It took five years, but elite American opinion seems to be finally considering that COVID-19 interventions – short of inoculation – caused more harm than good, after long ignoring research on SARS-CoV-2's relative mildness such as National Institutes of Health director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya's Stanford seroprevalence study in spring 2020.

The Boston Globe and New York Times published features this week acknowledging the incalculable and preventable damage from nonpharmaceutical COVID-19 policies including mandatory prolonged closures of schools, businesses, social gatherings and places of worship, with catastrophic educational, economic, social and spiritual consequences.

"I think there is broad consensus that schools were closed for way too long" and should have opened in fall 2020, Brown University School of Public Health Dean Ashish Jha, who conceded "no study in the world" shows masks "work that well" after leaving the Biden White House as COVID response coordinator, told CNN this week.

"I don't think I got everything right" in the White House, though "some of it happened before President Biden came in," Jha said, acknowledging that vaccine mandates "fueled a lot of vaccine distrust" and "maybe that was the wrong policy decision."

Also becoming conventional wisdom: the once-verboten theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese government lab, with the recent disclosure that German intelligence reached "80% to 95%" confidence in a lab leak in 2020 based on animal experiments, unpublished doctoral theses, lax security and sloppiness at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Germans reportedly believe the CIA adopted the same "research-related" explanation, first disclosed by the Trump administration in January, based on the conclusion the former shared with U.S. intelligence late last year. U.K. Health Minister Gillian Merron implied the government would adopt that view in light of the CIA update, the Daily Mail reported.

The length of stay-at-home orders does not correlate with death rates, the Globe noted, citing Democrat-run states with both far longer lockdowns and some of the highest COVID mortality such as California, New York and New Mexico.

"The lockdowns were never really effective, and the confusion around them sowed a great deal of public distrust in government," Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and COVID advisor to President Biden, told the Globe.

Yet the "recent" peer-reviewed research cited by the Globe – on the "steep increase in poverty, hunger, and inequalities … that likely far outweigh potential benefits" of lockdowns, spike in adolescent anxiety and depression and lethal overdoses and learning loss averaging half a grade compared to pre-COVID — was published from mid-2022 through spring 2024.

Lockdown policies rewarded the "laptop class" at the expense of marginalized Americans, backed by politicized science and censorship of dissent, according to a new book by Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee that calls for a national inquiry.

The Globe featured their analysis of lockdowns and death rates by state and dominant political party. "What’s become increasingly clear is that a lot of what we did was irrational and based on fear, and we didn’t think through the profound costs," Macedo said.

"The whole 'Sheltering in place' was [a] complete misunderstanding of how people live, enacted by people who have laundry machines," Chris Arnade, whose pre-COVID book on "back row America" was praised by JD Vance before the veep's political career, said of the new book.

The Times admitted research was clear by "early" summer 2020 that viral spread was limited in schools abroad and children were at low risk and poor spreaders, and now shows prolonged school closures supercharged student absenteeism.

It noted Democrat-run states ignored the American Academy of Pediatrics' June 2020 reopening recommendations and teachers unions demanded essentially zero spread before returning – a decision the Philadelphia and Chicago unions still defend – while American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten now claims she was "pretty loud" for reopening.

Yet the Gray Lady printed a whopper by the AAP report's lead author, University of Colorado pediatric infectious disease specialist Sean O’Leary, that some GOP-run regions with open schools had reportedly higher COVID death rates because "they didn’t wear masks," contradicted by an ongoing 18-year systematic review of mask research.

The World Health Organization is newly absolving itself of responsibility for COVID lockdowns, claiming it "does not have the authority to do this and isn't trying to get it," but it got fact-checked by Georgia COVID analyst Kelley Krohnert, who noted WHO's May 2020 reopening criteria were patently unrealistic, including detecting "every case" and tracing "every contact."

A month earlier, Bhattacharya's study in Stanford's backyard determined the infection rate was 50 times higher than Santa Clara County's official estimate, drastically lowering the infection fatality rate. His Stanford colleague John Ioannidis, a pioneer of meta-research, deemed the median IFR 0.26% and 0.04% for everyone under age 70.