Five years later, Americans are still feeling its effects.
New Year’s Day 2020 was no different than the ones that came before. Many people were traveling back home from the Christmas holiday, expecting to find their jobs and schools much as they had left them. Almost no one owned a surgical mask, and nobody had ever been offered a free cheeseburger in exchange for taking a vaccine.
Those first months of the new year brought whispers of a virus that was causing disruption in China. Based on everything most Americans knew at the time, there was no reason to pay attention to COVID-19. The virus seemed far away—things like that never happen here. Nevertheless, in early March, our children’s schools shut down for “two weeks to flatten the curve.” They did not reopen for the remainder of the school year.
The months that followed brought a great deal of confusion. There was constant revision of recommended guidelines. Who was in charge of those guidelines? And by what authority? The lack of data in the early stages of the pandemic made it virtually impossible for citizens to evaluate whether the restrictions were really supported by what soon came to be known as “The Science.” And as is increasingly the case, The Science was “settled.”
By the summer, that confusion was replaced by anger and disorientation. The reason was obvious: our world had been transformed in a matter of months. Otherwise “normal” people were going out with T-shirts tied around their faces. Restaurants had plexiglass barriers everywhere. Grocery stores had arrows on the floor indicating which direction you were allowed to walk down the aisles. The rules were zealously enforced…for a while.
But after George Floyd’s death in late May, “The Science” announced that mass protests for “racial justice” were just fine and would have no impact on case numbers.
Public anger rose after seeing this blatant hypocrisy. It was further fueled by the slow recognition that something important was missing: the bodies. The accounts of previous pandemics we heard about in school described hellscapes in which the deaths of family members and friends touched almost every individual. Aside from the mass hysteria of early 2020, the tangible signs of a pandemic were not present.
State and federal governments offered weekly death figures, but they withheld key information such as the age of those hospitalized and their pre-existing conditions—data that would have allowed the public to independently assess the threat and adapt their routines accordingly. Why was it withheld?
Today it’s clear that the pandemic was a happy problem for some authorities: governors enjoyed new quasi-legal “emergency powers,” the pharmaceutical companies received a financial windfall, and the whole situation was a useful tool to scourge the Trump Administration as a critical election approached. Americans were justifiably ill at ease with these ulterior motives.
Freedom Lost
So many of us were raised to believe that regardless of political persuasion, Americans are a people who treasure personal freedom. It’s a core aspect of our national character. We don’t want to be told what to do. The pandemic, however, exposed this as sentimental mythology.
In truth, a lot of people love being told what to do. But some of us held out hope that once average citizens saw they weren’t stepping over dead bodies in the street, they would realize they had been duped. Would they revolt after learning they were lied to by the media, which wildly exaggerated the threat of the virus? Before long, we knew the virus had a 99.5% survival rate, and the 0.05% of people who succumbed to the illness were overwhelmingly elderly and those in poor health. But “The Science” turned a blind eye to these numbers, ensuring there would be no return to rational thinking. Our hopes were in vain.
As the 2020 calendar flipped to September, the rules and restrictions had not abated—in fact, they intensified. Was wearing a single mask really enough? Talk of a “new normal,” “contact tracing,” and “permanent pandemic” entered the lexicon. In October, when the Trump Administration announced that a viable vaccine was on the horizon, Democrats charged it would be unsafe—a rush job meant to secure Trump’s re-election. A joint report by the United Nations and famed medical journal The Lancet warned the world against “new and unproven vaccine technologies, such as mRNA.”
But only two months later—after Joe Biden’s election victory, of course—the vaccine was announced. Immediately, the same people who cautioned us on the danger of a rushed, experimental, “unproven” vaccine began doing everything in their power to force Americans to get it. With the state of play in constant flux, there was no time to mourn what we had collectively lost.
And make no mistake: we all lost.
We lost the world we knew prior to 2020—the one where we never gave a second thought to gathering for concerts and sporting events. As the fires burned in the background of footage from the “mostly peaceful” protests, we completely lost trust in the mainstream media. We lost trust in each other. Citizens were incentivized by their government to turn on one another—and they did. But more than anything, we lost whatever remained of our innocence in the post-9/11 age. We didn’t zero out: we went into the red.
Five years on, America still hasn’t recovered. While many countries imposed more severe restrictions on their citizens, no other people in the world had ever been acclimated to the kind of liberty Americans took for granted. So while Americans enjoyed a less extreme lockdown than many other nations, no other people were affected as profoundly as we were. Our fundamental “freedom” was reduced in real-time by a significant portion of a population that had been raised to be wary of the federal government’s intrusion into their lives.
Contrary to what you saw on CNN, the pain couldn’t be measured by the death toll or the number of new COVID cases. It was a psychic wound—one the chyrons never took seriously, or even acknowledged. Things in America will never be the same.
2025 provides some distance by which we can fully take account of that loss. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, lost friendships, and lost their businesses. But what about those of us who saw the pandemic hysteria for the fraud it was? We learned some hard and critical lessons. And these, too, will endure.
Next time—if there is a next time—we will not be so easily manipulated. We will demand that the people in authority make better decisions. And when they don’t, we will hold them accountable.
For these reasons, COVID-19 performed a critical service for a freedom-loving remnant: it removed the scales from our eyes. The nature of power wasn’t changed by the pandemic, but it made power dynamics visible in a new way. COVID provided the labor pains needed to move us forward. It separated those willing to stand up from those who blindly follow orders. Those divisions are less obvious today, but they’re no less relevant.
There is an impending sense that the COVID playbook could be implemented again at any moment, and all the same people would fall back in line. We must be ready to respond in a more fitting way the next time we are asked to sacrifice our dignity, freedoms, and livelihoods—just for two weeks, of course!—to “flatten the curve.”
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.
