The COVID Whitewash
Five years later, all those "first drafts of history" were wrong
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This is a riff on a Patriot Post article by Michael Swartz from 2 April 2025
A global pandemic thrust the world into a “new normal;” I called it “COVID-noia” at the time; I still do. It feels like it was five decades ago, but was just five years. As time passes and political winds shift, we’re finding out just how much of the reaction to COVID was really necessary and how much wasn’t actually an accident but a step by those in power in determining how certain segments of society would react to a swift call for more government control at the cost of economic and personal freedom.
The “first draft of the history” of the COVID epidemic of 2020-23 in the newspapers and other mass media was based on lies
The impetus for revelation was a 16 March mea culpa in The New York Times by opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. Tufekci raised the possibility that we were “badly misled about the event that changed our lives.”
It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started…Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.
Zeynep Tufekci
The message became “trust the science,” but it only seemed to work one way—the way of the screaming mask-wearers telling children to report their families if they dared to go to church. Social media silenced scientists who called for a less invasive economic shutdown and the use of existing drugs that were/are effective against similar infections. As we now know, the COVID virus doesn't easily spread through the air.
Never repeat a rumor before you have verified it. And if it is true, hold your tongue all the more.
Selma Lagerlöf
Those restrictions on gatherings, those closings of everything but abortion clinics and pot dispensaries? Nope; changed nothing; helped nothing, nada. That house arrest we suffered through for weeks, then months, then the mask-wearing? The effect on the virus spread was practically nil. However, some wags will defend their coverage to the end.
Liberals have engaged in searching self-reflection—on school closings, the lab-leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.
Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic, 25 March 2025
The problem here is that Chait didn’t seem to catch these realizations when they were relevant and people’s lives, when livelihoods were at stake, as this “first draft of history” was being written by him and his associates.
Now, you and I may believe dunking on libs who accused you of committing mass murder for going to church is perfectly normal behavior. Chait, though, is irked by all the ‘gloating’ and ‘football-spiking.’
David Harsanyi, Detroit News, 2 April 2025
Remember all the grief some governors received because their policies and reactions treated COVID more like a flu epidemic than a crisis?
The people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety.
Kristi Noem, then Governor of South Dakota
The media crucified Noem for saying that, but not everyone thought she was wrong.
South Dakota’s response can serve as a template for states with mostly rural populations.
Mark Alexander
With apologies to those who lost friends, family, and other loved ones to the pandemic (I lost a niece, who’d been fighting kidney disease most of her life), societally, the most significant casualty from COVID was the truth. Many times, the deception in this “first draft of history”—and this first attempt at a “brave new world”—was intentional. It was in the name of “science” that this first draft of history was plain fabricated and the truth buried.
We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.
David Morens, senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci
Small wonder that Joe Biden pardoned Fauci preemptively. Even now, we only seem to get the truth in drips and drabs.
Fauci’s distortions of the recent past stand out for their Jesuitical sophistry and their brazenness…But he is not alone in attempting to alter history concerning Covid even five years later. Those of us who want to remember this history accurately and learn from it must guard against such revisionism.
Jack Butler, National Review
It’s been said that those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it. But does that really count when much of that story has been as carefully hidden as the origins of and impetus behind the response to COVID has been?
[The COVID era] was so profoundly unpleasant that Hollywood has studiously avoided producing a single film or streaming series set in that dark time of lockdowns, beachgoing arrests, mask mandate confrontations, bureaucrats cowering behind ubiquitous plexiglass sneeze shields, street-side restaurant tables, and Orwellian uni-directional arrows taped onto grocery aisle floors. This way to disinfection, comrade.
Jeff Childers
Those limited hangouts, like the Tufekci op-ed, aim to be satisfactory explanations but always leave more unanswered questions, especially to the historian. The Trump administration's revelations may eventually reveal the actual story behind COVID-19, including whether the "lab leak" was intentional, who perpetrated it, and—most importantly—why.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who prevent history from being taught plan to repeat it.
Anonymous
It was the fictional Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men who shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!” But we’re asking for it, anyway. The truth will set us free to not repeat the massive policy and social mistakes, not to mention the distortions of the historical record that beset the story of the COVID pandemic. While distortions during a crisis are normal and expected, the deletion of important future source material to keep from getting caught is not only illegal, but unconscionably irresponsible to the historical record.
Does history repeat itself—the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
Julian Barnes
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
As Curtis and Maria discover while researching Ned Steele, petty reasons often drive the distortion of the historical record. If you don’t believe me, read what the Roads to the Great War website says.
And Finally...
On 26 July:
1186: The Erfurt Latrine Disaster took place in that German city. During a meeting of the local nobles with German King Henry VI on the second floor of an unrecorded building, the floor gave way and dumped an unclear number of people (but not the king) into the cesspit below. It is said that at least 60 people drowned. The land dispute that was the subject of the meeting went unresolved.
1945: The US, Great Britain, and China issue the Potsdam Declaration in that German city, the culmination of the post-European WWII meeting. Harry Truman later read the Declaration on the radio, broadcast all over the world and aimed at Japan, setting out the conditions for the end of the Japanese war. Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō stated the policy of his country was mokusatsu, or killing with silence. This led the US to continue its plans to destroy Japan’s ability to wage war.
And today is NATIONAL DISABILITY INDEPENDENCE DAY, commemorating the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act into law on this day in 1984. This law requires all businesses and building in the US to make “reasonable accommodation” for people with a range of disabilities for access to buildings and employment.
Perhaps the phrase, "a bridge too far" applies here. The totalitarians sniffed a chance at absolute control before they had attained it. They revealed themselves for what they are before they fully implemented the censorship that is essential to all totalitarian regimes. We were able to discuss among ourselves and call out the bullshit. Without the internet, it would have been an entirely different story.