It started with a rusty bike.

I was clearing out the garage and I found my old one that I hadn't ridden for years.

So I searched how to fix up a bike on Tik-Tock.

I found loads of videos on there, like how to fix a chain, change the brakes and mend a puncture.

That led me to a video about local bike routes around Manchester.

Turns out there's a nice one that goes past work, so I started cycling in.

Now it's only me that's a bit rusty.

It starts on Tik-Tock. I'm John Batsch who with my colleague Mary Kistel at the beginning of 2024, old business, the

pandemic.

It damaged the economy of the earth. It damaged the lives of school

children. It certainly led to the troubles that were going to be with us a long time, long COVID, people suffering.

We lost a lot of American citizens, a lot.

I don't know the numbers.

The men and women who led that effort to fight the pandemic, one of them is named

Francis Collins, he headed the NIH I believe, but he was a decision-maker for

the Trump administration and for the Biden administration during the

pandemic. He's now, according to the Wall Street Journal reporting, apologizing in some fashion.

It's a roundabout fashion saying perhaps we over-emphasized one death or

deaths and didn't look at what shutting the economy down and closing schools, restricting movement and locking people in their

homes, what that did to the American people, to the health of the American people.

And that's a form of Mayoculpa. Mary, how do you read that? Well I think there were

many failures that happened in the COVID era and the first I think was forgivable, which was the initial reaction to shut everything

...