The Five-Year Anniversary Of COVID Lockdowns

Authored by Jennifer Sey via The Brownstone Institute,

We are just at about the 5-year anniversary of lockdowns. In the Bay Area, where I lived at the time that Covid took over the hysterical media’s every utterance, lockdowns went into effect on March 16, 2020. 

The official line now is that lockdowns in California and the Bay Area continued until mid-May. 

The reality is they went on much longer. 

Public schools were closed until September 2021. 

Playgrounds in San Francisco were closed until October 2020. Let that sink in. Outdoor playgrounds were closed for 7 months. Once opened, they closed again, then reopened. While open (in the beginning) these were the rules: you could only stay for 1/2 hour, no eating, no drinking water (because 2-year-olds would need to remove their masks to do so), line up for the activities/climbing structures, kids (toddlers!) always 6 feet apart, if your child cries you have to leave (they might spew droplets and Covid). Sounds like fun, right?

Basketball hoops were boarded over and stayed that way for well over a year. Some longer because they were just forgotten about.

Skate ramps at skate parks were filled with sand.

Restaurants didn’t open until September 30. 

They’d open, then close again, then open again, at the whim of the red/orange/green system implemented by the city’s public health bureaucrats. 

Once the city’s parks opened, people were forced to sit in chalk circles to maintain distancing.

It was truly the dumbest time. 

I could go on. But I won’t. 

Along with all of these constantly changing ridiculous rules, the citizens of San Francisco were encouraged to rat out their neighbors through a special 311 hotline set up for precisely that purpose. See something say something 2020 version had all the virtue-signaling and intrigue of 2001’s launch campaign, but this time people were encouraged to turn in their friends and neighbors rather than suspected terrorists. 

See someone entering a neighbor’s home that doesn’t live there? Text the number! See people from different households mixing outside at the park, text the number! See someone maskless or a child playing at a playground with yellow caution tape around the swings? Text the number! And sure enough, a police officer who couldn’t be bothered to help with the heroin addict vomiting on your doorstep would be happy to interrogate you about who was inside your apartment. And ticket you if you dared exercise beyond a one-mile radius outside your home. 

And people did it! The citizenry of San Francisco took great pride in turning in their friends and neighbors for perceived violations. And I learned that the vast majority of people I’d considered “my people” for decades would have been snitches for the Stasi and pointed directly to where Anne Frank and her family hid in Amsterdam. 

As I’ve written about extensively, my husband and I resisted and shouted and raged about all of this from day 1. And we paid a heavy price. We left San Francisco in February 2021, a city I’d lived in and loved for over 30 years. We lost friends and I lost my professional reputation as one of the best in the business — a reputation that I’d spent decades building. And despite my rightness about it all, my good standing has not been restored. 

I won’t forgive these psychopaths/pathetic cowards/aggressive virtue-signaling conformists. Ever. 

And now, on the eve of the 5-year anniversary of the lockdowns, there is a book about to come out about how wrong it all was. Sort of. 

By this account/review of the book, public health officials failed to follow pre-pandemic guidelines. And not only that, they censored and silenced anyone who might have reminded the public of that. People like Fauci — Fauci first and foremost, in fact — squelched any dissent, took down anyone who challenged (who could forget the “swift and devastating takedown” of Jay Bhattacharya?) and the press and academics failed to hold them to account. 

You might think I’d be happy that a book like this is coming out. I’m not. 

I find it enraging, in fact. According to the review in the Boston Globe, experts betrayed the actual science. And the system failed. 

But the reviewer says the authors are a bit “overwrought” in their telling of what happened. And they offset their critique with a series of “Yeah buts…” such as Trump said we should all drink bleach. He didn’t. Their list of yeah buts is short but meant to leave room for “Well, we did the best we could given the Trumpian brand of crazy.” 

In my view, the book leaves way too much room for an Emily Oster-type view that We need a pandemic amnesty because we all did the best we could. 

The authors themselves admit to bleaching their groceries. Is there any indictment of themselves, or do they train their ire only at Fauci? A little introspection about how wrong they were would be nice and go a long way in giving permission to others to do the same. But I doubt they do that (I’ll admit I’ve not read it, only this review).

