Apologies? Accountability? Still Waiting …

Well, here we are: Five years post-pandemic onset in Kansas City. Plenty of economic indicators now say we’ve recovered much of what was lost starting that fateful March week in 2020. Plenty of anecdotal evidence tells us we’ll never make up for what are now, in retrospect, the ill-advised policies of public-health officials at every level, from Washington to your local school board.

So, five years in, I’m still waiting for:

• An apology from those—looking at you, New York Times, and the gutless media who still follow your lead—who hounded Wisconsin physician Pierre Kory and the late Vladimir Zalenko of Pennsylvania for suggesting that existing pharmaceuticals could be employed off-use to treat COVID-19.

• An admission from the Food and Drug Administration that its “you’re not a horse” campaign against use of ivermectin wasn’t just unfounded—that much it now has admitted in court—it might have cost the lives of people frightened out of exploring a potential preventive, and possible early-stage treatment. How many? We’ll never know.

• An apology from public-health officials in Washington, starting with that gnome advising Joe Biden on pandemic policy, for promulgating the nonsense that he’d later recant, years after the damage was done. Specifically, admitting that there never was any scientific evidence supporting 6-foot “social distancing”—quite the oxymoron, that—or assurance in the efficacy of masks.

• An admission from state-level leadership that closing down schools, even for a comparatively short duration, inflicted more long-term harm on young people than the virus itself could.

• An admission from those who decried as conspiracy theorists the thousands of good-faith citations in the Health and Human Services database of reported adverse reactions to vaccines, VAERS. Were some of those claims bogus? Possibly. But there was more than enough going on in that data set to constitute the warning triggers the FDA has relied on previously to pull other vaccines off the market.

• A full refund to the U.S. Treasury from the hucksters at Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, who publicly declared that their unproven, under-tested vaccines—especially using mRNA technology—would stop the pandemic spread in its tracks. It didn’t and was never close to doing so.

• An apology, before he mentally checks out for the last time, from the former president for his flat declaration that, quoting here, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.” Demonstrably false on every level.

• A follow-on apology for the White House, CDC and FDA minions who tried to pin blame for the pandemic on tens of millions of Americans who exercised the right to make their own decisions about their health and came down against taking an experimental virus. Pandemic of the unvaccinated, indeed.

• Reparations to all the owners of those small businesses, from restaurants to hair salons, from movie theaters to nightclubs, who lost everything in a panicked overreaction to an invisible threat. 

• An apology from the medical research complex for sitting on the fact that, for the vast majority of Americans, life could go on without shutdowns. They knew early on that the elderly and those with multiple health risk factors—co-morbidities, in their parlance—were far and away the two groups most vulnerable to the worst of the virus’ effects. For almost everyone else, it wasn’t even a close call.

• An admission from the fear-mongers that they probably deviated from reality juuuust a tad when they encouraged people to wash their mail, cut holes in masks for elementary school band students playing wind instruments, concocted ridiculous acrylic “safety stations” to isolate people in their workspaces, and worse.

• An apology from everyone inside the D.C. Beltway or state capitol buildings who insisted that “the science” was indisputable, uncontestable and on their side, despite so very little of it having actually been conducted.

• Finally, from all of those in authority whose policies eroded huge amounts of public trust in the leadership of a nation’s health-care infrastructure—inviting even worse outcomes in the event of a verifiable and more serious threat—an admission that they did not in 2020, do not in 2025 and never will have all of the answers to every health crisis. It might also be nice if they would publicly commit to letting every American control his or her own health care and brush up on something the medical community calls the Hippocratic Oath and the concept of “above all, do no harm.”