Covid’s Moral Injuries

Strict lockdowns forced us to deny obvious truths.

By Meghan Cox Gurdon

Children and their guardians wearing masks leave a Manhattan school, Dec. 21, 2021. Photo: Brittainy Newman/Associated Press

The term “moral injury” arose in the 1990s, in the context of addressing trauma in combat veterans. It’s a phrase used to describe the outrage and distress that a person may experience upon witnessing unethical acts or decisions by those in authority. Moral injury applies in situations when a person is coerced into participating in deceitful or otherwise wrong behaviors and feels stymied, unable to protest. Unlike physical damage, moral damage may not be visible from the outside. But like physical injury, it causes real pain. And it leaves scarring.

If you, like me, suffered profound moral injury five and six years ago you may have felt the old wounds throbbing this past week. It was hard to see Anthony Fauci demonstrate his contempt for Americans by pleading the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer questions from members of Congress—even though he was pre-emptively pardoned for any potential alleged lies and crimes by President Biden. The sight of the smug little doctor, silent for once, was all the more galling alongside the release of diary entries he kept on his work computer that reveal what a preening, dissembling popinjay he was all along.

Dr. Fauci’s diary shows that our worst suspicions were justified:

He knew it was possible that the virus had come from a lab in Wuhan, China, not, as he told Americans, from a wet market there. In public he said he’d been against shutting schools, but in private gloated at his success in getting them closed. He knew that dissenting doctors and scientists were a threat to his prestige, and he collaborated with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and his pals in the media to silence and discredit them.

I’m speaking for myself here. Everybody had her own pandemic experience, and not everyone came to have misgivings about the protocols. But some of us did. It grieved us to comply with damaging measures, and it hurt us to see public trust betrayed. I suffered moral injury when, long after we knew masks were pointless, I watched my fragile father loyally replacing a used N-95 mask over his nose and mouth after taking it off to eat. He believed that his mask was necessary, but reused it because he was thrifty, and those things were expensive. I suffered moral injury when my convivial and active mother deteriorated after being isolated for months in her tiny home (she was determined to obey Dr. Fauci and “the science”). I suffered moral injury when, long after we knew that coronavirus didn’t spread outdoors, I was out walking and a neighbor stepped into the woods to avoid me when I was 50 feet away. I suffered moral injury when I confided to a friend I’d been wracked with fever after my second vaccination, and she crossly shut me down because I sounded “like an antivaxer.”

And—ugh, wasn’t it awful?—I suffered moral injury from the strangely combative acts and language of officialdom. At the airport, we travelers waited for flights, socially distanced with our faces covered, while automated voices threatened us with being banned from flying forever if we didn’t wear masks. Yellow tape sealed off public parks and tennis courts, where people could have been exercising and getting sun, though it was clear early on that excess weight and low levels of Vitamin D correlated with worse medical outcomes. Churchgoers were made to stay home; agitators were urged to riot. In the beginning I was so innocent, so trusting. I kept thinking: Why aren’t they being nicer about this? Why is the public- health apparatus treating us as subjects rather than as free citizens?

It was madness, and it was horrible, but in truth it wasn’t all Dr. Fauci. Some of the moral injury was self-inflicted. During the pandemic, it was not long before I, and perhaps you, saw the mountain of deceit for what it was. Yet I did not speak up. I was afraid of getting sick, sure, but to my enduring shame, I was more afraid of the opprobrium that awaited objectors. So I boiled inwardly and ranted to my intimates, and that’s as far as it went. I stayed quiet, kept my distance and, when I got Covid, as of course I did, despite the shots with their hideous side effects, I quarantined and tested until I was cleared to socialize again. And through it all I was ashamed of my compliance in the face of obvious wrong. I still am.

Mrs. Gurdon is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.