CITY JOURNAL – After a great disaster, the traditional response is to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate it, and a bill has already been introduced in Congress to create a Covid commission.
In theory, this could be a worthy public service, allowing experts to sift the evidence impartially and determine which strategies worked, which ones failed, how much needless damage was done—and whom to blame for it. But in practice, which experts would the current Democratic administration or Congress appoint?
Presumably, the pillars of the public-health establishment—the same luminaries whose advice was followed so calamitously the past two years.
“CDC leaders used unrealistic projections to claim unprecedented powers and experiment with untested strategies.”
Before Covid, the United States drew up plans for a pandemic and maintained the world’s most lavishly funded scientific and medical institutions to deal with one.
“It’s been a two-year-long version of Hell Week, especially in America’s blue states, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges.”
When the coronavirus arrived, the leaders of those institutions should have identified who was at serious risk and who wasn’t and adopted proven strategies to protect the vulnerable while doing the least harm to everyone else.
They should have monitored the effects of their policies and adjusted them based on what they learned.
By honestly communicating the risks and considering the overall public good, they could have tamped down needless fear and united the country behind their efforts.
Instead, they proceeded to ignore their own plans as well as the basic principles of science and public health.
Leaders of the CDC terrified the public with worst-case scenarios based on computer models—and then used those blatantly unrealistic projections to claim unprecedented powers and experiment with untested strategies …