I don’t want to be writing about covid in 2025.

But here we are.

I don’t want to be writing about covid in 2025.

Many people know my story but for those who don’t, I’ll try to keep it short: covid completely altered the trajectory of my life. In March 2020, our family moved into the dream house in Brooklyn that we’d been building for over two years. Our family of five had lived in a 600 sq ft studio while we had gutted a townhouse in Park Slope, down to the studs, and had rebuilt it exactly as we wanted. I picked every hinge, every paint color, every doorknob. This was our forever home. This is where our life would play out. Our kids (then aged 10, 7 and 4) would come home from college here. Our extended families, who all lived within 45 minutes, would visit often. There would be dinner parties and holidays. Football Sundays on our couch. Our eventual grandchildren would play in the backyard.

It took a long time to decide to leave, far longer than it should have. We were rerouting the future we had imagined for so long. My husband and I are both immigrants. I had grown up in Brooklyn, he in Queens. A townhouse in New York was our ultimate “made it in America” dream.

But then New York’s schools stayed closed for so long. We watched the saner places across the country open their schools but ours did not. My cover story in the New York Post urging schools to open was in April 2021, a full year after they had closed in the first place:

Our kids went to New York City public schools, our daughter to a citywide gifted and talented one in Manhattan and our boys to the local one in Park Slope. Her school didn’t reopen at all until May 2021. Our sons’ school opened at the end of September 2020, in a “hybrid” model of 2-3 days per week, but the rules were absurd and strict. The kids masked in a fashion adults were never asked to, between bites as they ate their food outside on the ground during lunch, and their school would constantly close for weeks at a time for no reason anyone would consider scientific.

Our neighbors spent the summer of 2020 marching for equity and then didn’t say a word for the poorest families of our city who didn’t have the resources to get a tutor or form a pod or send their kid to the open private schools. We couldn’t look at them anymore. Their silence was sickening.

We had to get our kids out of that madhouse but we weren’t ready to leave our home city forever. We looked up the best public schools in Florida and found a rental apartment for four months, starting in January of 2021, in the district for one of them. I still see that time as one of the happiest of my life. Our kids went to school and we lived a deliciously normal existence that we had missed so much. We ended up extending our stay because the freedom was so glorious in Florida. But ultimately we went home and tried to restart that life we had imagined.

It would be six months before we called it quits for good. New York wasn’t going to snap out of covid madness anytime soon and we couldn’t let our kids have their childhood destroyed by it. Freedom is everything. We made a permanent move to Florida and never looked back.

Mostly.

I wrote and talked about pointless and harmful covid policies for a long time after that. It wasn’t happening to us anymore, our kids were out of the insanity, but I didn’t forget those who were still in. Toddlers were being masked in NYC as late as June 2022. Tourists required vaccination to enter the country but illegal immigrants did not. Gibberish studies, including one that claimed masking helped fight racism, were reported in outlets like the New York Times with a serious tone instead of a mocking one. The covid vaccine was added to the immunization schedule for children even after it was clear it didn’t stop spread. And on and on. The stupid went on for years.

But to hear people talk about it now, everyone wanted the same things. Everyone wanted schools to open. Randi Weingarten, who I largely consider the chief villain of the pandemic where school closures are concerned, constantly talks about how much she actually wanted schools to open. She was the key person who stood in the way of that happening, going so far as to rewrite CDC policies so schools stayed closed in the blue areas with politicians she controlled.

Now everyone pretends they opposed harmful lockdowns. Everyone knew masking was silly. Did anyone even support any of the worst policies? Who could remember.

In the NY Post a few days ago, I lay out how galling it is that a massive rewrite is underway to rework the covid years into a sane era where one or two mistakes may have been made. I point to Tyler Cowen’s piece in The Free Press about how elites mostly got covid right. I don’t want to be writing about covid in 2025 but I can not let a statement like that go unchecked.

Two things that I didn’t get to in the piece that I want to highlight here.

One, Cowen takes a shot at Governor Ron DeSantis, who did get much of Covid-era policy right, for not getting it right sooner. His point is “we didn’t know” and the evidence is that DeSantis, largely considered the political hero of the pandemic years, also got it wrong. But getting it wrong in the spring of 2020 and getting it wrong in 2022 are not the same thing. Cowen’s comment gives a pass to those who refused to ahem, follow the science, literally for years, because their political side said told them not to. DeSantis took stands when they were unpopular, Democratic politicians couldn’t even do the right thing when there was overwhelming evidence what the right thing would be. When New York was masking toddlers but the elderly were having lunch in packed restaurants, don’t tell me they didn’t know.

Two, the role of Anthony Fauci in causing much of the chaotic covid response has to be remembered. “He did his best!” his defenders say. No, he did not. He absolutely did not.

Entire books can be written about Fauci’s unscientific flip-flopping through the pandemic. Enamored with the sound of his own voice, Fauci was a wealth of confusion for Americans and did more to lead to the current distrust of health officials than anyone. His politicization of that difficult time should be his legacy.

Just on masking, for example, Fauci took nearly every side of the issue, announcing every shift with such certainty that only fools could oppose him.

On March 8, 2020, Fauci said “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is and often there are unintended consequences.”

He later claimed he said this because there was a mask shortage for medical professionals. This is false. A month earlier, on February 5, 2020, Fauci advised a colleague not to mask on her travels. He knew masks were pointless to stop the spread of a virus.

In August of 2020, Fauci called for universal masking.

In October 2020, Fauci pushed a nationwide mask mandate.

In January of 2021, he said double masking was “common sense.”

In March 2021, Fauci had a heated exchange with Senator Rand Paul on masking post-vaccination or infection. Fauci said of Paul "He was saying if you've been infected, or you've been vaccinated, don't wear a mask — which is completely against all public health tenets. So he’s dead wrong.”

A month later, on April 25, 2021, Fauci said people could stop masking outdoors because “The risk when you’re outdoors – which we have been saying all along – is extremely low.” He had never said that before.

Then, to make sure that his comments were as clear as a muddy puddle on a dirty road, three days later he said that kids, who had the lowest risk of a poor Covid outcome of anyone, should still mask outdoors until they could get vaccinated. So Paul was right that masking post-vaccination made no sense? Did Fauci ever call Paul and apologize?

In December of 2021, Fauci said “There’s no doubt that fabric masks work.”

In January of 2022, Fauci reiterated that cloth masks work.

In September of 2023, Fauci argued that masks don’t work on a large scale but somehow work on the individual level.

In August of 2024, Fauci got covid for a third time, despite being vaccinated with six boosters and said that people should continue masking.

In April of 2025, after saying “masks work,” at an event, the host asked Fauci if that included cloth masks. You might be completely shocked to find out that what Fauci said multiple times about cloth masks no longer applied. Fauci said “A proper mask, an N95 or a KN95, properly worn, all the time [works.] If someone comes in and says ‘you know, I don’t know what happened, I wore a mask for most of the time and then I went to a restaurant and took off the mask and had my meal and got infected. Masks don’t work.’ Well, you took the mask off.”

No one, including Anthony Fauci, ever wore an N-95 mask 100% of the time, never even taking it off to eat.

So, no, I won’t stop talking and writing about covid. Monstrous things were done to Americans by health officials in charge, by weak politicians who catered to special interest groups like teachers’ unions, by liars who now want to be absolved of what they did. We can’t let that happen. There won’t be a reckoning, I understand that. Our incurious media will never hold anyone accountable for what they did. But I will not let history be rewritten.