This is the second of a three-part series on the lockdowns.

Part 1 looks at the setup for them and what happened in 2020-2021

Part 2 looks at the aftermath through 2022-2023, including the damage they caused to healthcare, education and the economy.

Part 3 will be an ongoing documentation of studies of lockdowns. Short version: almost everybody now agrees that they didn’t even work while causing a lot of harm.

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The lockdowns may be behind us, but their legacy is also in front of us. They demonstrated conclusively that elected and unelected officials do not have to worry about the public no matter how much harm they inflict on them because there will always be another distraction tomorrow.

AFTERMATH (2022-2023)

So where have all these people settled on this issue in the aftermath through 2022-23?

Whitmer (Michigan) Concedes Her COVID Rules “in retrospect, don’t make a lot of sense.”
Newsom (California) reflects on Covid approach: “We would’ve done everything differently“

No word from retired Governor Wolf (Pennsylvania)while Governor Murphy (New Jersey) appears to have no regrets.

Meantime Fauci is in full denial mode:

In Reason magazine they look at interview Fauci did with the NYT, Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns:

“But when people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci,” Fauci says, falling into the third person. “The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did.”

“I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that,” says Fauci. “I’m not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments—people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

True, but all those other people got run over by the scare tactics of Fauci and others, amplified by the If-It-Bleeds-It-Leads MSM, who screamed that in a health emergency you only listen to health experts, even if they refuse to accept that an action can have negative health benefits along with positive ones. As just one example MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow seemed ready to convert to heterosexuality over the gnome:

Maddow couldn’t contain herself. Before Fauci was even brought on, she melted with praise for Fauci. “Dr. Anthony Fauci is a singular figure in American history and in American public service. There has never been anyone else like him, and there never will be again” Maddow proclaimed.

Let’s hope so. Back to the Reason article:

And, of course, we shouldn’t forget the fact that despite everything—the pointless school closures, the livelihood-destroying mandates shuttering bars and restaurants, and the rest—America still suffered nearly 1.1 million “excess deaths” over the past three years, a total that exceeds the 1 million-deaths figure Fauci offered as a “worst-case scenario” in March 2020.

Confronted with that seemingly contradictory set of facts right at the top of his interview with the Times, Fauci replies that “something clearly went wrong.”

And it appears that he’s suffering cognitive dissonance:

Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. 

Which tracks with what Michael Baker wants to do here in New Zealand.

Meantime Randi Weingarten is just flat-out lying about her role when she testified before Congress in April 2023:

“We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

That’s a stupid thing to do in the age of The Internet Never Forgets:

She, despite being neither a doctor nor a teacher helped the CDC develop draconian guidelines that kept schools closed for months, and in some cases more than a year. And there is a direct correlation between the level of influence unions have in a school district and the length of those school closures.
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It was indisputable that she was one of the single biggest factors in having schools closed, keeping them closed, and the attacks on those who wanted schools reopened. She was one of the most powerful and loudest voices for keeping kids out of the classrooms. She literally could call the Director of the CDC at a moment’s notice and did. She helped write the school closure guidelines and made them much more draconian than almost any other country’s.
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Weingarten was vicious to her critics throughout the pandemic, dismissive of parents who were desperate to get their kids back in school, and a leader of the political fight to use COVID as a political cudgel against Republicans.

To be fair she had no time for Democrats either:

“After Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot proposed a hybrid in-person learning plan, the Chicago Teachers Union threatened a strike, and then claimed victory when she backed down and agreed to retain online-only learning. Teachers unions in Florida, California, and elsewhere have sued to block in-person instruction. In Detroit, union activists ‘stood outside one of the district’s bus terminals beginning at 5 a.m., blocking buses from leaving to pick up students to take them to school.’ The Los Angeles teachers union insisted ‘going back to normal is not an option,’”

Weingarten also said that kids are resilient and that they’d bounce back. They haven’t. And as late as 2022 she was still pushing to keep schools closed, while from Chicago to LA and other places, the teachers unions, like all Lockdown proponents, emerged from the disaster they caused stronger than ever. The CTU beat Lightfoot into submission and got massive pay increases while the United Teachers Los Angeles, which had fought to keep schools closed longer than most of the country, walked away from its latest three-day strike with a 21% pay hike and reduced class sizes.

In 2023 the New York Times also admitted the falsity of one of the key factors used to drive the fear:

Buried in the 17th paragraph of a newsletter titled “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief for the outlet wrote: “The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

Quite a change from the history noted in that report, where the CDC and the MSM fought against such “rumours” and Fauci said that they were “…baseless ‘conspiracy theories’.

In January, Washington Post columnist Leana Wen said the “medical community” was “overcounting Covid deaths and hospitalizations,” citing two infectious disease experts who said the numbers for hospitalized COVID patients were overcounted by as much as 90 percent.

In 2021, Italy, with one of the highest pandemic death counts in the world, recalculated its numbers and concluded that only 2.9 percent of COVID deaths could be exclusively blamed on the virus.

However there’s one aspect of lockdowns that can be marked as a success of sorts, and it’s described in this Spiked article which starts with the downfall in early 2023 of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson because of his lockdown parties, but which makes a larger point:

Yet this wholesale shutting down of society has not received nearly a fraction of the scrutiny that Johnson’s rule-breaking has. There has been no reckoning whatsoever with the rules themselves and their consequences for society.

This is strange, to say the least. Our establishment – in party politics, in the civil service, in the media and in the legal profession – likes to make a great show of its commitment to liberalism and human rights. It is also keen to pose as being on the side of the ‘most vulnerable’ in society. And yet lockdown took a wrecking ball to our most fundamental civil liberties, and the destructive impacts of it were felt most keenly by the poor and isolated. Why has lockdown been given a free pass?

I’d forgotten that England was put into full lockdown on three occasions and that it was illegal to leave the house without a valid excuse for seven months, between spring 2020 and summer 2021, which puts even us in the shade.

The opposition Labour Party – led by former human-rights barrister Keir Starmer – similarly refused to oppose the measures. Labour grandee Harriet Harman, who is leading the parliamentary inquiry into Johnson’s rule-breaches, was once the legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (today known as Liberty). Did she have anything to say about the house arrest of every healthy man, woman and child in the nation during lockdown? Of course she didn’t.

The writer’s answer to his own question is a simple one: these Liberal Elites are not actually liberal.

As one Guardian columnist memorably put it when the first lockdown was announced: ‘Never thought I’d be relieved to be placed under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government.’

Or as Frontpage (a magazine founded by ex-communists) put it after reviewing how well almost all the Lockdowners have done (save Cuomo):

It’s not just Fauci or the teachers. Not a single national or local elected official of any note paid the price for the lockdowns. Gov. Newsom in California emerged from all the lockdown abuses as the next in line for the presidential nomination. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer survived her reelection battle in Michigan. So did Gov. Murphy in New Jersey and Gov. Pritzker in Illinois.
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The lockdowns may be behind us, but their legacy is also in front of us. They demonstrated conclusively that elected and unelected officials do not have to worry about the public no matter how much harm they inflict on them because there will always be another distraction tomorrow.