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.
