Responses to that pandemic amnesty article are still floating around.
Look... I'm a forgiving kinda person and wanna extend grace, and my first inclination is to say "forgive, but don't forget". I mean... Obviously even most Democrats should agree by this point that given the judgement they showed, people like Cuomo and Newsom should never be trusted in a position as high as dog catcher ever again. People died. Many were forced to die alone. People lost their livelihoods. Their businesses. Children's education took one of the largest ever hits. All that.
But even on the forgiveness part, the first step is an apology. A recognition of wrongdoing. And I've seen almost none of that by anything other than maybe implication. And how big of a fuckup it was deserves more than just some vague "mistakes were made and we didn't know any better", because they pretended they did in order to craft universal policy that we're still suffering from today in terms of our broken economy and spiralling inflation.
If there's one thing we've all gained from COVID having happened, one bright spot to a horrible virus and reaction to it? It's that the general public has rightly become skeptical of institutions. The CDC, NIH, the FDA, the experts, were all shown to be undeserving of blind trust. The information gatekeepers deplatforming for sins like suggesting it came from a lab (it likely did), by research funded by taxpayers, pointing out which groups were significantly affected and which groups weren't, questioning the efficacy of cloth masks and closed parks, whether people should be able to leave their damn house... At every turn regular people were silenced and demonized by experts for saying things that turned out to be true. People were literally floating denying travel or even medical care to anyone who didn't get an injection that was new from a manufacturer relieved of liability.
Yes, I get it. Fear made you act irrationally. Support tyranny. There was reason to be fearful and we're all human. It's understandable and I'd like to extend forgiveness. But without not just public, but personal recognition of exactly what was wrong with not just the response, but what kinds of thinking motivated that response, we're not really learning the lesson we need to as a society. By all means, I grant that most of y'all had good intent and that we should move on, but not without the obvious lessons being admitted and actions denounced so they never happen again.
If y'all want "pandemic amnesty", most people that didn't lose their damn minds are willing to grant it after that apology, and the ball is in your court.