During his closing monologue on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that people who promoted bad policies and approaches during the coronavirus pandemic have avoided acknowledging their mistakes and “a lot of the dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct. Maybe that’s why the powers that be never wanted a COVID commission.” Maher also said that we haven’t learned anything from the pandemic, and one example is the continued use of gain-of-function research.
Maher said, “I get it that we didn’t know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID and some mistakes were inevitable. But, four years on, I’m tired of hearing, well, we didn’t know. No, we didn’t, but some people guessed better than others, and the people who got it wrong don’t seem to want to acknowledge that now. … I don’t see a lot of retractions being printed.”
After discussing school closures, attacks on the lab leak theory, overreacting with restrictions, and attacks on advocates of natural immunity, Maher said, “Yes, some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom. Ideas that haven’t aged well, and a lot of the dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct. Maybe that’s why the powers that be never wanted a COVID commission. Why not? We love commissions. The Warren Commission, the AIDS Commission, the 9/11 Commission, the NFL even had a, is ramming your head into another guy’s head bad for heads? Commission, really. So, where’s the COVID commission? Because it seems to me we haven’t learned a thing. Maybe the number one lesson from the pandemic was the need for proper air ventilation, second was never go on a Zoom with Jeffrey Toobin. But if there’s been a big national movement to retrofit buildings, I missed it. Gain-of-function research is still going on in labs. We’re still torturing animals by raising our food in conditions ideal for viruses to make the leap to humans. Bird flu was just found in a goat, which means we’re just one lonely farmer from the next pandemic. We handed out four trillion dollars of free money, 280 billion of which was just flat-out stolen in what the AP called ‘the greatest grift in U.S. history,’ and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden. So, we’re going to bring back Trump, the guy who ignored COVID like it was the dinner check?”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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