Five years after Covid-19 hit our shores, its longest-lasting effect is the damage it has done to our trust in America’s public health authorities.
It’s easy to understand the crisis in trustworthiness.
They told us that we had to close the schools to protect our kids, which wasn’t true. They told us that lockdowns would help eradicate the virus. They didn’t. They told us, absurdly, that it was critical to stay six feet away from each other—unless we were joining a protest against racism.
But the biggest lie was that the Covid vaccine was the silver bullet that would put an end to the pandemic.
Instead, we discovered that the vaccine did not completely prevent transmission; that the endless rounds of booster shots were largely pointless; and that it sometimes caused myocarditis in otherwise healthy young men who probably didn’t need to be immunized in the first place. Did the shot save lives? Yes, especially among the elderly and immunocompromised, who were the most likely to suffer complications from the virus. But for any healthy person under the age of 50, getting vaccinated for Covid-19 was always overkill, something most people now well understand. That’s why we support the Food and Drug Administration’s recent authorization of an updated vaccine for those over the age of 65 or people at higher risk because of preexisting health problems.
