Never forget June 5 — the day the elites shattered America’s trust

Every year for the last six, we’ve commemorated the key dates of the COVID-19 saga.

March 11, when the World Health Organization officially declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic.

March 13, when the US government declared a nationwide emergency and we started hearing about “two weeks to flatten the curve.”

March 16, the day New York City closed its schools and locked down most businesses.

The standard timeline, though, obscures some of the anniversaries that we urgently must remember.

On May 26, with New York City and many states still in lockdown mode, the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis began in earnest.

The protests swelled and many devolved into riots, spreading throughout the country.

By May 28, after the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct station was set on fire, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the state’s National Guard.

On June 1, the looting and rioting had gotten so bad in New York City that Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed a curfew.

And on that same day, health officials and infectious disease experts were quietly gathering signatures on an “Open Letter Advocating for an Anti-Racist Public Health Response to Demonstrations Against Systemic Injustice Occurring During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” imploring Americans to ignore the lockdown orders — in order to join the George Floyd demonstrations.

On June 5, when CNN published that letter, it bore the names and carried the imprimatur of more than 1,200 medical professionals.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they lectured us.

That’s why, “as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings” — read: violent protests — “as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”

Extra galling, the letter made a point to condemn a protest in Lansing, Mich. — because that one was organized to demand an end to the lockdowns that were destroying lives and livelihoods.

The Lansing demonstration, the signers said, triggered them to “privately mourn the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve.”

It was a bad joke: Those “leaders” went on to turn the rift into a gaping gulf.

Businesses were still closed — NYC didn’t start its cautious and painfully slow reopening process until June 7.

Children as young as 2 years old were forced to mask.

Elderly people died alone, unable to see family, unable to say goodbye.

We were gripped by mania — and the people pushing that mania, the same health officials who were adamant that leaving our house meant everyone would die, gave a free pass to protesters to do whatever they wanted, because they liked the cause.

On June 2, 2020, I was asking about the double standard in these pages.

“The protests have exposed the absurdity of the continued lockdowns,” I wrote.

“It’s either a public-health emergency and crowds must be stopped or it’s not. It cannot be both.”

Somehow, the experts were immune to such common sense.

Eric S. Raymond, a prominent software developer and author, refers to June 5, 2020, as “Fracture Day.”

“It was the day we realized that even the most supposedly disinterested of our institutions had been captured by overt enemies of our liberty and our civilization,” he explained on X.

It’s the day when the elites crushed their legitimacy.

Many of us would have liked to “trust the experts” at a time of such confusion and loss, but they made that an impossible thing to do.

The experts were openly lying, and on June 5, 2020, they made that all too clear.

And this country has yet to recover from their lies.

A few weeks ago, a survey by health policy research and polling firm KFF found that fewer than half of Americans believe in the credibility of any of our health agencies.

Only 40%, for example, believe the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will “act independently without interference from outside interests.”

Quite high, actually, for an agency that on Feb. 7, 2021, took a call from teachers’ union honcho Randi Weingarten and agreed to keep schools closed even longer at her behest.

The wrong and harmful response to COVID-19 isn’t something that happened to us; it’s something that was done to us.

And it was done by extremely partisan health officials who cared far more about furthering their political goals than about the breakdown of trust they would inevitably cause.

The anniversaries matter. Let’s remember all of them.

Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.