My two cents on Emily Oster's Atlantic article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/

I agree with Oster.

Forgiveness (or "amnesty," as she puts it) is necessary.

However: forgiveness is a two way street.

We can forgive, but repentance is necessary. Those who have wronged and been wrong over the past two and a half years refuse to admit their wrongness. We have a myriad of excuses, mainly "we didn't know." But, as many pointed out, we did know. Coronaviruses are among the most common and most well-researched viruses. Epidemiologists have a decent idea how they work and evolve. The WHO had a playbook for dealing with outbreaks like COVID, updated as recently as October 2019. It was willingly disregarded at the beginning of the pandemic.

As the failure of the experts have come out, rather than admitting they were wrong, we get gaslighted ("we never said that!" as they try to stealth-edit websites or memory-hole tweets), pathetic "we didn't know" weak-sauce excuses, or "well we would have been right except for political opposition," as if a virus cares about politics.

We need systematic reform of public health institutions. But, to get that, we need those who were wrong to be magnanimous in defeat and those of us who were right to be magnanimous in victory.

I do believe in forgiveness. Let us forgive those who wronged us so horribly. But they, too, must accept their responsibility here. These folks caused real personal and social harm. They must accept that fact, not with excuses but with repentance.