At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic mass hysteria bulldozed any voice of calm and reason; there was simply no stopping it, though many tried. Feeling the sense of futility of convincing my friends, neighbors, and community to not let fear destroy the very things we were trying to protect, I decided instead to act at the most effective level possible to improve my immediate environment, and that was at the level of my family.

My wife and I convinced our children that they didn’t need to be terrified even if everyone else was. They were much better off because of our efforts, and they began to see that even authorities and the large majorities supporting them could be disastrously wrong, and it was very important to state the truth even if it was massively unpopular. The truth can be buried under a ton of concrete, thrown into a volcano, or shot into the sun, but those acts won’t make it false.

The pandemic response exposed a systemic rot in US federal agencies that operate in a politicized environment with perverse incentives that favor pharmaceutical companies and powerful wealthy individuals at the expense of the public interest. Very few were courageous enough to stand up for the truth when the vast majority of the public and media were supportive of these agencies, even when their recommendations, authorizations, and mandates were clearly not backed by evidence or driven by minimum standards of ethical behavior that existed before 2020. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta, were three such individuals. The governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was another, and Florida became an outlier in Covid policy, resulting in better outcomes than lockdown- and mandate-happy California when compared with age-adjusted all-cause mortality.