Why Did They Kill the Things They Love?

A teacher walks through an empty classroom during a period of Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) at Hazelwood Elementary School in Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 11, 2022. Jefferson County Public Schools, along with many other school districts in the United States, have switched to NTI in response to severe staffing shortages. Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Commentary

There are several features of the pandemic policy response that still astonish me. It does not surprise me that bureaucrats couldn’t suppress, control, much less eradicate, a respiratory virus by scrapping the Bill of Rights. What I cannot get over is all the ways that the response ended up achieving the opposite of what it was supposed to do.