TWO WEEKS TO SLOW THE SPREAD WAS A LIE.

As May of 2020 gave way to June, pandemic mitigation, better understood as fashionable nonsense, was still what Officialdom Decreed.

Americans had been forced to confront the reality that "two weeks to slow the spread" was a lie. The two weeks had come and gone at the end of March, yet government health advisors had continued to pressure authorities at the federal, state, and local levels to maintain lockdowns, mask mandates, and prohibitions on social gatherings.

These policies were initially sold to the public as temporary measures that were necessary to give hospitals time to receive an influx of COVID-19 patients. By the start of the summer, it had become clear that public health experts would continue to insist on heavy-handed mitigation measures until either case counts crashed on their own or a vaccine became widely available. This meant that in Democratic-controlled municipalities, where it was fashionable to "trust the science," relevant policymakers would keep lockdowns in place, require masks in all public spaces, and discourage large gatherings—even outdoors.

Robby Soave correctly notes that a virtue signal exposed the lie. "When we speak of declining trust in experts, this is the sort of thing we're talking about:  Remember when scientists said protesting was OK but only if it was against racism?"

We understand that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.  Officialdom botched that, badly.  "In the aftermath, organized science and public health might have so discredited themselves that reducing the indirect cost return reimbursements and defunding the universities are an easier sell to the Militant Normals."