After the Pandemic: Amnesty or Amnesia

In recent months, several voices have called for a pandemic ‘amnesty’. However, or it to be real, and not mere ‘amnesia’ or memory loss, it needs to be preceded by an open apology by those in charge.

In the autumn of 2022, economist Emily Oster made a proposal in The Atlantic to declare ‘a pandemic amnesty’, arguing for it with the claim that even though mistakes were made, we just didn’t know any better at the time. Delving into it, however, the claim feels rather slim. Indeed, we might have not known everything in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic first broke out, yet it was clear quite quickly that the virus had distinguishable risk groups, as well as that it posed no serious risk to healthy children and youngsters. And yet, in many places of the world, the restrictions were placed on all indiscriminately, just as the vaccines were later recommended without much, if any consideration of other health factors. Oftentimes people were forced either to accept the dictate or lose their livelihood, career and social position. Even protests were subdued or outright dispersed in some parts of the world.

The word ‘amnesty’ is derived from Greek where it means ‘forgetting the bad’.

The Greek word ἀμνηστῐ́ᾱ (amnestia) that ‘amnesty’ is derived from means ‘forgetfulness’, particularly ‘forgetting the bad’. However, for ‘amnesty’ to have any true credence, it would need to be preceded by ‘paenitentia’, some form of penance or regret. Unless one asks to be forgiven, forgiveness will really go half way. Furthermore, we should all know even from our everyday life that asking pardon will only have real substance if the excused is also able act upon his or her regret and not commit the mistake all over. Asking for forgiveness presumes that we have, at least to a degree, understood our error and feel ourselves at fault, having thus learnt something from the mistake. To put something right, we need to understand what went wrong. Amnesia – a total loss of memory – on the other hand is looking for a pardon for the perpetrator to err in the same way again, and potentially with even greater harm. Voices like Oster or her fellow mind Alena Buyx, president of German Ethics Council, run counter, for example, to major Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet that was one of the first to take a self-critical tone and say they had ‘failed’ in their journalistic diligence over the pandemic.

In the US, professors Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya have therefore called for ‘a COVID truth commission’, to take an honest look at the costs and benefits, and the collateral harm of the imposed measures. Amongst many oddities of the prevalent response, they seek to ask why was the worth and strength of naturally acquired immunity ignored, even though it would have significantly helped in tackling the threat the virus posed to the risk groups and at the same time, kept the rest of the society more open and less prone to division. The divisive quality was, of course, most of all exemplified in the establishment of so-called vaccine passports, even though we know by now that vaccines’ actual effect on transmission – the main claim behind them – was never tested. The same was, by the way, referred to by Peter Doshi in the British Medical Journal already in October of 2020.

Prof. Martin Kulldorff is one of those calling for ‘COVID Truth Commission’ for reviewing the pandemic policies of last years. Image: Thérèse Soukar (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)

The collateral damage of thwarted education and hurt social skills of children and youth is another vast area of concern, Uganda being perhaps the most drastic example here, with children missing out almost two years of school. What will be the consequent result of such voids, or the real effect of day-long masking of some socially shy adolescents, for example, will be visible over time. Most importantly, however – if science is really the yardstick to go by – it would perhaps serve us best to really look into why were some of the highly reputable experts in the matter suddenly refused public floor and consideration.

What also needs to be asked though, and is perhaps even far more challenging to answer, is the question of why did so many people so easily accept the proposed account of the pandemic and treated any diverging views with marked indifference or even malice. Should it speak to our complacency with holding our rulers to account, there is something deeply at odds here with the proclaimed values of liberal empowerment and solidarity – instead of fighting the divide, it feels it was oftentimes welcomed. Did some of us, perhaps, elect to forgo our very personal responsibility of seeking truth and honesty? And this, in turn, begs to ask whether the society’s response to the pandemic was really confined to the matters of health or whether it became an outlet of anger against those worldviews and that knowledge which did not concede with one’s own. If it was the latter, the healing or ‘amnesty’ necessary for us runs far deeper than exonerating any particular pandemic policies. Even if seeking pardon for lockdowns, vaccine mandates, day-long masking, shedding unvaccinated youth of much of their social life or curbing their sporting and learning opportunities, or the elderly passing in devastating solitude, etc, etc, would be something of a necessary start.