Heavy-handed government approach wasn’t effective in Covid response

Editor:

Roughly two years ago today on March 16, 2020 we went from “14 days to slow the spread” and to flatten the healthcare curve to two years of government-imposed lockdowns, and mandates restricting/taking away personal liberties and freedoms guaranteed to us by the US Constitution in an inept attempt to try and control a virus through control of human behavior.

Some may wonder why I am writing about this now; the mandates have been lifted and we are free once again. Well, “they” did lift them, but there is still this undercurrent if you listen close enough that we are free as long as numbers don’t spike again.

For example, just the other day President Biden extended the Federal Transportation mask mandate. At the state level I am still unsure if there was a ruling on the constitutionality of Hochul mask mandate which was in front of the State Supreme Court for the last two months.

Why no ruling? What about the healthcare worker vaccine mandate and all of those professionals who lost their jobs? These are just a few examples…there are many more.

This signals to me that our government is still holding on to the mask and vaccination mandate string ready to pull it at a moment’s notice. This is not acceptable to me.

Politicians claim that they are following the science and the data, but what specifically are they looking at to make these monumental decisions about what freedoms we can and cannot have? From the first onset I agree there was much to be worried about with regard to Covid, because there was much, we didn’t know. However, from that first summer of Covid, we knew critical facts about this disease that haven’t changed since then.

Most importantly, we knew who was at serious risk for hospitalization and death and who wasn’t. The elderly and those with certain health issues were most at risk and generally healthy individuals and especially children were not.

While the different variants spread at different rates and pretty much everyone got Omicron whether you were vaxxed or not, the previous facts did not change. Yet for two years, New York continued on with governor-imposed, non-sensical ineffective restrictions disregarding science and data at the expense of our freedom.

Let’s even say we give the Government the benefit of the doubt, and they were waiting for the vaccine before they would change their approach. I strongly feel the “public policy” and government intervention part of this pandemic was over once the vaccine was released.

Regardless of your position on the vaccine and its effectiveness, it was available by January/February of 2021 for all who wanted it and with the post-Covid treatments available which reduce hospitalization by 95+%…at this point the Government has no business dictating anything to us citizens in this regard.

The decisions that remain should have been left to individual choice made with consultation of one’s own doctor. There should have been no forced or coerced vaccinations and no masking mandates!

There are tons of data out there comparing states and countries that have strict mandates vs those that did not and generally speaking the difference in the numbers is negligible. So basically, all of the loss of freedom, damage to our children’s mindset and future, the spreading of fear, the economic hardship was completely avoidable, ineffective and what was done needs to be answered for. As we head into this election cycle, I urge everyone to not let these politicians take credit for beating Covid.

For me, what I want to hear from current and potential candidates at all levels is their stance on how this pandemic approach went, what they would have done differently and certainly where are they on the stance of a one-size-fits-all-mandate approach to a public health concern such as Covid.

I will only vote for candidates that believe in limited government intervention and more specifically those that believe in our citizens to make the right choices if they are just given the facts without using “political” science and fear-mongering.

Brian Sorochty

Batavia