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Fifteen days to slow the spread.Remember that? March 2020, and the country was told to sit down and wait. Fifteen days became fifteen months in a lot of places, and the man at the center of it never stopped appearing on television to explain why the next restriction was also necessary.Here is the part that should bother you no matter where you sit politically.In March 2021, the CDC director told a national audience that vaccinated people do not carry the virus. That July, the President said if you get vaccinated, you will not get COVID. Both claims went far past what the data actually showed. The early studies indicated reduced transmission, not zero transmission, and there is an enormous difference between those two things when you are using the claim to justify firing people.By then the damage was done.Nurses who worked the entire first year without a vaccine were terminated in year two for declining one. Service members were discharged. Small businesses that survived the shutdown did not survive the mandate. Natural immunity, which is real and measurable, was waved off because it complicated the message.Then there was the theater.Six feet of distance, which Fauci himself told Congress in 2024 "sort of just appeared" without a study behind it. Plexiglass shields that did nothing. Closed beaches and empty playgrounds. Masks on for the walk to the table, off at the table.And when scientists asked whether a virus that emerged near a lab studying coronaviruses might have come from that lab, they were publicly dismissed as conspiracy theorists, while private emails later showed the question was being taken seriously behind closed doors the entire time.Ask yourself something simple. If the guidance was purely scientific, why did so much of it require the public to be managed rather than informed?A free people can be reasoned with. That was the whole premise of self-government. Publius argued in Federalist No. 63 that public opinion is a check on power, not an obstacle to it.