We’re now learning just how bad the “collateral damage” is post-pandemic. ~ Bill Maher on Twitter
Bill Maher: Now we’re getting some information, after a while, we have time, to find out just how bad the collateral damage has been. Here’s just a few cases.
The pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading. See, right away I got to say, this pisses me off, I see these headlines all the time. The pandemic didn’t do that, the way we handled the pandemic did that. The pandemic was most certainly a thing, but let’s not just say the pandemic, because it was not written in stone that we had to handle it the way we did. ACT scores are the lowest in 30 years, anxiety and depression way up, the body mass index increase doubled for kids 2 to 19, drug overdose overdose deaths, murders way up, inflation at a 40-year high, domestic violence increased. Oh, and my favorite, car crashes. They couldn’t figure this out [car crashes] went way, way, way, up and they’re finally the experts, I love this, the experts said you know what it is, people just went f****** mental. They just went nuts. They’re like I’m home and the f****** kids are here all the time. My stupid husband is here all the time. I’m just going to take it out on the highway, and they did.
Michael Smerconish: There was a group, the Great Barrington Declaration, these academics and a lot of them are at Hoovered at Stanford I have
Bill Maher: Hoovered?
Michael Smerconish: Hoover Institute. I had them on CNN, I put them on regularly on radio and there was always a enormous blowback because they were saying many of the things that you’re saying now, only they were saying it in real time.
Bill Maher: That’s the name of the show
Michael Smerconish: Yay, I guess, I guess what I would, what I would add to that is I think one of the great injustices was the rush to judgement as soon as the s*** hit the fan to clear out every college campus in grad school. It never made sense to me that we sent them back through airplanes and car rides with relatives instead of keeping the right where they were and, and Bill, I have three for him I’m still paying tuition bills, they were so robbed of a year, year-and-a-half of of all the exchange, the mingling that you talked about last week.
Bill Maher: Yay.
Michael Smerconish: We’re never going to make that time up. That’s my point.
Guest: What you don’t have s the benefit of the alternative scenarios to see how they would have come out to be able to judge whether what did happen was a lesser evil than other options that would have unfolded and so suppose, suppose we didn’t . . .
Bill Maher: Actually, we do because other countries handled it differently. Sweden didn’t handle it differently. Some of the places with the lowest vaccination rates turned out to have the best results.
Guest: With really low population densities.
Bill Maher: Yay, there are different factors the right.
Guest: Yes, that matters.
Bill Maher: Of course that matters.
Guest: I walk into an elevator in New York City with 15 people . . .
Bill Maher: We can’t make any judgments because we don’t live in an alternative universe Over America handled differently, and I’m saying other places handle it differently, that does matter.
Michael Smerconish: It’s a legitimate, I think it’s a legitimate conversation to have. You remember there was talk of of herd immunity and how we get there at the outset and people were shouted down for even raising that prospect. I’m not the scientist you are, but in retrospect . . .
Bill Maher: They shouted down the idea that it might have escaped from a lab.
Michael Smerconish: Right.
Bill Maher: That was somehow racist?
Michael Smerconish: Right.
Bill Maher: As opposed to somehow that if you believe that it came from the wet markets you were a Democrat and if you believed it came from the lab you were a Republican. This is ridiculous.
