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.

The planners, mostly of the Progressive left perspective, ended up totally discrediting the very things they have heretofore championed. What they did was unbearably idiotic even when judged by whether and to what extent they bolstered the institutions they had previously worked so hard to build.

Exhibit A is the public schools. The virus was never a threat to kids and we knew that early on. Nor did it have a medically significant impact on working-age healthy adults beyond a severe flu. Had they kept the schools open, the worst result would have been some absenteeism among staff and teachers in ways that could not be prevented in any case. The instance of Sweden proves the case.

Yet they did it anyway. Why is still unclear. Maybe it was Carter Mecher’s panicked memos. Maybe the teachers backed by unions just wanted more paid time off. Maybe the online education industry was looking for a massive boost. Regardless, they kept the schools closed for a year and even two in some cases, forcing parents who pay taxes to support the schools to educate their kids at home with online videos. The results are a disaster for the ages, with devastating reports of educational losses and demoralization among the young.

It’s all very odd because public schooling is the crown jewel of progressive reform. They began to pop up in the 1880s and spread as a means of bringing civic enlightenment to new immigrant populations and otherwise pushing out the idea of a unified population with equal opportunity. By the 1920s, attendance was compulsory in most parts of the country. Then in the mid-1930s, the final step was to eliminate work opportunities for the young so they would have no choice but to be educated in mostly public institutions.

Public education became a doctrine in the American civic religion, so much so that homeschooling was for decades considered dangerous and unpatriotic. Today, however, the public schools are losing teachers and students in incredible ways. At least 1.2 million students are gone from the rolls. The New York Times says the shift has been “seismic.”

So many more parents are homeschooling and attending private schools. With more states than ever offering school choice programs, including vouchers to use however parents want, private school networks are growing and so are other hybrid options.

Forecasting to the future, it doesn’t seem as if there is a way for public schooling to remain the dominant method that kids are educated in this country. This is an astonishing shift, and pretty much the last thing we would have expected to happen in such a short period of time. They killed the thing they love.

Another incredible shift concerns vaccines themselves. After World War II, population-wide use of vaccines became mainstream and credited with great improvements in public health. Smallpox was even eradicated through them. To be sure, these achievements are easy to exaggerate but even so, the popular belief that vaccines were safe and effective became a mainstream and largely unquestioned truth.

The COVID shot enthusiasts used this public confidence in vaccines to push onto the general population a medicine that was not needed by most and had not been tested properly for safety or effectiveness. Then they kept approving boosters and new shots even after FDA officials resigned in protest. Vaccine injuries kept rising, and people started to become incredulous once it became obvious that even under the best conditions, the shot didn’t protect against infection or spread.

And yet the whole time, major public-health officials lied about the shots. Then without any serious deliberation, the shot was added to the childhood schedule, even though whatever protection it offers slips to near zero in less than a year. The whole thing became utterly indefensible. And the reasons were more than obvious: the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

The end result was easy to foresee. These actions ended up recruiting a mass population army of what used to be considered an eccentric position of being generally against vaccines. This was a result of the mandates for a shot that intelligent people could easily figure out were not necessary and were neither safe nor effective by the old standards of general distribution.

The disruption of lockdowns meant that millions of kids missed routine vaccinations. As a result, mainstream vaccinations like the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine were down significantly from a few years earlier. And now we have people questioning the entire apparatus and machinery that took 70 years to put in place. It’s not surprising that parents are now questioning and even completely eschewing the entire childhood schedule.

I quipped to a friend who loves vaccines and is proud of what they have achieved that the COVID shot might be considered the most effective anti-vaxx tool in modern history. He completely agreed that the whole industry is in a tailspin in terms of public confidence. From his point of view, the result is a complete disaster. They have killed what they love.

A third area of disaster concerns public health generally. The agencies charged with public health have a disastrous reputation, which is likely why Rochelle Walensky was pushed out as head of the CDC. Someone has to take the fall. But it cannot achieve what they want, which is to bolster the reputation of public health.

And by any standard, public health itself is in catastrophic shape. The problem of chronic disease worsened during the pandemic. But so did drug abuse. Allysia Finley writing in the Wall Street Journal reports that:

“Between 2019 and 2021, methamphetamine-overdose deaths more than doubled and cocaine deaths rose 54% .... So has abuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall, to which young people increasingly turned during the pandemic. A Trilliant Health analysis of insurance claims found Adderall prescriptions increased 58% between 2018 and 2022 among adults 22 to 44. There’s now a shortage of the drug because manufacturers haven’t been able to keep up with demand. The Trilliant analysis also found an increase in healthcare visits for anxiety disorders (48%), alcohol and substance use (27%) and depression (24%) between the first three months of 2019 and the same period in 2022. None of this is surprising, but it goes a long way in explaining why deaths among young people remain elevated even as Covid deaths have plunged.”

Here again, they killed what they love. The phrase is taken from one of the greatest achievements of late-Victorian literature, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” by Oscar Wilde. “... each man kills the thing he loves, /... / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word, / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword!”

The poem is about the cruelty of the prison state, and the way in which its brutal coercion worsens and coarsens human life, multiplying tragedies with ever more injustice. In the case of the COVID response, the authorities deployed all four tactics (looks, words, kisses, and swords) and utterly wrecked the world they built. We could add to the list science itself, which they continually invoked to defend the most unscientific policies and claims imaginable. It will take generations to rebuild.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.