Instead of declaring a pandemic amnesty, how about declaring a pandemic tribunal?

By Marica Micallef

On 31^st October, the Atlantic published an article entitled “Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty”[1] by Emily Oster, an Economist at Brown University.

Oster, besides advocating for such an amnesty, added that the wilful spreaders of the actual misinformation must be ignored while we should forgive the difficult decisions that people had no choice but to make with imperfect information during the pandemic. She stated that the precautions that people were made to talk – that is, wearing masks and social distancing were totally misguided: “But the thing is: We didn’t know” and that everything said and imposed was “the result of uncertainty”.

This article has caused some comments. I am only showing two of such posts:

Now let’s have a look at other articles which the same Atlantic had published before.

On 3^rd August 2021, it published an article by Juliette Kayyem, entitled “Unvaccinated people need to bear the burden”.[2] Kayyem is a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama.

In it, Kayyem advocated that flying should not be a right of the unvaccinated and that the government should restrict it to vaccinated people. She built her argument on a poll whereby 41% of the unvaccinated had said that “a prohibition on airline travel would get them closer to the shots.” She added that “the deprivation of movement will win over doubters”, and that for the common good, this should be banned until everyone is vaccinated. Instead of agreeing with conservative critics who believed that unvaccinated people were being ordered around arbitrarily with the mandates, Kayyem described this as shifting burdens to unvaccinated people for whom it is right to have them prohibited from certain societal benefits. She also justified the fact that by refusing the non-vaccinated the right to work, employers would operate more smoothly. According to her, people who defy public-health advice don’t deserve to be a protected class, while having to show proof of vaccination when flying is only a minor convenience, because flying is a privilege.

Three weeks later, on the 29^th of August, the same author wrote another article entitled “Vaccine Refusers Don’t Get to Dictate Terms Anymore”[3] because “people who opt out of shots shouldn’t expect their employers, health insurers, and fellow citizens to accommodate them.” In the article, Kayyem praised a number of institutions and companies that mandated the vaccine, especially Delta Air Lines for being creative and announcing the financial penalty of a $200-a-month health-insurance surcharge on unvaccinated employees. In her statement: “Regardless of the reasons for their hesitancy, unvaccinated employees will literally have to pay for it.” She praised such an approach for two reasons: firstly, so that the business’s ability to function would not be hurt, and secondly because it still acknowledged the free will of the vaccine refusers which meant that they could keep rejecting the shot while having to accept the consequences.

She concluded the article with: “I know, I know: I should try harder to understand the feelings of unvaccinated Americans. Being more patient and empathetic would make me sound nicer. But do you know what’s really nice? Going back to school safely. Traveling without feeling vulnerable. Seeing a nation come back to life.”

In between these two articles, on 22nd August 2021, the Atlantic published an article by Silas House, an author, entitled “Some Americans No Longer Believe in the Common Good”[4]. In it, she criticised a host of conservative politicians for the anti-vaccination rhetoric and being against the mask legislation, and that Americans should do some sacrifice for the common good. She gave examples of some incidents which occurred by the non-vaccinated like when parents yelled at medical professionals for having spoken in favour of the masks and when a reporter was attacked in an anti-vaccination protest in Los Angeles. She concluded that the non-vaccinated are unwilling to give up a small portion of their daily comforts for the sake of America, but she put the readers’ minds at rest that these do not constitute the majority, because most of the vaccinated, think of one another.

On 25^th January 2022, Kurt Anderson’s article “The Anti-Vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America”[5] claimed that since the summer of 2020, “the conservative campaign against vaccination has claimed thousands of lives for no ethically justifiable purpose.” He criticises those American politicians who were anti-testing, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, with a “nothing-to-worry-about orthodoxy” like Democrat Jamie Raskin who said that all was “like a policy of mass human sacrifice” and other people on the right who compared “the inconvenience of closing down public places to ritual sacrifice.”

So, do they think that the unvaccinated will accept the declaration of amnesty and grant it? How about declaring a pandemic tribunal instead, where all those involved in crafting lies, destroying lives, killing people in hospitals, denying people treatment while attempting to keep people in the dark about Covid and pushing the Covid-19 deadly vaccine onto people, are held accountable?