THE LOCKDOWN SKEPTICS WON.

It's possible that Donald Trump's reluctance to continue the hard corona shutdowns, whether to boost his 2020 electoral chances or on sound policy grounds, contributed to his return to the White House earlier this year.  He named lockdown skeptic Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health.

Yet five years on, at Bhattacharya's confirmation hearing, Democrats were completely mum about his COVID-era research and advocacy.

Not a single Democrat mentioned the Great Barrington Declaration. None bothered to press Bhattacharya on his opposition to once-consensus opinions on lockdowns, masking, and school closures.

Despite having every opportunity and incentive to attack Bhattacharya as a dangerous crank nominee, the minority on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chose not to even mention what were once his most controversial views.

Instead, Democrats almost exclusively focused their questions on the Trump administration's recent pauses of NIH grant and advisory committees and caps on grantees' indirect research spending.

That report, filed by Reason's Christian Britschgi, concentrates on the end of the foolish idea that lockdowns were sound policy.

Bhattacharya himself was unapologetic about his criticism of lockdowns—saying that Florida ended the pandemic with lower all-cause mortality than California, as did Sweden vis-à-vis its neighbors.

Democrats' silence and Republicans' praise is a remarkable touchstone. It's yet more proof that five years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown skeptics have won the argument.

Critics of lockdowns can publicly express the idea that lockdowns don't work as an uncontroversial matter of fact. Past defenders of lockdowns are now unwilling to back the policies in public, not even in a lockdown skeptic's confirmation hearing for a high-ranking public health position.

It's possible, though, that the Trump administration is changing the nature of sponsored research at the Institutes.

At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya criticized past NIH leaders for stepping outside their role as scientists to tell people what to do during the pandemic and attempting to silence debate instead of encouraging it.

"The role of scientists is to say these are the risks by giving more data," said Bhattacharya. "Science should be an engine for freedom, knowledge and freedom."

It's a refreshing sentiment and one that would seem to take the most authoritarian COVID-era policies off the table in any future crisis.

Whether his management team will address the fundamental failings of sponsored research is yet to be determined.

Let's take the win, though.  Science is a process, and scientists are neither oracles nor priests.

The virus felt so frightening back then. So unexpected.

And if public health officials made some mistakes — you might be convinced, by this point, that they kept schools closed too long — you’re willing to cut them some slack.

People like infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci were doing the best they could with the information they had. They were following the science. And we got to the other side in better shape than we might have.

But if there’s something comforting in this story — even a little triumphant — there’s just one problem: It’s almost completely wrong.

That’s according to Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s scathing new book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.”

In their telling, Fauci and his ilk didn’t follow the science, they betrayed it — pressing for lockdowns even though experts had warned for years that there was little evidence to support such a drastic intervention.

When they ran into dissent, they squelched it.

And the people who should have held them to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job.

The costs of the shutdowns were enormous: trillions of dollars in deficit spending to stave off economic ruin; massive learning loss, concentrated among the least advantaged children; the special pain of leaving loved ones to die alone in dreary nursing homes and emergency rooms; a further cleaving of our already divided society.

Put another way, the tradeoffs we noted a month into the shutdowns almost always turned out to be unfavorable to the lockdown advocates.  Accumulating evidence on that score almost certainly led to the return of Donald Trump to the White House, tariffs and nasty social media and all.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg is savoring the moment, and yet he wants butts to be kicked and names to be taken.

But as one of the unwashed, unfavored masses who still managed to figure the eventual truth out bright and early, and paid a price for it, I’m still not ready to make nice. There’s gotta be a “truth and reconciliation” commission of some sort.

Even if it’s only here.

Illinois and Minnesota are both failed states losing productive people, and the corona tyranny records of the people who contributed to those failures ought be kept in the minds of the electorate.