A scathing 520-page report released Tuesday from the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in the U.S. House of Representatives shows why Americans should never forfeit their civil liberties on the false promise of serving the common good.
Those rights are most important during a time of crisis when political leaders default to authoritarian tendencies.
The report details much of the nightmarish decisionmaking Michigan residents in particular lived through. Often relying on federal "guidance," Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued capricious masking and lockdown orders that crippled small businesses and restaurants, closed schools and led to the worst mental health crisis this state has ever faced.
The report also found the Biden administration exceeded its authority by mandating masks and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relied on flawed studies to support the issuance of unconstitutional masking mandates.
Under an executive order by President Joe Biden in February 2021, the CDC required the use of masks on public transportation under an obscure section of the Public Health Service Act of 1944. In April 2022, the order was found unconstitutional by a federal judge in Florida.
Yet masking and distancing requirements determined how Americans lived for several months.
It is understandable that in the early days of COVID, as society faced the unknowns of a new virus, masking was tried as a way to prevent spread. But as the science emerged -- which it did quickly -- that masking had little effect on COVID transmission, elected officials should have been transparent and responsive.
Instead, in Michigan, masks continued to be required, and children were kept out of school well past any time period that made sense to "slow the spread."
"These harmful effects associated with COVID-19 lockdowns in American youth are also inexorably linked to extended school closures," the report found.
Students fell behind in almost every education metric -- and the mental health of all Americans, particularly adolescents and young adults who were forced to stare at a screen to learn or socialize, dramatically worsened.
The share of 18 to 29-year-olds living at home with their parents reached 52% during the first year of the pandemic -- surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression, according to Pew Research.
Substance abuse, domestic abuse, overdoses and suicides all rose because of orders the government gave to suspend the right to move and interact freely.
Families couldn't attend funerals for loved ones unless they dwere a member of the elite.
States such as New York and Michigan co-mingled elderly nursing home patients with sick COVID patients contributing to the deaths of more than 8,000 people in Michigan from COVID in long-term care facilities and 15,000 people in New York. Families could see, but not talk to, their grandparents and parents through glass.
Progressive political ideology favors "experts" and "the science" over common-sense, democratic values. In the case of COVID, Americans forfeited their civil liberties because they were asked to trust the decision-makers to administer the general good.
As well-intentioned as that argument may be, it leaves citizens vulnerable to leaders such as Whitmer who act arbitrarily and then stick to their positions regardless of the damage they're doing.