This article was originally published by Lance D. Johnson at Natural News. 

The medical “experts” who demanded that all people “trust the science” and stay masked up and locked down until a vaccine was available are starting to see just how fraudulent and destructive their totalitarian belief systems really are. Lockdown experts are starting to admit that they were wrong about everything, and some are even begging for forgiveness. On an episode of Bill Maher’s “Real Time” program, New York University Professor Scott Galloway conceded that they were wrong for supporting lockdowns and is now asking for forgiveness.

“I was on the board of my kid’s school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy,” Mr. Galloway said. “In retrospect, I was wrong.”

“The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk. But here’s the bottom line: Myself, our great people at the [CDC], I’d like to think the governor [Andrew Cuomo], we were all operating with imperfect information, and we were doing our best,” he lamented. “Let’s learn from it. Let’s hold each other accountable, but let’s bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness.”

The expert’s models drove global panic, fueling medical error and societal destruction

Another big-time lockdown proponent also changed his mind. Dr. Ari Joffe, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta in Canada, went all-in for lockdowns, mass quarantines, and medical mandates. He now sees that he was participating in “group think” and making poor decisions out of fear, even though, at the time, public health officials had all the information they needed to make sound decisions and to treat people with dignity.

A peer-reviewed paper authored by Dr. Joffe takes a closer look at the groupthink that drove public health leaders into a state of mindless terror and abuse. The Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team published a model on March 16, 2020, that predicted “there would be 510,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million deaths in the United States by mid-April, surpassing ICU demand by 30 times.” The experts said that if lockdowns were not enforced by governments for more than two thirds of the time over two years, there would be “7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths” globally. The result from that modeling was widespread fear, Dr. Joffe said, which he helped promulgate.

Dr. Kevin Bass, a seventh-year medical student and researcher at a Texas medical school, admits he was wrong for supporting lockdowns. He said the modeling at the Imperial College and reports from the World Health Organization convinced him to go all-in with lockdowns. “I was always a ‘Covidian.’ I always thought that we should have lockdowns, we should have mask mandates, and vaccine mandates, and I was very authoritarian.”

“Looking back on it now, it’s embarrassing,” Dr. Bass said.

The chronic disease epidemic needs to be addressed to properly combat infectious disease

Strategies to treat infectious diseases were shut down and censored at every turn, as public health leaders and media talking heads demanded more lockdowns and restrictions that defied all logic and threatened human rights. From shuttered parks and masked schoolchildren to families being forcefully separated at hospitals, to churches shutting down assemblies…it was all unnecessary and harmful to everyone. Capitulating to this groupthink led to mentally ill behavioral patterns, psychoses, paranoia, and controlling/hateful impulses that harmed the very social and moral fabric of society.

Dr. Joffe told The Epoch Times that he initially supported all the government-imposed lockdown measures because he believed “lockdowns would reduce viral transmission and deaths, as famously, inaccurately, and tautologically modeled at Imperial College.” As many in the health freedom community already knew from the beginning, the suffering and death throughout 2020-2023 could never be prevented with fearful behaviors, isolation, and division. The totalitarian acts of family separation, censorship, and forced vaccination only emboldened the problems within the medical system, leading to a higher incidence of iatrogenic errors and a greater number of untreated and mistreated patients.

As time went on, Dr. Joffe began to realize that his support of lockdowns came from a privileged position that “failed to recognize that loneliness, unemployment, and adverse childhood experiences are top risk factors for shortened lifespan, mental health problems, and chronic non-communicable diseases.” In the end, it’s the chronic health conditions and autoimmune diseases (pervasive throughout the population and exacerbated by toxic, inflammatory vaccines) that led to the worst outcomes from infectious diseases over the past four years. For there to be real forgiveness, there must be accountability, and massive changes must be made to the very systems that were weaponized against the people.