It reminds me of what USA Gymnastics did regarding Larry Nassar, the infamous pedophile who abused over 500 athletes. At first, they denied it. When they couldn’t any longer, they did the whole “one bad apple” defense. He’s gone! We did our part! The sport is perfect without him! No. The sport is toxic. The training environment is abusive. And Nassar was able to abuse for three decades because the whole thing was rotten to the core, and the institutions (USAG, USOPC) covered for him. 

Covid was not a one-man problem. And Fauci being out of a job doesn’t solve what went wrong. 

And the fact is, the mainstream view is still largely centered on the idea that the Covid alarmists were mostly right. Sure schools could have opened sooner, but other than that, Fauci and his ilk were right about everything. This view is best represented by the alarmist to beat all alarmists, David Wallace-Wells with his New York Times piece just a few weeks ago called: The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth than Everyone Else. 

Wallace-Wells bemoans the current situation that “Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been put in place in states as blue as New York.”

To that I say: Thank fucking goodness. 

But I do not trust it won’t happen again. 

Wallace-Wells is screeching that it must, in fact, only harsher, longer, “better.”

We’ve seen the attempt at a similar media/public health panic with Bird flu. And before that, monkeypox. We’ve seen schools closed for all manner of reasons, from migrants being housed in public schools to eclipses and “bad air.” School closures are a “tool in the tool box” now, and it’s not a good one. 

The alarmists continue to insist that we need to do better next time — lock down harder and sooner and implement more censorship. And there have been no apologies. None to people like me (not to be too self-centered, but you’ll pardon using me as an example) who lost our lives as we knew them. For saying everything just a few years too soon. We are not un-canceled. We are still heretics who may have been right but for all the wrong reasons. And the Faucis of the world may have gotten some stuff wrong but for all the right reasons. They are still the good people, and we are still the bad ones in the court of public opinion and the mainstream media. 

There are glimmers of hope. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one. He was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 which advocated for basic principles of pre-pandemic planning: Don’t shut down the world; protect the vulnerable and let everyone else live their lives; don’t shut down the economy for it will lead to crushing inflation (correct) and starvation in third world countries; it will lead to child abuse, and child marriage and decimation of the most vulnerable. Correct on all counts. 

As Dr. Jay has said: lockdowns were trickle-down epidemiology and “the lockdowns, if they were to benefit anybody, [. . .] benefited members of the laptop class who actually had the wherewithal to stay home, stay safe while the rest of the population served them.” Basically, lockdowns benefitted the rich and ruined the poor and the vulnerable, the class they were purported to save. 

Jay was right. And now he will be the director of the National Institutes of Health, the organization that orchestrated the swift and devastating takedown of him in 2020. It does feel like a bit of redemption for us all. 

Notably, in his confirmation hearing, he was not asked a single question by the Democrats about his views on lockdowns, which were formerly considered “contrarian.” A win? I’d say so. They knew this line of questioning was a loser. 

But I’m left feeling very little comfort. 

People like me have received no apology. We are not released from our canceled status. We are left to make our own way, still ousted from the mainstream despite having been right. 

And the book blames Fauci to shield everyone else in the machine from blame. And Fauci is gone now, so it would seem to suggest we’re safe. 

I’m left with the feeling that we have not scratched the surface of all the blame that must be laid down. Not out of vengeance but accountability. And as a way to clearly signal: These people failed to do their jobs. This can never happen again. 

The vast majority of people who led lockdowns at the state and local level are still in their jobs despite having failed miserably. The vast majority of journalists who spread fear and failed to hold power to account are still in their roles (Apoorva Mandavilli?). The people who made sure schools would remain closed are still in power — Randi Weingarten at the top of that list. And now Randi is moaning about the harms to poor children if the Department of Education is shuttered. She certainly didn’t care about poor children back in 2020-2021. She is a politician and a hypocrite of the highest order. 

We are not done. Not by a long shot. What went wrong was EVERYTHING. And I, for one, won’t stop shouting about it until that is acknowledged, apologized for, and until those people who did the wrong thing over and over again are defanged and declawed.

Republished from the author’s Substack