfold and facts are unknown or uncertain. But what we are talking about here are people who tolerated no disagreement and systematically silenced and punished dissenters.
Or if they admitted they were wrong – see Fauci
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Ace:
The HotAir post by David Strom is terrific. Measured, rational and kind. He makes a clear distinction between the mistakes of the very early days of Covid, when people were scrambling, and really didn’t know very much, and the carefully orchestrated oppression, compulsion, and restriction that was imposed–against an ever-increasing fact and knowledge base–once political opportunism and the chance to take down Trump overwhelmed any consideration of what was actually the moral, ethical, or right thing to do. Forgive the first? Sure. The second? Not a chance.
The article he’s reviewing doesn’t even try to make that distinction. It’s the usual virtue-signaling pabulum of the Left, in which the only (glancing) attempt at referencing a deliberate fraud inflicted on the American people during the Age of Covid refers to “remember[ing] when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach.” It airbrushes out the malfeasance of Fauci, Birx, and Wolensky, and the nonsense spouted by the current occupant of the White House over the course of years:
So, let’s not have accountability. Let’s not debate the “role that messaging about COVID vaccines” played in the disastrous situation we now find ourselves in, let’s simply forget about it and move on.
IOW, as the aptly named author of this nonsensical melange seems to be saying:
But I do mind. I spent the first several months of lockdown caring, through his last days, for my very ill husband. To be fair, his doctor was willing to put him in a dementia ward in the local hospital. At which point, the door would have been slammed in my face, he’d have been allowed no visitors, he’d never have seen an unmasked, smiling human face again, I’d have had to Zoom in my final words to him, and he’d have (inevitably) died even more confused and frightened than he already was, and alone. No thank you. To put people in the position of having to make such invidious choices–or giving them no choice at all–and then to blame them for doing a poor job of self-care (“many people have neglected their health care over the past several years”) is the ultimate insult. Forgive that? Not on your life.
Every time you see a mask out there — and you still do — you see a person whose fragile mind has been preyed upon by the COVID fanatics in government.
These people have been taught to fear contact with their fellow human beings. They have been taught that people are nothing but disease vectors. They are mentally damaged. And that is entirely on the government.
There must be reparations.
After hubris comes nemesis.
After hubris comes a fat severance package and a plum position in the beltway.
I do so enjoy these classical references.
Nemesis is not just a natural consequence, it is a necessary consequence.
My daughter had a piano concert Saturday. Enough students to fill both sides of the program and it lasted almost two hours. Still had two or three families in masks. I didn’t catch it, but my wife is quite sure one kid had trouble because he couldn’t see the music clearly. People need to swing from yardarms. I’m afraid our tyrant is going to be rewarded with reelection next Tuesday instead of being covered in tar and feathers.
The Atlantic author not only says we shouldn’t punish those who made wrong decisions, we shouldn’t even try to understand why they made those wrong decisions. The author says we should focus all our efforts on solving the problems the wrong decisions created. But without understanding why those wrong decisions were made, our ability to solve them, and to prevent similarly wrong decisions in the future, is severely limited.
This may surprise people here, but I am for amnesty from prison sentencing – but with conditions.
Let the hospital admins who by May 2020 went along with CDC/NIH recs to not use HCQ plus zinc or ivermectin now personally give half their salaries and retirement funds to people who lost family members while in the hospital for COVID. (And in many cases they were in the hospital for other matters,but their death was listed as “COVID” because they tested + for it.)
While in the hospital, COV patients were slammed with rocephin, fentanyl and remdesivir. Some elderly people were slammed with at least 12 other drugs as well. This would include the anesthesia needed for putting them ventilators. Once on a vent, a person’s chance of making it out of the hospital alive were usually less than 10%.
So let’s see hospital admins make up for the murderous activities they chose to do.
I’m sure their attitude at the time was “Who can blame us? After all, we receive X amount of thousands of dollars if we test a person who enters the hospital for COVID and the test shows they are COV positive.
“We also get thousands more if we put them on ventilators, so let’s do that too! Who cares if she was a victim of a mugging and had been stabbed with a knife? It is quite easy to load them up with fentanyl. Then once woozy enough, have them sign papers saying that they understand they have COV and that they need to be ventilated.”
Repeat as needed for everyone on the food chain that was COVID.
Go after the execs whose holdings include nursing homes where family members were denied visits to loved ones. Where elderly people refused the jabs, but had them forced on them, and were found dead in their beds the next morning.
Also where elderly people turned their faces to the wall, refused food, and died within a week or so, due to loneliness and heartbreak.
Let’s leave Fauci out of prison but make sure he is on call to assist those who are suffering from injuries caused by the vaccine.
I don’t care if he is 80 years old. Let him be the one to change, free of charge, the catheter in a vax injured person’s body, a protocol that person will need to oversee every day for the next 60 years.
Same for Bill Gates.
Oh but of course, before that duo can begin their assigned duties, lets make sure they have caught up on all of their vaxxes on the COV schedule. This time the injections will occur with the caps off the needles!
I would prefer to celebrate the people who were right about COVID-19. See my post at https://ricochet.com/1331941/who-are-the-covid-19-heroes/. Here are some of them:
Jim Geraghty who exposed the Wuhan Lab and exploded the Wet Markets theory.
Ron DeSantis opened up Florida and was label “DeathSantis.”
Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., used his position as a Stanford Medical School Professor to cast doubt on the COVID-19 hysteria.
The signers of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Dr. John Campbell, author of the Ivermectin Meta-Analysis.
Bethany Mandel who advocated for schools to open, and was called a Grandma Killer for her efforts.
President Trump should be praised for the extremely quick development of the vaccines.
Most of all, Wuhan Whistleblower Li Wenliang, who gave his life trying to stop COVID-19.
Ricochet which kept the conversation open.
Most of these people were attacked by those who want amnesty .
so we should forget the “expert mob” so they repeat it for the next crisis?
Should we forget the Fauci used his power in the Fed Gov to attack Bhattacharaya?
Please do not hijack the thread, Gary. Your hero thread is getting comments and you shouldn’t try to change the subject on THIS thread.
Like the politicians who run on having years of experience. Yes, you have experience, but you were always wrong. You haven’t shown that you’ve learned from your mistakes and plan to continue to govern in a bad way.
Example #1 being Joe Freakin’ Biden.
Amnesty? No. Fricking. Way.
So solving the problems created…maybe Trump buys the Atlantic?
Or Musk, but I think he already has his hands full.
The Megyn Kelly podcast 424 had really good analysis.
Musk is a businessman wooing the CCP for his Tesla line. I am watching events with interest at Twitter, and I have nothing against Afro-American businessmen as such, but Musk is a complicated character. Eggs and baskets and so on.
I think the accepted term is African-American, or Black.