If T.S. Eliot measured out his life in coffee spoons, I, like most self-respecting Irish Italian New Yorkers, have measured out mine in baseball seasons. To me, 1998 isn’t the year of the Monica Lewinsky scandal but of the Yankees’ record-breaking 125-win season. Nor is 2009 the year of former President Barack Obama’s inauguration, but instead of the Yankees’ World Series win over the Phillies, set to the tune of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”
And despite the momentousness of 2020, which produced any number of enduring images, the memory of baseball games played in empty stadiums will always come to mind first: the crack of the bat ringing awkwardly through the folding seats and concrete corridors, the players feigning enthusiasm despite the silence in the stands, and the players chewing gum under masks in the dugouts.
And like most other COVID protection measures foisted upon the nation that year by a moronic and malevolent triumvirate of bureaucrats, business executives, and legacy news media pamphleteers, COVID baseball was based upon false assumptions and an overeagerness among the powerful to exert control.
The sheer magnitude of the establishment’s pandemic failure is difficult to quantify since each aspect is interrelated and still unfolding. But a short list of lowlights might look something like this: The actions of the ruling establishment during the pandemic wrecked the economy, ballooned the already untenable level of national debt, torpedoed learning outcomes for a generation of students, exacerbated a long-festering youth mental-health epidemic, violated free speech, drove up drug overdoses, and further deepened the American cultural divide. Incredibly, this was all done without significantly improving the death count, which could be the only conceivable justification for such heavy-handedness. All in all, the United States managed one of the least successful pandemic responses in the world.
These pitiful results are the fruits of corrupt leaders who imposed terrible ideas upon a frightened public. Perhaps the worst of these, and that is really saying something, was school closures. This “public health” measure, which remained in place long after it was discredited, rested upon the false assumption that COVID-19 posed a significant threat to young people, which it didn’t, of course. Major teachers unions such as the American Federation of Teachers pressed hard for schools to remain closed and attempted to use the crisis as leverage for securing nonrelated policy changes, including the cancellation of student loan debt and a suspension of teacher performance evaluations. The consequences of these closures have been cataclysmic.
Not far behind is the damage done to small businesses, many of which shuttered, 40% of U.S. small businesses in all, during 2020 and 2021. Unnecessary and destructive measures, such as fining people who violated social distancing rules and mask mandates outdoors, created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that led to the demise of mom and pop shops.
According to a recent study by the Lancet, states that imposed the harshest COVID measures, such as California, fared no better in preventing unnecessary death than states such as Florida, which, even with a much older population, ended up with a comparable death rate while remaining open for business.
The policy of societywide masking similarly had no positive effect on health outcomes while producing dire societal consequences, including stunted brain development in children. The results of the 2023 Cochrane Review — which, despite the false insistence of legacy media outlets that it is simply “one study among many,” is considered the world’s gold-standard metastudy, or a “study of studies” — demolished the idea that masking works to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses on a societal level. It is impossible to forget the fervor with which masking proponents demeaned critics. Let’s just say that the apologies have been less intense.
But nothing did more to turn people against one another than persistent untruths about vaccines, in particular, the lies that “vaccines stop the spread” and that “vaccines are completely safe and effective.” The former claim, shouted from the rooftops by figures across the mainstream landscape from Dr. Anthony Fauci to Rachel Maddow, was used to shame skeptics and pressure people into receiving the vaccine under false pretenses. Tens of thousands were fired from their jobs for refusing to take a vaccine that has since proven to carry far more risk than was initially communicated, while many thousands more took the vaccine against their better judgment out of fear of losing employment. And while the vaccines did indeed help some people, these false assertions gave oxygen to some of the wilder theories about their nature.
Public trust in institutions eroded further still when it was revealed that the Biden White House colluded with social media companies to censor people who dared question the government line on COVID. The lab leak theory of the pandemic’s origin, for instance, was labeled “misinformation” by Twitter, and Facebook called it a “false claim.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, ever eager to provide cover for establishment malfeasance, puffed out his chest on his broadcast and declared, “This coronavirus was not manmade. That is not a possibility.”
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But, of course, we know now that it probably was manmade and that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a biohazard event in late 2019. This is now the favored position of the FBI and the Energy Department’s elite “Z Division,” which exists solely to monitor foreign weapons of mass destruction, among others.
To reestablish public trust in our institutions, which we must if we are to perform better during the inevitable next public health crisis, those responsible must be held to account. Candidates running for reelection in 2024 at every level must be forced to address their mistakes, and media figures must undergo scrutiny for the role they played in failing the country during the crisis of the century.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.