Four years after the pandemic hit, officials are just starting to tell the truth about their panicked and destructive reaction to it. The lockdowns that were imposed worldwide (with the exception of Sweden and a few other countries) ran contrary to the longtime conventional wisdom that the main responsibility of the public-health system in a pandemic is to keep people calm and society functioning. Our public-health officials did the opposite. Intentionally. The hysteria they generated led to hundreds of thousands of non-Covid excess deaths, massive economic and social harms, and, worst of all, an unprecedented disaster in education. Francis Collins,...