A refreshing article, Ross, and it's always encouraging to see these sorts of sentiments from folks still in good standing on the left. More typically I come across the sort of reflexive defensiveness perhaps exhibited by a couple of your other commenters.

Did you happen to read David Zweig's book "An Abundance of Caution" about the school closures? I reviewed it a few months back in context of my experience chronicling Columbia's School of Public Health during Covid. ivyexile.substack.com/p…

My sense is that the pandemic would likely have been handled much differently if the president had been Hillary or somebody like Jeb, and also had it not cropped up during an election year. There are some brilliant people of integrity working in public health, but a big chunk of the time the field consists of gussying up rather idealistic activism with a few superficial STEM trappings to make the "scholarship" appear irrefutable. Covid provided a perfect pretext for PMC managerial technocrats still shaken from Brexit and Trump's shock victory to try to forcefully impose the sort of centralized top-down new normal that they'd always wanted.