OPINION:
The United States has a long and distinguished history of creating national commissions — usually populated by old people who have had some role in creating the problem the commission is designed to address — and then either fighting over or completely ignoring the conclusions of those commissions.
Examples include, but are by no means limited to, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which led to neither, and the Committee on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which spawned many more questions than it answered.
That said, we need some sort of national reckoning with respect to COVID-19. If we don’t get a firm grip on what went right and what went wrong and why, we are likely to repeat the lethal mistakes that were made in our efforts to address the coronavirus.
At this point, there is not even coherence on fundamental facts such as how the disease originated and found its way into the human population, how many Americans died as a result of COVID, or whether the U.S. government supported the research that led to the creation of the virus.
There is no agreement on whether the vaccines were, in fact, vaccines. Nor is there agreement about the relative merits of natural immunity compared with that of the shots.
Obviously, it would be better if such an examination emerged organically from the public health care community. But that community seems to have little interest in any public examination of its performance during the pandemic.
That leaves it to the political process to initiate the effort. Congress should empanel a national commission on COVID composed of doctors, immunologists, virologists, researchers, governors, media and others with meaningful perspectives.
There should be a bias against including too many people on the commission who derive a substantial amount of their income from any part of the federal government.
With respect to the commission’s charge, it should attempt to answer the most pressing and relevant questions. These include:
• What could have been done differently to protect older Americans?
• Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the relative effects of the disease on various age cohorts?
• What damage did those closings do to the educational attainment and mental health of students?
• Why did government officials routinely question infection-acquired immunity, and how did that hurt the fight against the virus?
• Did the focus on COVID result in more deaths and illnesses from other diseases because of lack of basic medical care?
• Did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fail to collect timely data? Why?
• Were effective therapeutics available to the general population? If so, why were they not used?
• Why were we slow to approve and implement testing capacity? How can that be improved?
• Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them?
• Did these efforts delay more efficient mitigation efforts?
• Were there potential harms associated with the wearing of masks?
• Did the CDC or National Institutes of Health sponsor randomized trials to assess this possibility?
• Why did the policies not change in the wake of data from other countries that found that masks had no or minimal efficacy?
• Did the federal government support research that led to the development of the disease?
While there are certainly dozens of other questions and issues that need to be addressed, the most important thing is to create, populate and launch the commission or blue-ribbon panel or whatever Congress wants to call it.
If we don’t do something like this, if the public health and medical communities — and all Americans — can’t gain a complete understanding and public recognition of what worked and what failed, the likelihood is that mistakes will be repeated the next time we face an epidemic.
And it is a certainty that there will be a next time.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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