Oh, how far we’ve come in just two years. In November 2020, just too late for the presidential election, Pfizer announced it had prepared an effective mRNA vaccination for COVID. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson weren’t far behind. Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed cut bureaucratic red tape to enable this, proving Joe Biden’s charge that “Trump has done nothing to stop the virus” to be a lie. Many Americans hailed the news as the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.

Unfortunately, in many ways that light turned out to be an oncoming train.

Democrats flip-flopped from hysterically denouncing any vaccine Trump had anything to do with to then encouraging, insisting, brow-beating, and eventually mandating the novel vaccine. Anyone who declined for any reason might find themselves blocked from services or fired from their jobs. “Get your laws off my body,” indeed.

As Democrats traveled the path of authoritarianism, it became apparent that the vaccine is less effective than advertised. It’s good, especially for older or more at-risk folks, but it’s certainly not a bullet-proof vest. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Biden falsely asserted. The vax has also been tied to side effects like myocarditis.

The latest entry in this trip down crazy lane is yesterday’s news that a CDC advisory panel unanimously voted to add the ‘rona shot to the public health agency’s Vaccines for Children Program. Assuming the ensuing recommendation is made today to add it to the childhood immunization schedule, it will head to the desk of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for approval. If officially adopted by the CDC, the COVID vax will become part of the immunization schedule used by many states.

That means the shot will be covered by insurance after the federal government no longer foots the bill beginning next year. It also means it might become required for children to attend public school in some states.

“State laws establish vaccination requirements for school children,” according to the CDC. “These laws often apply not only to children attending public schools but also to those attending private schools and day care facilities.”

We suppose the end result of this will be more stark divide among states that even give the CDC the time of day. “Regardless of what the CDC votes on whether COVID-19 vaccines are added to routine child immunizations — nothing changes in Florida,” argued Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo before the vote. “Thanks to [Governor Ron DeSantis], COVID mandates are NOT allowed in FL, NOT pushed into schools, & I continue to recommend against them for healthy kids.”

Ladapo recently made waves with a study tying cardiac-related deaths in people 18 to 39 years of age to the COVID vaccine. The CDC also has been quietly updating data about myocarditis.

As for vaccinating kids, Moderna’s CEO just this week seemed to indicate that’s unnecessary. “If you’re a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy?” asked Stéphane Bancel. “You might want to … but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high-risk, people above 50 years of age, people with comorbidities, people with cancer and other conditions, people with transplants.” In other words, generally not schoolchildren.

Sweden does not recommend it for children age five to 11. Neither does Denmark. Neither does the UK.

Anthony Fauci, Dr. Science Himself, once explained that COVID presented little risk to children by way of pointing out the statistical misrepresentation of hospitalizations. “If you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” he explained early this year. “If a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, 'hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.”

If you disagree with Anthony Fauci about the danger to kids, well, so does Anthony Fauci. “The idea that this virus doesn’t affect children is not so,” he insisted this past weekend. “We’ve already lost close to 1,500 kids so far.”

How many have suffered from or have we lost due to myocarditis? How many committed suicide because their social life was taken away by the shutdowns Fauci “had nothing to do” with?

Ultimately, the vaccination question boils down to trust. Without vaccines, we’d still be battling measles and polio. Yet there’s something about this vaccine — or maybe more accurately the elites pushing it so hard — that a lot of people don’t trust.

To that point, the CDC is the subject of a whining report in this week’s Washington (Democrat) Post about “intense pressure” and “job threats” from Donald Trump’s White House. Is that really true, or is it just three weeks before an election in which Democrats need Trump to stand in as the villain?

The CDC is also making a big show of a phony “reorganization” after its myriad failures during the pandemic. One of those failures is that it took the CDC more than two years to discover natural immunity. When it finally did so, it greatly relaxed its recommendations for dealing with COVID in schools. Until this vax move, anyway.

Normal Americans are left with an increasing — and increasingly deserved — level of distrust in grossly politicized government institutions.