Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty

Economist Emily Oster’s The Atlantic essay “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” contributes to post-COVID discourse by narrating early pandemic behaviors as part of a broader call for collective forgiveness. Oster recalls personal anecdotes from spring 2020—homemade cloth masks, improvised distancing rituals, and outdoor precautions that later proved ineffectual—underscoring how early public health actions were guided more by fear and uncertainty than by scientific consensus. “We didn’t know,” she writes, framing such moments as emblematic of a population improvising under duress.

While Oster critiques school closures for causing long-term harm to students with minimal epidemiological benefit, her broader argument reframes all pandemic protocols as experimental—undertaken in good faith, with incomplete data. Rather than litigate specific missteps, she advocates redirecting public conversation away from blame and toward pragmatic repair, including addressing vaccine hesitancy and learning loss.

Notably, Oster’s role as a non-specialist public voice during the pandemic—an economist without formal training in public health—became a flashpoint. Her advocacy to reopen schools made her both popular and polarizing, drawing epithets like “teacher killer” and “génocidaire.” These personal recollections serve as narrative evidence of the broader politicization of pandemic response in the U.S.

Through memoir-inflected reflection, Oster’s article charts the evolving rhetoric of COVID-19 storytelling—from crisis improvisation to retrospective judgment—and calls for a more constructive, adaptive approach to ongoing pandemic consequences.