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Economist Begs For "Pandemic Amnesty" After 2 Years Of Covid Hysteria, And Very Few Are Willing To Grant It To Her

The last two years have dramatically changed our country, maybe permanently. Coronavirus caused a huge split in our society and there was a whole camp of people that made it very clear that they wanted unvaccinated people dead, maskless people locked up, and small businesses shut down (some of them for good). Now those people are requesting a "pandemic amnesty," but it's unlikely they'll get it.

By Gina Florio2 min read
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The last two years have been a dumpster fire of conflicting information from public health organizations, arbitrary lockdowns, and open support of seeing people get sick and die because they declined a vaccine they didn't need. Sadly, many people had to watch their loved ones die on FaceTime without saying goodbye because hospitals wouldn't allow visitors. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses around the country that were shut down for months at a time, and some of them were closed permanently, resulting in countless families losing their livelihood and struggling to make ends meet. We've also seen a wide support of vaccine passports, which thankfully never came to fruition.

It became very clear who was against us during the last two years, including Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who openly called for public shaming of people who chose not to get vaccinated. Now Emily is begging for "pandemic amnesty" in a new article she wrote for The Atlantic. Very few people, if any, are willing to grant it to her.

Economist Begs for "Pandemic Amnesty" After 2 Years of Covid Hysteria, and Very Few Are Willing to Grant It to Her

On October 31, The Atlantic published an article by Emily Oster entitled "Let's declare a pandemic amnesty" with the tag line: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID." Emily implored people to find forgiveness in their heart for the individuals who bullied and coerced people into wearing masks, getting vaccinated, and shutting down their business. But even though she is asking for amnesty, she doesn't apologize a single time in this article for what she and her allies have said and done over the past couple years.

In December 2021, Emily tweeted, "Shaming people who haven't gotten vaccinated is not likely to work at this point (or ever). What will? Individual family pressure: Maybe vaccine requirements for things you want to do (domestic air/train travel, work, sports events): Yes. We can have these without shame."

Less than a year ago, she was very enthusiastic about instating vaccine requirements at your place of work and public travel, but now she is singing a different tune. "We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty," she writes for The Atlantic. "We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge."

She claimed that they "lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna," adding that "this misstep wasn't nefarious." It was just "the result of uncertainty."

We all had the same information for the last two years. We all had the same data. And yet we didn't turn into power-hungry, rabid people who celebrated unvaccinated people who died, attacked maskless individuals in grocery stores, and cheered when small businesses were shut down. You know how the phrase goes: too little, too late. People will never forget how they were belittled, berated, and attacked for merely making a medical choice for themselves. People will never forget that their local businesses were closed by the government while Target and Walmart remained open. People will never forget how people like Emily demanded that vaccine passports be instituted in order to shame and force people into getting the vaccine.

The ratio on Emily's tweet says it all. It received only 2,000 likes and had almost 27,000 replies. The vast majority of the comments were a refusal to forget what she and many others did over the last two years.

People like Emily desperately want us to forget the last couple years even happened. But we won't forget—and the internet certainly will never forget either. These people need to be held accountable for their actions, not granted "pandemic amnesty" because they claimed they didn't have the right information.