There has already been a robust response to Emily Oster’s flimsy Atlantic piece, Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty in which the Economics professor counsels forgetting of Covid decisions: ‘Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.’

Oster is careful not to specify which ‘we’ made the choices that turned out worst – the lengthy school closures that harmed young people’s learning and wellbeing, the forced shuttering of small businesses that led to bankruptcies and associated devastation, the border stoppages that caused severe economic disruption while doing nothing to end the pandemic, the mass...