What feels like four score and seven years ago, but was actually just five years ago, the world was thrust into a “new normal.” Yet 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 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 impetus for all this navel-gazing was a recent mea culpa in The New York Times by opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, presenting the possibility that we were “badly misled about the event that changed our lives.” You think?

By contrast, some will defend themselves to the end. Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic complained, “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.” The problem with Chait is that he didn’t seem to catch these realizations when they were relevant and people’s lives and livelihoods were at stake.

As columnist David Harsanyi notes, “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.’”

Remember all the grief some governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem 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,” said Noem. For that, she was crucified in the media. However, as our Mark Alexander noted at the time, “South Dakota’s response can serve as a template for states with mostly rural populations.” (This is a good time to remind readers that Alexander has been chronicling the COVID era from the beginning, a now book-length timeline and resource page that’s worth reading as we look back.)

With apologies to those who lost friends, family, and other loved ones to the pandemic, societally, the most significant casualty from COVID was the truth.

In many cases, the deception was intentional. “It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started,” Tufekci writes. “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.” The message was “trust the science,” but it only seemed to work one way. Scientists who called for a less invasive economic shutdown and usage of existing drugs proven to work against other, similar infections were shouted down and shadow-banned (or simply censored) from the conversation on social media.

It was in the name of “science” that we were just plain lied to 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,” wrote David Morens, a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, himself a master at manipulating the narrative so as to defend “the science” against the truth.

“Fauci’s distortions of the recent past stand out for their jesuitical sophistry and their brazenness,” posits Jack Butler of National Review. “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.”

Jeff Childers, a Florida-based attorney who was one of those fighting to end the lockdowns in the thick of the madness, has since become another leader in seeking the truth about the pandemic. As he observes, 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, streetside restaurant tables, and Orwellian uni-directional arrows taped onto grocery aisle floors. This way to disinfection, comrade.”

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 history has been as carefully hidden as the origins of and impetus behind the response to the COVID pandemic has been? Even now, we only seem to get the truth in drips and drabs. Those limited hangouts like the Tufekci op-ed are intended to be satisfactory explanations but always leave more unanswered questions.

With all the revelations coming out during the Trump 47 administration, perhaps there will be a time before all is said and done when we find out the real story behind COVID-19, and whether this simple “lab leak” was done intentionally, by whom, and — more importantly — why. It was the fictional Col. Nathan Jessup who shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!” But we’re asking for it anyway. Try us. The truth will set us free to not repeat the massive mistakes of the COVID pandemic.

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