John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist argues that Americans never should comply again with government pandemic lockdown orders.
We’re told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We’ve heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.
What these experts and officials don’t seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown orders again. They have burned their credibility to the ground, and they no longer have the moral authority to tell us what to do.
Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay.
The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.
That’s a curious argument to make after forced business closures and lockdown orders destroyed tens of millions of American jobs, ruined countless businesses and livelihoods, and caused a sharp uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and domestic abuse. Never mind the compelling research that lockdowns are overall much worse for public health than the coronavirus.