Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared on Washington Examiner.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped its recommendation that people testing positive for COVID-19 isolate for five days. COVID-19 isn’t much of a thing anymore, but the government’s response to it wreaked havoc on our society and freedoms. We must reflect on the damage so that we do not repeat our mistakes.
Last month’s conclusions from a study of more than 99 million people in eight countries, for example, demonstrated that the rushed COVID-19 vaccine’s “adverse events of special interest” were more common than the public expected. The public couldn’t have been so unsuspecting of vaccine injuries without the help of Big Tech and the Biden administration. They intentionally worked together to hide evidence and speculation about the vaccine’s now-proven role in causing Guillain-Barre syndrome, brain blood clots, and heart and spinal cord inflammation.
Recently, a pediatrician told me that with these new revelations, she nevertheless would have taken the COVID-19 vaccine herself but would not have subjected her children to it. How many parents share the same regret as this medical expert?
Sadly, our federal government didn’t want to give its citizens information and a choice concerning the vaccine. They instead engaged in Draconian measures to suppress evidence of vaccine injuries and force mandates. Some school districts even implemented COVID-19 vaccine mandates for children. Anthony Fauci, the government’s COVID-19 czar, supported mandates for children despite the minuscule risks if they contracted the virus.
At the national level, in President Joe Biden’s September 2021 executive order to mandate vaccines for federal employees, the stated intent was to “halt the spread” of the virus. Biden even promised us, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Following the vaccine mandate for federal employees, Biden said COVID-19 was “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The bar had shifted, much like many metrics during the pandemic, from preventing infection to decreasing the likelihood of serious illness. Yet unquestionably, the answer to everything was for everyone of all ages to get the vaccine and get boosted. This ad brought to you in part by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson and their investors — right, Fauci?
But vaccine mandates weren’t the only way our governments abused us during the pandemic. The destruction waged by these self-interested virtue-signalers will reverberate through generations. Teachers unions led a mob to lock our children out of schools for a year and a half. Despite the resulting arguably insurmountable learning loss, teachers unions’ leaders continue to wash their hands of responsibility. And instead of focusing on academic excellence and learning loss recovery, they now focus on teaching our children about gender identity, social-emotional learning, and critical race theory.
The Branch Covidians also demanded isolation throughout the pandemic. Without real evidence for effectiveness, they mandated that we remain 10 feet apart from one another both inside and outside for months before the powers that be settled on 6 feet of “social distancing” indoors. Basketballs were sanitized at halftime in youth games, and parents were told to remain in their cars due to pandemic capacity restrictions in the gym.
Mask mandates were in effect nearly everywhere, especially in schools — the teachers unions made sure of that. More than two years later and despite the fact that almost no students wear masks now, Fairfax County Public Schools administrators refuse to expunge my sons’ 39 cumulative days of mask suspensions, all acquired after Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) Executive Order Two made masks optional. These school administrators, to this day, are not sorry for usurping power and persecuting students.
The self-proclaimed monopolizers of moral truth also closed our businesses across the country. For three months in Virginia, most businesses, including mine, were forced to shut their doors. There was a pandemic of permanent business closures across the country that couldn’t weather the government’s storm. Restaurants, hair salons, dry cleaners, gyms, and other businesses crumbled with many families’ dreams.
People living in isolation during the pandemic became depressed. Suicide rates and alcoholism spiked. Divorce rates also skyrocketed.
What was actually worse for our society: the disease or the so-called cure? As I watch many of the Branch Covidians continue to drive around with their “Be Kind” magnets and wear their N-95s alone in their cars, I wonder if they realize how much better we would have been without their “help” during the pandemic. Certainly, those now suffering lifelong conditions from mandated COVID-19 vaccines would be faring better.
Many parents in Fairfax County, Va., recognize the truth in Senator Paul’s words. In January and February, 2022, our local school district issued 
Despite Fauci’s public stance on mask obedience, in private, he seems to understand mask deficiencies. Senator Paul adds to his point, “I would point out that the pores of a surgical mask were six hundred times larger than the virus.” (p. 120). There is consensus; Cloth masks are ineffective. It is clear that masking is not about “the science,” it is about control.
Senator Paul and his wife, Kelley, seemed touched at the event by the story of brave young American children standing up against draconian school masking policies. The senator generously wrote the message, “In liberty!” to my sons when he signed his book for them.
The senator’s book, which will undoubtedly reach many generations of Americans, illustrates the important point that COVID policies were less about “following the science,” and more about profiting and controlling the population. He writes, “[U]nder the cult of personality around Fauci, science was bastardized into something akin to religion. And yet the media accused anyone who challenged the dogma of somehow ‘politicizing’ the virus.” (p. 120).
I hope that Americans are taking notes and internalizing the lessons of COVID policy failures and government abuses at all levels, so that we do not ever repeat them. Senator Paul’s book and his upcoming tour is a brave undertaking to that end. The IWN Fairfax chapter was grateful to be there for a stop on his important journey. 
