Victor Davis Hanson:
“…The reasons for our experts’ ambiguity?
Despite all their credentials, degrees, and confident arguments from authority, the experts, like 320 million other Americans, did not have sufficient information or experience with the strains of SARS-CoV-2 to appreciate how unpredictable were the spread and course of the mysterious COVID-19 disease—mostly benign for the vast majority, absolutely deadly to a select few.
Yet again, scientific expertise also proves needlessly fallible because of politics. To be blunt, aside from the mass quarantines, thousands of others may have died from COVID-19, or will die because science has become ideologically weaponized.
Recent studies from a variety of sources, domestic and foreign—including the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and New York’s Mount Sinai Health System—have concluded that hydroxychloroquine has some medical efficacy in early stages of COVID-19.
Yet remember the “Hydroxy Effect”: anything endorsed by Donald J. Trump must be denigrated. Thus for the last nine months we have been lectured that the cheap, time-tried, and widely available hydroxychloroquine was dangerous and useless—even as millions worldwide felt it had saved thousands of lives from the ravages of COVID-19.
Many clinicians certainly pleaded that the drug’s availability gave them greater choices in treatment, and its efficacy often had far outweighed its side-effects, which after years of use and hundreds of millions of doses were considered tolerable. Again, no one knows whether the politicized decision to demonize the drug cost the planet thousands or more lives.
In May and June, thousands of Antifa and Black Lives Matters demonstrators hit the streets of some of our largest cities, initially at least, protesting the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Within days often mass looting and arson ensued.
Most states were under strict quarantines. The logic of the lockdowns forbade large outdoor gatherings, and demanded strict social distancing and the use of masks.
But when tens of thousands simply ignored these state guidelines, many health care providers lost all credibility by ignoring their own prior stern health advice.
Now suddenly they claimed that the angst occurring from not protesting was a greater health threat to would-be demonstrators than violating the quarantines and spreading the disease. So much for their concern over friends and families of the protestors at home, who might come in contact each pre-protesting morning with the soon out and about woke. So much for science…”
