COVID-19 is beginning to seem like a distant memory for most Americans. Sure, there are still holdouts masking up alone in their cars, desperately pining for their next booster, but for the most part, the coronavirus has no impact on the daily lives of people.

But just because a memory is growing fainter doesn’t mean it should be forgotten. What happened throughout 2021 was one of the most egregious abuses of government in modern American history. To this day, “emergency orders” still exist in some states and at the federal level. They aren’t letting go, so why should we?

Then there are the individual stories of those who were wronged, such as former Washington State University head football coach Nick Rolovich. He was fired back in 2021 for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine despite citing a religious exemption. Now, he’s sharing details of the incredible attempt by the university to not only make him get vaccinated but to humiliate him in the process.

Washington State allegedly wanted to turn Rolovich getting the jab into some sort of sideshow all while knowing he was against receiving the vaccine.

“The AD said ‘Hey, let’s put you on the 50-yard line, we’ll have the team all around you and the doctor will give you the vaccine in front of everybody,’” Rolovich said on ‘The Jason Rantz Show.’

“I said, ‘Absolutely not. I have no desire to do that.’ I wasn’t going to make it a circus.”

When it comes to COVID-19, it has never been enough to just do what they tell you. Instead, in a quasi-religious fashion, you are demanded to proclaim your subservience as some kind of pagan ritual. Here, it wasn’t enough to request Rolovich get vaccinated. Instead, they wanted to put him in the middle of a football stadium, cameras everywhere and on national television, to make him bend the knee publicly.

Rolovich was eventually fired for his trouble along with four other coaches. It didn’t matter that he had his first season cut short to just four games because the PAC-12 insanely canceled its 2020 season while the SEC and others continued on just fine. It didn’t matter that he took that bad situation and turned it into a winning season the next year despite Washington still being a COVID security state. There was no goodwill built up, and the powers that be weren’t willing to change even as their position became untenable in face of the science.

That Rolovich didn’t capitulate is laudable. It was obvious by the Fall of 2021 (when this was all going down) that the vaccines did not stop the spread of COVID-19. There was no scientific reason whatsoever to keep forcing people to get it under the guise of “protecting others.” Governments continued to do so because when tyrants seize power, they never give it up voluntarily.

They want you to forget everything they did. They want you to move on and give them “amnesty” while they never admit they were even wrong, much less do they deliver a promise to change their behavior. It’s an abusive relationship that shouldn’t be tolerated. States that ruined the lives of people over a vaccine that didn’t even stop the spread of the virus (i.e. there was no communal benefit) need to be held accountable. That won’t happen at the ballot box in many places, but it can happen in court, and I’ll be rooting for Rolovich to prevail.