Editors at Issues and Insights highlight one of their biggest fears about Big Government.
Not to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.
From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.
Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.
Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.
Consequently, businesses, jobs and livelihoods were destroyed without mercy; education was wrecked; our health suffered as screenings and treatments were delayed and sometimes canceled altogether; powerful people silenced critics and dissenters. Government went $6 billion deeper into debt as politicians thought spending could stop the spread, bankruptcies soared and alcohol-related deaths “increased during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” reaching 488 fatalities a day during the pandemic’s lost years.
The results have been catastrophic, the carnage exceeding “by multiple times any health benefits from mandates and lockdowns,” says the CTUP. It can’t be allowed to happen again.