The American people deserve answers about massive pandemic failures

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya write, “Due to insufficient protection of older people — whose COVID-mortality risk is more than 1,000-fold higher than that of the young — official counts attribute more than 1 million deaths to COVID in the United States and almost 7 million worldwide. Though people vehemently disagreed about the wisdom of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates and discrimination, masks and so much else, there is near-universal agreement that what we did failed.

By early 2022, about 95% of Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures. A John Hopkins University meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns failed to contain the spread of COVID. At best, they temporarily protected the laptop class, who could work from home while being served by the working class.

"With the litany of failures of the covid response, the American people deserve an honest covid commission to evaluate the response and document all the errors as well as the few successes." --@MartinKulldorff & me in the @nyposthttps://t.co/O9VF0EnQlm

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) February 22, 2023

The pandemic response itself has wrought tremendous collateral harm. There is now broad agreement that the school closures — in some states running a year or more — have set kids behind in ways that will lead them to worse outcomes as adults, including shorter, poorer lives…

So the American people deserve answers to fundamental questions about the pandemic. On what empirical basis were schools closed? Did public-health decision-makers consider the harms of their policies? Why do American public-health authorities insist on masking children as young as 2 years old when mask wearing 'makes little or no difference' for COVID’s spread?

Perhaps the most perplexing sin of the public-health establishment is that it abandoned an essential commitment to science."

Read the entire column.