Covid Response at Five Years: Conclusion

These days remind one of the experience in Kabul, Afghanistan, following the US invasion in 2002. US troops eventually fled in panic, and the Taliban runs Afghanistan today.

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

In March 1913, a man on horseback galloped into downtown Columbus, Ohio, shouting, “The dam has burst!” Men ran into the streets. “Go east,” they yelled. “Go east,” away from the impending flood.

The panic was contagious. The first group began to run, and others soon followed. Shop owners and pedestrians joined the dash. Dozens turned to scores, scores to hundreds, multiplying until 2,000 Ohioans ran eastward.

“Like a flash, business on High street was paralyzed, the whole city was thrown into a panic, rescue work in the flood district was hurriedly abandoned, the river’s east brink from a mile was cleared of humanity,” the Columbus Citizen reported. “Never before in the history of Columbus was there such a scene of panic, even consternation. Through alleys, down street, down stairways, out of windows, people hurried, tumbled, ran, shouted and fairly fought each other in their almost mad rush.”

The panic blinded the stampede to its surroundings. The sun was shining, and their ankles remained dry. The thrill was all-consuming. They ran shoulder-to-shoulder with their neighbors for six miles. Some ran twice as far as they jockeyed for high ground.

“In a twinkling the streets became a tangled jam of men and women, who had abandoned desk and counter to seek places of safety,” the Ohio State Journal wrote. They flouted all traditional concerns. Housewives sprinted outside while stoves burned; shopkeepers joined the mob with doors unlocked; men sprinted past the less agile without offering to help. Horses ran out from their stables and through the streets, “adding confusion to the eddying torrent of people and vehicles,” the paper reported.

“A visitor in an airplane, looking down on the straggling, agitated masses of people below, would have been hard put to it to divine a reason for the phenomenon,” wrote James Thurber, who was in Columbus that day. “It must have inspired, in such an observer, a peculiar kind of terror.”

As legs began to tire, the sprint turned to a jog, then a trot, then a walk, then a rest. The news spread that the dam had not broken at all. The residents returned to Columbus to find that the flood had never arrived.

“The next day, the city went about its business as if nothing had happened, but there was no joking,” Thurber wrote. One reporter later admitted, “There was a silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten.” Discussing the madness would be an admission of their mammalian shortcomings, an acknowledgement of how their instinct to follow an irrational crowd blinded them to obvious truths.

Now, the world finds itself in a similar position with respect to Coronamania, though the damage is far more profound. To various degrees, all were complicit. Some ran full speed with the crowds, others remained silent as the pathology spread. Only a few are curious about who was pushing the controls behind the scenes, how they managed to break through all restrictions on such schemes, the trillions doled out to business interests, and how these huge attacks on all civilized precepts of social and economic functioning swept the world.

Many took months or years to recognize that false premises had underpinned the government response that overturned their way of life. Those who resisted wish they had done so earlier. Those at the forefront wish they had been more vocal and effective.

Agitated masses of people abandoned their daily routines based on the error-ridden declarations of those in authority. Americans injected themselves with experimental shots and kept their children out of school. They castigated their neighbors and instituted systems of medical apartheid in cities and campuses. They shut down the kids’ schools, covered their faces, and taught the children that people are nothing but disease vectors.

The orthodox worshipers of Government edicts banned religious gatherings, insisted the elderly die alone, and offered indulgences for their political allies. Reprehensibly, the organs of power, intertwined in a conspiracy of shared interests, promoted the panic and exploited the destruction they sowed.

Homicides, childhood suicides, and mental illness skyrocketed while lockdowns gutted the middle class. The Federal Reserve printed three hundred years’ worth of spending in two months, and fraudsters stole at least tens of billions from Covid relief programs. The federal deficit more than tripled, and studies suggest the pandemic response will cost Americans $16 trillion over the next decade.

Corporate interests looted the public treasury. Mayors criminalized Easter worship, and bureaucrats used GPS data to monitor church attendance. Millions of unvetted men from the third world poured into our country while unvaccinated Americans died after being denied organ transplants.

Supposed monetary experts flooded the economy with trillions in liquidity while keeping interest rates near zero. The military fired healthy men for refusing to take ineffective shots. Government policies transferred $4 trillion from the middle class to tech oligarchs and permanently closed businesses across the country.

The powerful heeded Rahm Emanuel’s advice and capitalized on the crisis. The Constitution was designed to restrain the powerful, but public health became the pretext to unshackle aspiring tyrants from its limitations. The Intelligence Community, through bribes, deception, and coercion, overturned the republic. Government and private industry merged forces to unleash remarkable tyranny and unprecedented wealth accumulation.

In March 2025, Dr. Scott Atlas, the White House’s chief voice of dissent protesting Coronamania in 2020, reflected: “The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.”

After ten weeks of lockdowns, the regime revealed its true aims. Fifteen days to flatten the curve was merely the “first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions,” as Birx admitted in her memoir.

Their aspirations were far more grandiose. As Dr. Fauci later wrote in Cell, they were prepared to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.” Then, a Minnesota police officer put his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a career criminalwith heart disease, a Covid infection, and enough fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system to classify as an overdose.

