It's a spin on Tacitus: "This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone."
We can judge the results of the pandemic response, then, by the number of people who claim it as their own. So far the answer seems to be: none.
These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn't force anyone to do anything.
Even from 2021, the media routinely referred to the "pandemic" and not the pandemic policies as responsible for learning losses, depression, business failures, and poor economic conditions. This has been deliberate. It's designed to normalize lockdowns as if they are just something one does to deal with infectious disease, even though lockdowns have no precedent on that scale in the West.
Comment: AG Smith released a statement in June 2023.