Amy Acton kept us floundering in fear during COVID-19. She can't be governor.

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

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This month marks five years since the greatest assault on civil liberties by governments throughout the ostensibly free world since WWII, including across the United States and right here in Ohio.

Politicians and the narrowly-focused experts they foolishly empowered restricted freedom of assembly, religion, the press, and speech — all previously sacrosanct. We were forced to stay in our homes, cover our faces, close our businesses, isolate our children, and watch loved ones die without the comfort of our touch.

They added $6,000,000,000,000 to our already bloated national debt.

Entire populations were subdued not with bullets and bombs but by the expert’s fears, lies, and incompetence.

They told us it was necessary to “flatten the curve,” “slow the spread,” and save lives.

It wasn’t necessary. It flattened our economy. And society has yet to fully recover.

You know what I’m talking about — the government responses to the global pandemic caused by a novel respiratory virus we came to know simply as Covid.

Now, Dr. Amy Acton, the bureaucrat who led the assault on the freedoms of Ohioans, is running for governor. Dr. Acton, a Democrat, is running to succeed Mike DeWine, our current Republican governor, who empowered and signed off on Dr. Acton’s orders five years ago.

Bipartisanship of the Acton/DeWine variety is often lauded as good governance, but when driven by fear, it’s just a more efficient path to tyranny.

The pandemic was real. Authorities were right to take the threat seriously. Some sacrifices were necessary. The questions were always how much and by whom.

Forsaking individual liberties — if the actions are constitutional and for the common good — still must be premised on an honest, public accounting of the evidence to outline the threat,  support the sacrifice, and detail the costs.

Such an honest reckoning was never offered at the time and is only trickling out now.

The experts and their apologists insisted that Covid was so new and deadly that there simply wasn’t time, and we had to do something — anything — to stop it. There was some truth to the former but little for the latter.

If you swim in the ocean and get caught in a rip current, your fear-driven reaction is to frantically swim toward shore. You’re likely to drown from exhaustion as you struggle against the tide pushing you out to sea. The thoughtful, evidence-based response is to swim parallel to the shoreline until you exit the current and can make your way to safety.

Our lifeguards of public health kept us floundering in fear rather than throwing us the buoy of evidence to help us through the maelstrom.

Covid was deadly, but the evidence was clear in the first weeks of the pandemic that the risks were highly age stratified, with school-age children largely spared and healthy adults at minimal risk.

Population-wide limits on movement and commerce had never been imposed outside of wartime until the Chinese Communist Party claimed success doing so and Western governments followed their lead without objective evidence of efficacy.

We knew before Covid that school closures were highly disruptive and learned from Europe that schools — and students — weren’t a significant source of community transmission.

We knew “hybrid” school was an untested chimera but forced it on millions of kids for months and years if they were to have school at all. In Columbus City Schools alone, more than 10,000 kids never logged on.

We sacrificed our children’s future based on the fears of adults.

We knew community masking had never been shown to be effective but governments mandated their use anyway, even for children, on whom it had never been tested.

We knew the six foot social distancing rule was a fabrication but public health autocrats forced it on us anyway.

To know something and then claim ignorance or the opposite of what you know is the definition of a lie.

Nowhere was the obviousness of the experts’ dissembling more evident than in their ignoring the rules they forced on the rest of us or their excuses for allowing tens of thousands of people to gather maskless and packed tightly together in protest of the killing of George Floyd during the first summer of the pandemic.

That they did so while still forcing children to cover their beautiful faces with useless masks and frighten them into thinking they’d kill their parents if they didn’t is the epitome of hypocritical cruelty.

Our leaders and their designated experts pitted citizen against citizen with unsupported claims of a pandemic of the unmasked and unvaccinated. They debased science by insisting it was settled when it wasn’t.

I know that many excuse or would like to forget the expert and leadership failures from five years ago. But that would only compound their errors as we would fail to learn from them and will be more likely to repeat them in the future.

I don’t begrudge those in power for trying to do what they thought best, especially amid a crisis. I fault them for their hubris, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and lack of contrition.

 They should never hold power again.