Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no shortage of analysis personifying the virus as the villain. In a sense, it’s understandable: SARS-CoV-2 was the catalyst and the killer that drove much of the pandemic destruction. But painting public health leaders as innocent bystanders and Covid as the boogeyman who made people sick and locked down the economy, destroyed businesses, shuttered schools, censored speech, masked children, and suspended constitutional rights and sacred rituals is deceitful historical revisionism.

On Thursday, a Washington Post headline asserted that “Covid shut schools five years ago. Anxiety, learning loss and more linger.” On Monday, a PBS FRONTLINE headline heralded “A Look Back at How the COVID-19 Pandemic Disrupted the World.” Last week David Wallace-Wells wrote about “How Covid Remade America” in The New York Times. According to Wallace-Wells, “It” — that is, Covid — “broke our faith in public health,” “shackled the U.S. with debt,” “scarred children,” and “turned us into hyperindividualists.”

In other words, when the media, public health “experts,” and government officials aren’t blaming the woes of the pandemic on Trump’s “unscientific” response, the unmasked, or vaccine skeptics, they’re blaming Covid, as if the virus were the only entity with any real agency during the pandemic years.

But Covid didn’t order lockdowns and issue stay-at-home orders. Covid didn’t mandate masks and vaccines. Covid didn’t close schools. Government officials did that, and, yes, they actually had agency and alternatives to Covid tyranny.

As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean noted in Intelligencer, “there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic.” They went on to cite 50 studies indicating that the lockdowns did little to reduce Covid mortality. An examination of state Covid orders by two Princeton professors does not show a correlation between stay-at-home order duration and Covid deaths. Sweden’s no-lockdown approach led to an excess mortality rate of 4.4 percent during peak pandemic years, data shows — the rate in the United States was more than double that number. As Nocera and McLean observe, “It is not unreasonable to conclude from the available data that the lockdowns led to more overall deaths in the U.S. than a policy that resembled Sweden’s would have.”

Furthermore, the decision leaders made to put the nation under house arrest wasn’t just ineffective and anti-constitutional; “shelter-in-place” orders had devastating societal consequences. To summarize briefly, lockdowns “increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies,” according to reporting by the Boston Globe. “As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading.”

Despite the lockdowns’ disastrous consequences, it’s common for the media to bemoan Americans’ diminishing trust in “science” and public health guidance — as if the virus itself is responsible.

But Covid didn’t break “our faith in public health;” public officials did that. Covid just helped them do it by giving them an opportunity to display their narcissistic megalomania. They could have respected and upheld the constitutional freedoms and principles that have long served as the backbone of our republic, but they did the opposite. In addition to instituting indefinite lockdowns, the “experts” descended monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily with new pronouncements from on high. Cosplaying as Moses on Mount Sinai, they proclaimed their health commandments: masking between bites, arrows on grocery store floors, the made-up six feet of “social” distancing. Unlike Moses, they mustered no signs of divine origin for their edicts — no thunder, no fiery mountain, no inscribed tablets of stone.

Government officials, particularly those on the left, melded Covid guidelines into a new, legalistic morality. Those who followed (or virtue-signaled their attempt at following) the rules were deemed “loving.” They kept their masks on as they walked to the restaurant table, avoided “large” gatherings, and got vaccinated — and then boosted, again, and again, and again. Political and institutional leaders, along with the media, vilified anyone who failed to abide by their ever-changing guidelines and essentially accused those who opposed the guidelines of murdering elderly people.

Lacking the willpower and the ability to enforce social-distancing, shelter-in-place, and masking requirements in all places at all times, Covid tyrants manipulated and intimidated businesses, schools, and churches into cramming down compliance on their fellow citizens. Legacy media outlets faithfully fanned the flames of fear and hysteria while scanning the horizon for minor Covid infractions, eager to pounce and destroy the reputations of those who violated the new morality. Unsurprisingly, Americans have not responded by expressing credulous faith in the public health “expert” class (or the corporate media).

When it comes to Americans and “science,” a Wall Street Journal headline from November of last year is representative of the media narrative: “How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics.” The subhead warns that “officials worry they won’t have ample clout for the next crisis.” Given how badly they failed during the last pandemic, that shouldn’t be a surprise. But the bigger issue with the framing is that Americans’ lack of confidence in public health officials — or even in scientists — does not equal lack of confidence in science. The “experts” are not “the science,” contrary to Anthony Fauci’s infamously ridiculous claim.

“Science” can refer to a body of established knowledge, but the “knowledge” Fauci and his followers were peddling wasn’t based on a systematic study of physical reality guided by scientific principles. Instead, all too often, they just made it up — on lockdowns, masking, and vaccines stopping transmission of the virus, to give a few examples. Yet politicians and officials at the national and local level became instant celebrities, appearing behind podiums and on nightly television, unmasked and uncensored, because they had something significant to say: no weddings, no funerals, no saying goodbye to loved ones who would soon be gone forever. What they had to say was significant, however, because of how much damage it would cause, not because it was true, and Americans are still paying the price five years later.

The Covid “experts” — whether politicians, public health officials, scientists, or local leaders — weren’t victims of the virus. They chose the unscientific tyranny of lockdowns, mandates, and petty, ineffective, legalistic rules, and they didn’t have to. If these tyrants really want to regain the trust of the American people, they should start by refusing to embrace totalitarianism the next time anti-liberty constituents and the media clamor for them to turn the republic into a police state.

Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.