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Newsweek is finally admitting what we knew all along: Covid-era interventions were an unprecedented disaster.

“I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.” This admission comes from Kevin Bass, a PhD medical student writing for Newsweek about the hypnosis that overcame Western nations during the COVID-19 era.

That his opinion piece made it into a mainstream publication that fuelled fear and hysteria is evidence that a majority are finally waking up to the disastrous policy failures of recent years.

“As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19,” Bass begins. “I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.”

‘All of These Were Scientific Mistakes’

He now admits he got it wrong, and that much damage was done by the expert class feeding unwarranted fear to the public:

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

Bass now understands what level-headed people intuited from the beginning — that individuals perceive and respond to risk in diverse ways, and are often far better at making sensible decisions than policymakers give them credit for:

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

“We made science a team sport,” he laments — “and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and ‘they’ responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.”

We ‘Violated The Autonomy’ of Minorities

According to Bass, blanket interventions forced upon an unwitting public had especially dire consequences for those already disadvantaged in society:

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children.

Restoring Public Trust in Science

The opinion piece by Kevin Bass, which deserves to be read in full, concludes with a summary of what prompted the author to make his bombshell admission. “My motivation for writing this is simple,” he explains: “It’s clear to me that for public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and where we could have done better.”

As an independent news and commentary site that has consistently challenged mainstream hysteria and disinformation about COVID-19, the Daily Declaration couldn’t agree more.

Read the Newsweek opinion piece here.

UPDATE: Kevin Bass has since been interviewed by Tucker Carlson.