Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

 YES, IT WOULD HAVE: 

Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

Each technological age renews the fight over speech infringement. If given an inch, government censors inevitably take a mile. In July, pushback came when a federal court issued a temporary injunction against federal bureaucrats leaning on social-media companies. The decision takes particular trouble to note the bureaucracy’s campaign to silence dissenters to its Covid policies. Many of those policies are now seen to have been ill-advised.

A plaintiff in the lawsuit, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, recently made an arresting admission in an interview with the Hoover Institution. Dr. Bhattacharya was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, that still-vilified October 2020 challenge to Covid lockdowns. He now says the declaration was the “least original thing I ever worked on in my entire life.”

This rang some bells with me. In late January and early February 2020, I channeled what experts were thinking about the then-novel coronavirus. Most infections were mild or even asymptomatic and weren’t being properly counted. The virus was likely already rampant in places it wasn’t yet detected, like New York City. It couldn’t be stopped at a cost a sane humanity would be willing to pay. It was also far less deadly than was being reported.

But then things turned weird. This balanced assessment, roughly universal among experts, was shelved in a bandwagon frenzy that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. . . .

Meanwhile, bans on elective medical procedures, forced unemployment, school closures and other extreme measures produced their own toll. Among the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, their average age was 74 and they lost 12 years of life. Nobody yet knows the total years lost to younger people due to “excess deaths” from substance abuse, suicide, homicide, accidents, lack of cancer screening and other non-Covid causes. Only with the arrival of the Biden administration did it become expedient to acknowledge a truth known from the start: The virus was something we would have to “live with,” not defeat with indiscriminate social and economic curbs.

This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence others. Fighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position.

Well, the thing to remember is that it wasn’t about getting a better pandemic outcome, but about securing political advantage.