OPINION:
As official declarations formally end the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, albeit it more than two years late, another political campaign season is beginning in the United States. While proposals to broaden access to high-quality medical care still need to be debated, new priorities for health policy reforms have arisen in the wake of the failure of pandemic management.
Unelected bureaucrats Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky directed the federal guidance that failed to stop the infection and failed to stop the death — they and the two presidents who empowered their authority own those outcomes.
The U.S. rate of COVID-19 deaths per day remained unchanged from February 2020 through April 2022 — two full years, two administrations — even after vaccinations began in mid-December 2020. Two presidential administrations and most governors implemented lockdowns and school closures, rejecting the science. For example, the 2006 review by Dr. D.A. Henderson, known for his work in the effort to eradicate smallpox, clearly stated that lockdowns were not effective and were extremely harmful.
As predicted, lockdown policies shifted the pandemic burden to low-income families while inflicting severe harm on America’s children — learning loss, increased school dropout rates, social isolation, mental illness, drug abuse, suicidal ideation, self-harm, hundreds of thousands of unrecognized child abuse cases, and an obesity crisis, most of which were far worse for lower-income groups, in perhaps the biggest health policy fiasco in history.
The first and most urgent priority in health policy should be to strengthen the health autonomy and privacy of individual Americans — those who bear the impact of future government policies.
All health emergencies must be managed in concert with our Constitution and system of laws, respecting all guaranteed freedoms of religion, movement, association, and right to work. Defining time limits on such emergencies that require legislation to extend beyond the short term is essential to justify any temporary restrictions.
We have also learned that mandated confinements, business shutdowns, school and church closures, and injections of experimental drugs need to be explicitly forbidden by law, even in this country founded on liberty and individual rights. And all health records, including vaccinations, diagnostic tests, and use of care, must remain strictly private, with no exceptions.
Part of ensuring the rights of individual Americans is to guarantee their government never relinquishes authority over America’s health policies to an outside organization. Instead, many months before seeing what will be the final, legally binding version of a new global Pandemic Accord, Pamela Hamamoto, U.S. ambassador to the World Health Organization, has already promised: “The United States is committed to the Pandemic Accord.”
WHO’s accord not only oversees the intellectual property, including patent limits and drug prices but also authorizes the WHO to define “public health emergency” in signer nations — the fundamental basis to justify restrictions on the public. This must be publicly vetted before Congress, as a treaty requires.
A second priority should be new accountability to the public from government health and science agencies. In a society where evidence forms the basis of truth, health policy largely stems from medical science research. The key is to break the powerful cabal of government and university elites who control the funding of the National Institutes of Health, now at $45 billion per year. By their hold on the money, they control the careers of the university scientists who need NIH grants for promotion; they dictate favored research topics; and they control major research publications by simultaneously holding journal reviewer positions.
Moreover, the top 15 university medical centers each receives more than $500 million per year from the NIH. Understandably, they would be reluctant to speak against the powerful few at the top of the NIH or risk jeopardizing that funding stream. We need more accountability for universities that receive taxpayer funding, such as requiring the flow of dissenting faculty speech and debate on campus without censure or intimidation.
To reduce the stranglehold on scientific research, we should decentralize the NIH’s near-monopolistic control of money, implementing competing regional centers and transferring some funding decisions from NIH career bureaucrats to non-agency, active research scientists.
We also need to remove the cloak of secrecy surrounding the funding of science. While anonymous review of grants seems logical, theoretically allowing honest evaluation without reprisal, that same anonymity permits publication and funding decisions based on political or other nonscientific motivations. To start, we should publish all grant reviews with the identities of the reviewers — if you are not willing to stand by your review, perhaps there is something to hide.
Americans must be guaranteed full transparency regarding the discussions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and other health agencies, subject to free and open public debate, via a media free from censorship. This would be a complete reversal of what we saw during the pandemic.
All health agency committees must be required to publicly disclose all minutes and votes and include outside experts who aren’t compromised by holding salaried government positions. Likewise, we cannot have entrenched, 30-plus-year bureaucrats like Drs. Fauci and Birx accumulate and wield control to the levels we witnessed. Term limits for all mid- and top-level agency positions would restrain such bureaucratic power and facilitate more cross-pollination of new ideas.
A poisonous interplay between America’s media, Big Tech, unaccountable academic scientists and unelected public health leaders has interfered with the free exchange of ideas that is the very core of science. This has severely damaged the public trust: Half of America does not have much faith in science itself.
The February 2020 Lancet publication calling the lab origin of the SARS2 virus a “conspiracy theory” contrived with a March 2020 Nature publication may have been meant to conceal malfeasance, financial or otherwise. It has been reported that then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Fauci leading the NIH sent American dollars to fund China’s dangerous gain-of-function research and circumvented restrictions under former President Barack Obama.
We should enforce stronger, more visible rules on conflicts of interest, including full visibility of multimillion-dollar revenue-sharing partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and NIH principals like Drs. Fauci and Collins, an obvious source of conflicts of interest in expedited drug authorizations, research grants and health guidance.
Although more than two years too late, truth seems to prevail, but being proved right is insufficient. We have a crisis of trust and a void in leadership that threatens the credibility of future health guidance. Investigations and hearings are a first step, but congressional hearings inevitably have limited impact due to their political nature, intended or not. And judging from Philip Zelikow’s report from the “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” the failure to recognize errors, including frank denial of scientific data and unethical government overreach, continues among many influential insiders today.
America’s next president needs to put forth health and science policy reforms — not solely to prevent the next debacle, but to gradually restore trust that all free and ethical democracies depend on.
• Dr. Scott W. Atlas is senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, founding fellow in Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science & Freedom, co-director of the Global Liberty Institute and author of “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America” (Post Hill Press).
Please read our comment policy before commenting.