A ‘Pandemic Amnesty’? Hell, No

E mily Oster, writing at the Atlantic, asks whether we can all just forgive and forget about what we said and did to one another during the Covid-19 pandemic. On the question of masks, school closings, and the efficacy of this or that vaccine, some people got it right, and some got it wrong. But litigating this forever is a waste of time, she argues. The headline is “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”

No, thank you. I don’t want this. And I don’t even think Emily Oster should want this. Frankly, Oster herself deserves more credit for trying to talk sense into people during the pandemic about the harms that school closures were inflicting on children.

An amnesty means throwing up our hands and simply re-declaring something all adults should already know: Men and institutions are fallible. But what we need is more forensic accountability for our institutions; one hopes (perhaps in vain) that a Republican Congress can launch a solid inquiry into the FDA and the CDC on their response to the pandemic. And we need much better reflection from journalists, experts, and the public.

Some examples should suffice. Oster writes:

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.

It’s true that most of the public didn’t know (though some were wary of the Covid messaging from the get-go). I remember the early days when, spooked by stories of vicious triaging in Wuhan and Northern Italy, we started sewing masks together in my home. But the experts knew, Dr. Anthony Fauci among them, which is why he told people on 60 Minutes that drugstore masks didn’t really do anything. Scientists like Fauci were citing decent existing studies on the questionable efficacy of cloth masks. Only later did Fauci retract that view and pretend that he’d been lying to protect supplies of PPE for front-line workers. He started wearing masks himself, although he hinted at his true feelings when he called them a “symbol” of the sort of thing we should do.

We don’t need amnesty here. Just as with Fauci admitting to the New York Times that he would shade his views on “herd immunity” based on where he thought public opinion was landing. We need to understand what role conscious deception (noble lying) plays in public-health messaging. We should investigate it precisely because, while it didn’t accomplish its ends, it did inspire backlash. We need to investigate it because perhaps the stodgy small-r republicans are right, and the very practice of expert deception is an offense against self-government. Maybe we also need to relearn the lesson from the stodgy old moralists that even the practice of noble lies tends to corrupt men and their institutions.

Oster writes that “given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic.” Fine enough. Then:

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. . . . These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck.

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach, because President Trump had supposedly recommended this treatment — when, in fact, he had done no such thing?

I remember also that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance spearheaded a false scientific consensus against the lab-leak theory, unethically suborning a science journal. By doing so, he was able to sway the balance of progressive opinion, which had the run-on effect of changing the way social-media companies governed and censored the speech across their user base of billions of people.

No, I don’t want to throw amnesty over bad actors like this.

A call for amnesty would prevent us from learning lessons. My boss, no expert in science, was able to write this confidently in April of 2020:

Among all types of closures, school shutdowns are among the most damaging to society. Younger children have no outlet for social and emotional development. Sustained shutdowns inhibit the ability of older children to meet grade-level requirements. Parents who are trying to juggle homeschooling with working full time from home are not in a position to replicate the instruction a child would receive in a full day of school. The closures also exacerbate the achievement gap between wealthier households with more resources and the ability to work from home and those that do not have that option.

Why was he so right, while people at the New York Times or in government were so wrong? The lesson is simply this. Even in a crisis we are not to be swallowed up entirely in the “current thing.” We do not begin again at Year Zero to maintain our common sense and proportion.

Yes, of course, Oster is right that millions of people fell to the wrong side of prudential questions about freedom versus safety. And of course she is right that our predispositions and political commitments tended to shape how we weighed evidence that pointed one way compared with evidence that pointed another way.

But the questions in the pandemic were not just factual disputes about a disease that was evolving quickly. They were also disputes about whether the Bill of Rights mattered anymore. Think of Bill de Blasio, telling Christians, Jews, and other religious believers that they had to abide by the city’s rule against gatherings of ten or more people, even as he himself was violating these rules in public support of the George Floyd protests.

Amnesty for this? Hell, no.