Emily Oster, writing in the Atlantic, has launched a pre-emptive plea for amnesty for advocates of authoritarian Covid measures. The viral article lit the powder keg on raw anger. ‘Osterism’ describes the attitude of forgive, forget and move on because we didn’t know but meant well. Abracadabra. Puff! it’s all gone’. ‘Getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing’, she writes. Oh, but it was, Ms Oster, and your lot own it. All things considered, this may well be the biggest moral failing in modern Western civilisation.

Oster says people couldn’t have known that transmission is rare outdoors, masks are not very good at blocking viruses and kids are a low-risk group for viral spread. Except each one of these was conventional wisdom. Departures from them represented evidence-free radical experimentation. On 7 May 2020, the BBC published a chart showing just how the risk of dying with Covid tracked the ‘normal’ distribution of age-stratified death rates. The extensive range of predicted harms are also well documented. In a recent review of several studies, John Ioannidis and colleagues conclude the survival rate of Covid-infected healthy under-70s, who make up 94 per cent of the world’s population was a staggering 99.905 per cent before vaccines became available. For under-20s, it’s 99.9997 per cent. Experts from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine used subsequent actual data to back-calculate a survival rate of 99.9992 per cent for under-20s in Britain. The doomsday model from Neil Ferguson in March 2020 that precipitated lockdowns estimated the mortality rate to be twenty times higher. With his past record, why did anyone give him a platform to propagate yet another set of ‘Sky is Falling’ warnings?

Check out the list of resources from Brownstone (https://brownstone.org/articles/what-we-knew-in-the-early-days/) of just how much was known already in early 2020. The Spectator Australia has gained a worldwide reputation for the scepticism expressed right from the start by several authors. Then tell us: which major ineffectual/harmful lockdown consequence was not predicted? Apologists have memory-holed what was known, thrown a cloak over solid data from the Diamond Princess, airbrushed the taunts hurled at nonconforming governments like Sweden and Florida, are silent on their embarrassing embrace of dubious claims from China, and in denial on their shrill denunciation of sceptical voices and attempts to censor, humiliate and fire dissenting doctors and scientists. This is detailed in a recent article in Minerva by Australian and Israeli authors. The policies are not all behind us. Many are still ongoing. The tactics developed during Covid to psychologically manipulate people’s beliefs and coerce compliance with policy diktats are already being used by some governments, says Stephen McMurray, for climate alarmism. I did not consent. I haven’t forgotten. I do not forgive. Not now, not ever. I resent the imputation that efforts to study the existing literature and publicly available data to try to get it right was mainly down to ‘luck’.

In many countries including Australia, excess deaths are running above historical averages. The mainstream media is slowly starting to raise the possibility that control measures may indeed be causing more deaths, especially in younger people. Lockdowns caused cascading economic disasters. National wealth is an essential enabler of first-world health services. Yet they covered up their mulishness by vilifying lockdown critics as wanting to prioritise the economy over lives. Lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates, rooted not in science but in smug self-righteous groupthink and assumptions-driven modelling, made a metaphorical bonfire of cherished liberties and freedoms. All the institutional checks on arbitrary abuses of power failed miserably, from parliament and the judiciary to human rights machinery, media and professional associations. No rational public health harm-benefit analysis could justify the lockdown restrictions and mandates. Not then, not now.

The precautionary principle was flipped to enact policies that we knew would inflict harms, with inadequate knowledge of any positive good they would deliver. The self-aggrandising public health clerisy gravely damaged the common good. The instantly-forged mass consensus on Covid policy has delivered sicker, poorer and unhappier populations. There is no better examplar of the pathology of denialism than the ‘duplicitous’ and furiously ‘backpedalling’ Anthony Fauci, with his vicious efforts to crush dissent and destroy the professional reputation of critics. Not just individuals but public health institutions, as well, resorted to ethically questionable gaslighting, half-truths and dissembling. Americans’ trust in the CDC has fallen, says Dr Marty Makary from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Professing ignorance now cannot excuse the brutality and severity of pandemic measures: wholesale house arrests of healthy populations, mass transfer of wealth from the poor to the mega-rich, exposing the working class to infection risk and job losses while shielding the laptop class from economic pain, violations of bodily integrity, bans on peaceful protest, the spread of the surveillance, administrative and biosecurity state, the transformation of citizens into family, friends and neighbourhood snitches, the treatment of people as germ-ridden disease carriers and biohazards, the sheer dehumanisation of people who just asked to be left alone, the cruelty of denying final goodbyes to dying parents and grandparents and the emotional closure of full-service funerals, the state diktats of whom we could meet, how many, where and for how long; what we could buy, during which hours and from where; and the theft of children’s education and economic security by loading them with debt decades into the future.

Forgive and forget the harms done to our precious children? Hell no. Those who pointed out inconvenient facts were hounded from the public square by the baying mob that now wants to erase recent history and quietly move on. Those responsible for our health and welfare chose to terrorise and harm us. There can be no closure until they’ve paid a price. Zealots like the Australian’s Jack the Insider (Peter Hoysted) continue their campaign of abuse. Michael Hiltzik argued in the LA Times in January that it may be ‘a little ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents’, who received ‘their just deserts’, but it is necessary to teach them a lesson on the benefits of vaccines. Tell me again why he deserves an amnesty? Having given us no quarter, they should expect none in return. Seeing as how they copied Chinese-style totalitarianism, how about Chinese-style public self-criticisms for penance as well?