An off-duty New York City police officer is in critical condition after being shot in the head during a robbery attempt Saturday evening, according to authorities.

The officer, identified as a 26-year-old and five-year veteran of the New York Police Department, travelled with a relative to Ruby Street in Brooklyn to purchase a vehicle in a transaction arranged on social media, officials said during a Saturday night news conference.

Upon arrival, the suspect pulled out a gun and “announced a robbery,” leading to an exchange of gunfire in which the officer was struck, said Michael Baldassano, assistant chief of the NYPD Detective Bureau.

NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said the officer was transported to Brookdale Hospital in critical condition. “Please keep this young officer in your prayers. He is currently fighting for his life,” Sewell said.

Watch live as Police Commissioner Sewell & Mayor Adams provide an update on a police investigation in Brooklyn. https://t.co/CEIBPcvIP3

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) February 5, 2023

Police asked the public for assistance in finding the suspect, who Baldassano said fled from the scene of the shooting. He encouraged anyone with information to call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.

Baldassano also said police had “no reason to believe” the suspect knew the target of the attempted robbery was an off-duty police officer, but he stressed the shooting remained under investigation.

New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams said the wounded officer is married and has children. “We will catch the person responsible for this act,” he said.

The relative who accompanied the off-duty officer was not injured, police said, per the New York Daily News.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, said legislators are living in a “fantasy world” when they talk about crime as if it’s not real. “We’ve asked for help before. We’re asking and demanding help now,” he said.

New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul conveyed well wishes for the officer and denounced the scourge of gun violence.

“I am praying for the recovery of an off-duty [NYPD] officer who was shot during an attempted robbery last night,” Hochul tweeted. “Everyone deserves to feel safe in our state. I will keep doing everything in my power to combat illegal gun trafficking and the gun violence epidemic.”

Could the experts be starting to admit, three years later, that they were wrong about COVID?

At least one medical researcher is calling on the scientific community to admit mistakes were made.

“I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives,” wrote Kevin Bass, an MD/PhD student, in a recent op-ed for Newsweek.

Whoops.

For years and with almost one voice, the scientific elites seemingly doubled down on the necessity of broad vaccine mandates and prolonged lockdowns, even as Americans suffered.

Medical professionals who questioned the narrative or offered opinions not accepted by the mainstream were mocked and censored on social media platforms.

Americans were required to abide by COVID restrictions even when they seemed to defy common sense, such as wearing a face mask when standing in a restaurant but not when sitting down.

Bass said he “staunchly supported” public health authorities when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and booster shots. He believed at the time that they were responding with “compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise.”

Now the scales have fallen from his eyes, he said.

Public health authorities “overstated the evidence and misled the public” on a litany of issues, including natural COVID immunity vs. vaccine immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially for young people, Bass wrote.

The U.S. government, namely the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), are all at fault, he said.

Bass also pointed out that pandemic policies like lockdowns were promoted by elites in academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health and forced on the working class, “whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk.”

Not only were the experts wrong, but their mistakes cost lives, Bass concluded.

“If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far fewer lost lives,” he wrote.

Beyond the loss of life potentially caused by the half-baked policies foisted on the public, Americans suffered physically, emotionally, and financially.

Elderly Americans died alone in the hospital. Their families were denied a funeral. Children committed suicide. Many of the ones who didn’t suffered, cooped up at home and stuck behind a computer screen, watching their grades sink while schools stayed closed longer than restaurants. Families lost their businesses. Millions lost their jobs.

Then many Americans were forced to get the COVID vaccine despite religious and health objections. Stories of “vaccine injuries” including nerve damage proliferated online. Some young people, who are least at risk of developing serious COVID symptoms, developed myocarditis or inflammation of the heart after the vaccine.

Bass describes himself as a “centrist” with “non-partisan takes on health, longevity, nutrition” who welcomes “constructive criticism.”

He is not the first to admit that medical experts oversold their confidence in how COVID works and what the response should be. Even CNN’s Dr. Leana Wen said at the end of 2021 that “cloth masks are little more than facial decorations.”

However, so far it has been crickets from most of the scientific community on whether they got anything wrong over the last three years.