February 18, 2026

Did we learn anything from the Covid debacle?

Did we learn anything from the Covid debacle?

Princeton professor Stephen Macedo provides a retrospective on covid-era policies including the following:

1. He calls it the flu. I am old enough to remember when we were told that is a conspiracy theory.

2. There was decades of pandemic planning before Covid. The consensus was that school and workplace closures, restrictions on gathering sizes, mask mandates, social distancing measures, etc., were NOT effective and that the cost of doing so would be very high.

3. Measures NOT recommended by the WHO in their 2019 pandemic planning documents included contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry/exit screenings, border closings, and school closures.

Johns Hopkins said essentially the same thing just months before Covid started and made the point that the overbearing measures might be used for political reasons. I’ve said it for years that Covid kicked off 2020 election theft season.

4. In 2008, the ACLU said (in relation to Bush-era pandemic preparedness planning) that fear of diseases has justified abuses of state power, that coercion and brute force breeds pubic distrust, strategies that rely on voluntary participation do work as long as public health officials are working to help people not punish them, and that minorities bear the brunt of tough public safety measures.

The ACLU said noting during Covid which tells us something since they have been co-opted by Democracy Inc.

5. The professor made the point that they declared a war on Covid where dissent was not welcome, including from Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of the NIH.

6. The Covid measures that they put in place had no effect on mortality but they had a devastating impact on society and people especially related to young people and education. The measures also contributed to higher rates of crime, substance abuse, and depression, and had a negative impact on overall health.

7. He then mentions the origins of Covid. They all knew it came from the Wuhan lab but they lied about it which has led to the distrust in supposed experts and institutions. Covid had "furin" cleavage sites which are manmade. It did not come from a wet market or raccoon dogs.

After all of that, not one person has been held accountable.