Kerby Anderson

Apologies are important, especially when wrong actions hurt another person. That is why Kevin Bass, an MD/PhD medical student wrote an op-ed in Newsweek with the title: “It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID, and It Cost Lives.” He supported authorities who called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters. But he admitted that “we in the scientific community were wrong.”

He says part of the problem was the fact that: “We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and ‘they’ responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.” And he adds that the ingrained partisanship prevented the authorities from seeing the full impact of the interventions that were imposed on the public.

He adds that many of them did not speak up in support of alternative views and tried to suppress those views. He provides a list of qualified professors and health care experts that “faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community.” And, he says, “we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil.”

Near the end of his commentary, he provides a long list of the problems brought on by the authorities, with links to online articles documenting each. These include the rise in suicides and gun violence, a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders, especially among the young, and a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children. We might also add the distrust of the healthcare system along with a distrust of science and scientific authorities.

There is quite a bit to apologize for, and this op-ed is an important step in the right direction.