Let’s Demand a Covid Mea Culpa

T he pandemic measures that closed businesses, churches, and, worst of all, schools had serious costs and caused real damage. We as a country cannot and should not allow our leaders to escape blame for their failures. As I wrote last week:

Democrats, including our president, chose poorly, and they should pay a political price for those mistakes. Their continuing lies about those past errors should not be allowed to stand. It is long past time for our political leaders, the education establishment, and public-health authorities to admit their failures and own up to them.

I am not necessarily calling for punishment for these mistakes. Some were honest mistakes, made at the height of a pandemic where no one really knew the right course of action. Others were more nefarious, and less scientifically defendable, such as the long closure of schools based on little or no data. But before we can accept and move on from the failures of our elected leaders, they must be called to account.

Because ours is a modern society with foundations in science and logic, we require honesty from these leaders, including open admission of their mistakes. We need accountability not only so we can put the pandemic crisis behind us, but so we can learn how to prevent or respond more effectively to the next one.

This week, Emily Oster, a respected economics professor at Brown University who has written extensively about the Covid-19 pandemic both in media outlets and in peer-reviewed scholastic journals, published a piece in the Atlantic under the title “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”  It was met with a maelstrom of angry reactions.

Many of the opinions Oster expresses are ones that would be widely embraced on the right. For example, her position on school closures:

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Her argument is one I have made myself: Early on, being overly cautious was reasonable. At times of uncertainty and great risk, it is logical to be cautious. Oster, to her credit, has gone back and studied some of the decisions made about closures and lockdowns, and overall has found that many of those decisions were not reasonable and have caused widespread damage to our society.

But even knowing what she knows, Oster says we should move on:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

What Oster is really suggesting is not a broad amnesty, but a highly subjective, selective one. This is where her argument falls apart. She proposes amnesty for those who made “hard calls” but exempts those who spread “misinformation.” So, which policy mistakes are amnesty-worthy, and which are not? Who will make these subjective calls? She doesn’t say.

Let’s take the issue of masks. Early in the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the public didn’t need to wear them. He said this based on little evidence and no data. Later, he admitted to having misled the public about masks in order to preserve the supply of masks for health-care workers. Does that misinformation deserve amnesty or not? Then he came out strongly for masking, and at one point recommended double-masking. Was that misinformation too? How is the public supposed to judge? Is the erosion of public trust in health experts itself a pandemic error that deserves amnesty — or not?

On school closures, Oster herself has said that the costs of keeping children out of school were not sufficiently considered. Do the teachers’ unions who demanded continued school closures deserve amnesty? Or was that “nefarious,” to use her word? On lockdowns, do the elected officials whose policies drove some people out of business get absolved? The politicians who kept people from visiting their loved ones? The elected leaders who violated their own lockdown orders?

I believe Oster is approaching the post-pandemic period from an ethically and morally considered position. My interactions with her on Twitter have been few, but they have been thoughtful and respectful. I don’t think she is looking to excuse the worst mistakes. And I don’t think that Dr. Fauci was intentionally trying to cause harm when he made misleading and contradictory statements. But a fair number of those statements can only be characterized as misinformation. It’s simply impossible to pick and choose which actors are deserving of amnesty.

Oster concludes with the following:

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

She is right, to a point. But unless we are honest about who spread misinformation and made disastrous decisions, we cannot really learn the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic. Admitting that many politicians and public-health officials were dishonest with the American people and made grievous errors is part of the process. Without that kind of honesty and admission of guilt, any amnesty talk is a nonstarter.