Until now, most people on earth had never heard of Emily Oster, an American academic economist. Now, just about everyone has.

Certainly, COVID dissidents have. And in what must be a world record, she already has an “ism” appended to her surname.

DENYING

As Jessica Hockett of The Brownstone Institute writes: “Dr Emily Oster, the Brown University economist who spent a good part of the pandemic response denying that her own data indicted the uselessness of masking kids in schools, published an article in The Atlantic today, calling for ‘a pandemic amnesty’.”

Short version: Let’s chalk up the devastation caused by fear-driven policies to benign ignorance and good intentions.

The Atlantic is one of the house journals of the COVID class. It likes to spit venom at the hoi polloi. It attacked Alex Berenson, one of the few journalists in the USA actually to understand and explain the COVID scam.

Michael Senger also weighed in at The Daily Sceptic. “I’ll admit, I nearly spat out my coffee when I saw Brown Professor Emily Oster’s new headline in The Atlantic on Monday morning: “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

It’s the headline we’ve been waiting to see – and, in the revisionist, gaslighting style that’s become the journalistic norm on the response to COVID – it’s about the closest thing to an outright admission of guilt that we’ve seen since COVID began.

Here is part of what Oster, the so-called lockdown “moderate”, said: “Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

“Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

“The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.

“All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet.

“These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck.

“And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.”

Then there was this: “Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward. [emphasis added]

WILLFUL

Oster isn’t asking for a general amnesty, however. Only forgiveness for the innocently mistaken (them). For those spreading misinformation (us), there is to be very little forgiveness.

She added: “We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation.”

Yet while members of the COVID class were supposedly merely “ignorant” and “well intentioned”, the COVID State appeared to enjoy their power overreach.

As Jeffrey Tucker points out: “They really did cancel two years of public worship services, segregate the large cities, abolish in-person education, foist masks on all the kids, destroy millions of businesses, censor all media so that we could barely discover facts, forget everything that humanity only recently knew about immunity, end concerts, impose limits on house parties, scrap weddings and funerals, lock the elderly into their homes so that kids couldn’t visit, end dentistry, impose travel restrictions across state borders, and…

“We are all left with a kind of PTSD. I don’t know what the right cure for that condition is but surely coming to terms with the grim reality of what happened is essential.

“My worry all along is that the concerted efforts to pretend like none of this occurred, or that it was no big deal, or that it was necessary and needs to happen again, and that governments and experts did their best given the paucity of information, and so on, would actually succeed.”

We are asked by Oster to put all of this down to innocence and ignorance. Quite the impressive to-do list. Quite a lot to forgive, then.

I have written elsewhere about the seven schools of thought of COVID denialism. These are the “alibis” of those who crucified the rest of us for over two years.

Oster fit neatly into two of these – the “move on” brigade, and the twenty-twenty hindsight brigade. You know, if only we knew then what we know now.

Peter Shergold – he of the recent COVID policy review funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation – has referred to the “fog” of early COVID information. This is very Osterian.

It is also ludicrously inaccurate. There was no fog. There was half a century of settled science which was crystal clear on the inefficacy of masks and of lockdowns.

And it emerged very, very quickly that there was no COVID emergency, certainly for most of the population. And definitely not for children, locked out of school for months and, in some cases, years.

The narrative of “fog” just doesn’t work. As an attempt at plausible deniability, it doesn’t stack up.

But back to Oster herself.

What a lot of tendentious, self-serving, misleading rubbish she spouts. Not just second-rate thinking, but dangerous thinking to boot.

Perhaps even a strategic play against the emerging angered class of COVID victims who want revenge, or at least an apology. Oster’s pitch is simply more narrative fodder for the ruling classes

It will let them off the hook, and, as Jessica Hockett notes, Osterism will only encourage future lockdowns and mandates when the next virus inevitably arrives at our shores.

SUPPOSED

If they are not punished now, they won’t learn that, in a (supposed) democracy, we rule them, they do not rule us.

The pushback against Oster has been swift, unrelenting, deserved, pointed and more than a little nasty in places. Enjoyable to read, though.

This shows the breadth and the degree of anger out there about pandemic policies. The great Eugyppius thinks she suffers from “head girl” syndrome as a member of a new “midwit” tyranny. (A midwit is one who knows just enough to be dangerous).

Mary Harrington (at UnHerd) situates Oster in what NS Lyons has termed the “virtual class”, which generally had a very good COVID.

Michael Senger has explained the problems with Osterism: “There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say, ‘We didn’t know any better at the time!’.

“Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and cancelling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.

“Second, ‘amnesty’, being an act of forgiveness for past offences, first requires an apology or act of repentance on the part of those who committed the offence. Not only has no such act of repentance been forthcoming, but in most cases, establishment voices like Oster’s have yet to stop advocating these same policies, much less admit they were wrong.

“With no accompanying act of contrition, these calls for ‘amnesty’ in light of rapidly-shifting public opinion have a real ring of fascist leaders calling for ‘amnesty’ after losing the war.

“Third, there’s some question as to whether Oster herself really did know better at the time. Like many other mainstream COVID voices, Oster had long been closely attuned to COVID data showing that these mandates did not work, yet she often seemed reluctant to share that data insofar as it contradicted the mainstream orthodoxy that mandates were necessary.

“In that sense, the policy prescriptions of Oster and those like her may have had less to do with ignorance than with cowardice, tribalism and ‘following orders’, which can’t be considered acting ‘in good faith’.

“And that leads to the ultimate problem, from a legal perspective, with Oster’s call for ‘amnesty’ for the advocacy of totalitarian policies during COVID: the implicit assumption that all those who advocated lockdowns, mandates, censorship and an indefinite state of emergency, all the way up the chain of command, did so in good faith.