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Maher calls for COVID commission: ‘Some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom’

March 30, 2024 | | Print Article

To his rare credit, liberal comedian Bill Maher has called for the creation of a COVID commission to investigate America’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking Friday on his HBO program, “Real Time,” Maher admitted straight-up that many of the COVID dissenters who’d cried foul about lockdown policies and vaccine mandates had been right all along.

“I get it that we didn’t know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID and some mistakes were inevitable,” he began. “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.”

“Some people said closing schools for so long was pointless and would cause much worse collateral damage to kids and they were right,” he added.

Listen:

Even The New York Times recently admitted that all the pro-school closure pundits and “experts” had been dead wrong.

“Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting,” the paper reported on March 19th.

Maher then moved on to talking about the lab leak theory originally disparaged by the media as just a mindless conspiracy theory.

“Of course, it wasn’t a conspiracy theory, and it wasn’t owned by Steve Bannon,” he said. “And now everyone, including the Biden administration, admits there’s at least a 50-50 chance that the virus could have begun in the lab in Wuhan that was doing gain of function research on that virus, duh! But I don’t see a lot of retractions being printed.”

Indeed.

Maher continued by mocking all the “stupid things” Americans did because of COVID, including washing their mail, having sex through glory holes, washing their hands every five minutes, never touching their face, and wearing a mask outside on the beach.

“Because the last thing you would want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and vitamin D,” Maher sarcastically said. “No, much better to stay locked up, stressed out and day drinking.”

“Yes, some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom, ideas that haven’t aged well. And a lot of its dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct,” he added.

The liberal comedian then finally broached the idea of a commission, arguing that, given the existence of so many other commissions, there should be a COVID commission as well.

“We love commissions!” he said. “The Warren Commission, the AIDS Commission, 911 Commission. The NFL even had an ‘Is ramming your head into another guy’s head bad for heads?’ Commission. 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,” he added.

Maher concluded his lecture by noting all the things that haven’t changed despite the COVID wake-up call that’s occurred in the last few years.

“Gain of function research is still going on in labs,” he said. “We’re still torturing animals by raising our food in conditions ideal for viruses to make the leap to humans.”

“We handed out $4 trillion dollars of free money, 280 billion of which was just flat-out stolen in what the AP called ‘the greatest grift in US history’ and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden. So we’re gonna bring back Trump?! The guy who ignored COVID like it was the dinner check?! Talk about not learning anything” he added.

Eh, conservatives for their part have argued that former President Donald Trump mainly handled the pandemic well, save for his overtures to Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom those on the right say he should have never listened to.

Vivek Saxena
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