With Floyd’s death, the pretext of “public health” disappeared, and social justicecatalyzed their mission to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence.” School curricula, social media content policies, investment criteria, corporate hierarchies, Supreme Court nominations, Vice President selections, and every aspect of American life became dominated by a pernicious new ideology under the innocuous banner of inclusivity.

Meritocracy, tradition, and equality were quickly supplanted by diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those new buzzwords were merely covers for the ideology of nihilism and iconoclasm they mandated.

As the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights disappeared from daily life, so too did the physical connections to the American past. The statues came tumbling down, and shared language became taboo. While the churches remained shuttered, radicals preached a creed of anti-white, anti-Western vitriol. Freedom became reserved for those who subscribed to the new and amorphous creed. The nation added trillions to its deficit and destroyed institutions that took generations to build.

When the panic swept over the public and its representatives, the Supreme Court remained derelict, greenlighting the steamrolling of civil liberties. The Bill of Rights proved to be no more than “parchment guarantees.” As Justice Antonin Scalia explained, these enumerated rights – habeas corpus, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of movement, the right to jury trials, equality under the law – were “not worth the paper they were printed on.”

The Framers designed a structure of government and the accompanying separation of powers to protect those liberties. Federalism intended for states to resist national tyranny; a bicameral legislature created systems meant to combat radicalism; separating the power of “the purse and the sword” – of spending and of executive power – was intended to limit despotism; judicial review would protect individual rights against the fervor of the mob; separate spheres of public and private entities would create an antagonistic balance between the rule of law and innovation.

But in the Covid response, a cabal, led by forces in the Intelligence Community and the US Military, abolished those safeguards. The federal government worked to punish insubordinate states. The legislature and the Federal Reserve opened the public coffers for the country’s most powerful forces to loot at will. The Supreme Court abandoned its role as a protector of liberty as the Chief Justice conjured a pandemic exception to jurisprudence. Unmitigated hysteria opened the opportunity for a coup d’etat as the regime marched in lockstep toward tyranny.

Five years later, fundamental questions remain unanswered, and threats are unabated. The origins of the pandemic remain clouded in confidentiality and mystery.

There has been no effort to curb the extra-constitutional excesses of the Intelligence Community. President Trump’s appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Marty Makary present an opportunity for reform, but the pharmaceutical industry maintains its outsized and pernicious influence on government. Their liability shields remain intact, as do the corrupt arrangements of shared profiteering for public and private employees.

It remains to be seen whether President Trump and Elon Musk will be able to defeat, or even impair, the racket of taxpayer-funded NGOs that facilitated the destruction of 2020. The US has continued its development of quarantine camps, and pandemic frauds remain unrecovered. In March 2025, the Supreme Court denied President Trump, the head of the Executive Branch, the ability to halt foreign aid payments in a 5-4 decision, demonstrating the Chief Justice’s continued subservience to the D.C. establishment.

Many people have learned, lost faith in authority, and swear that they will not comply next time. It’s not so easy for industries that must comply or else lose their right to do business. When the health inspector tells the chicken farmer to slaughter his stock because of a PCR test, not complying will only lead to permanent closure. In other words, the lockdowns and mandates can easily come not through the front door but through the back door, basement, or attic.

It is an undeniable truth that the entire machine that unleashed mayhem is still in place. The industrial interests that pushed all these schemes still retain their access. The laws in states and the federal government have not been changed. Indeed, the quarantine camps could appear and be deployed in an instant with no real institutional blocks, and people can be rounded up and put there for reasons of politics masked as health concerns.

More optimistically, however, the resistance to lockdowns, mandates, and madness brought millions together in a coalition against tyranny. It raised awareness to the pestilent forces in our society that so many assumed were latent. The threat to fundamental rights led that amalgamation of political forces to reconsider and reaffirm the value of the first principles it had largely taken for granted. A jolt has awoken the somnambulant saunter of post-War America, creating the potential for real reform.

For now, however, that’s all there is: potential. And there is no clear indication as to the direction of that future. The President who oversaw lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed built a coalition of dissidents in his return to the White House. His second cabinet appears remarkably more resilient than the advisors of his first term. Alex Azar, Mike Pence, and Jared Kushner have departed the West Wing to make room for those who appear unphased by the uphill nature of the fight for liberty. The presence of RFK, Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Bhattacharya, and J.D. Vance represents a deliberate and monumental shift in the Executive Branch, but their capacity to make a lasting dent is still in doubt.

The perpetrators of all the outrages of the last five years, carefully documented in this series, have every hope of creating in the opposition the feel of victory without the reality. So far, the wins are pyrrhic and await instantiation in budgets, laws, and practice.

These days remind one of the experience in Kabul, Afghanistan, following the US invasion in 2002. When the troops landed, the Taliban was nowhere to be seen; all the fighters headed to the hills to prepare for the long fight. George W. Bush declared victory. US troops eventually fled in panic, and the Taliban runs Afghanistan today.

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