Brown University economics professor Emily Oster appeared this week in The Atlantic to petition for a “pandemic amnesty.” As the evidence gets harder to bury that the ruling class’s responses to Covid were, as some of us predicted in March 2020, worse than the disease, Oster wants to deflect rising public acrimony over these devastating leadership failures.
“In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward,” she writes. “We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.”
She concludes her article, “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.”
Yet it’s simply not true there wasn’t enough information for leaders to make prudent decisions back in January to April 2020. Indeed, they were certain enough about their patently cruel policies that included leaving the elderly alone to die, requiring women to give birth utterly alone except for masked strangers, and forbidding families from holding funerals.
