What to ask
WASHINGTON—Covid-19 was not this nation’s first or worst pandemic. There probably will be worse. How much worse might depend on the caliber of public health leaders. There is room for improvement.
Approximately 1,200 presidential appointees require Senate confirmation. A crucial one does not, until 2025. Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced legislation to require immediate confirmation of the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mandy Cohen. Herewith, some questions for her:
The Great Barrington Declaration was issued in October 2020 by eminent epidemiologists and public health policy specialists who dissented from federally encouraged and mandated pandemic mitigation strategies—commercial lockdowns, school closures, masking toddlers, etc. The GBD’s authors —Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard)—favored targeting protection for the most vulnerable: the elderly and others with co-morbidities. (Children were the least vulnerable.) This might have saved the $6 trillion the government spent to resuscitate the economy after the government suffocated it. And might have prevented a generation’s learning loss. Was not the GBD correct?
Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease specialist, and Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, tried to orchestrate what Collins called a “takedown” of the GBD, which Collins denigrated as the opinion of “fringe” scientists. (Bhattacharya alone had more than 100 peer-reviewed articles.) Will your CDC be more receptive to heterodoxy?
In March 2020, Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Soon, however, masks were mandated. Do such malleable certitudes contribute to what Fauci calls the “smoldering anti-science feeling”?
Under your predecessor, the CDC proclaimed—until the Supreme Court said there was no legal basis for this—a national housing policy: an eviction moratorium. Will your CDC have less imperial pretensions?
In January 2020, at the pandemic’s outset, Sen. Tom Cotton said the coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab that “works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.” This possibility was promptly denounced as “fringe” and a “conspiracy theory.” A March 17, 2020, paper published in Nature Medicine journal discounted “any type of laboratory-based scenario” for the coronavirus’s origin. A month later, however, one of the paper’s authors said in a private email that we “can’t fully rule out engineering”—the possibility that the virus not only leaked from the Wuhan lab but was created there. Today, the FBI strongly suspects the virus had a research-related origin. How do you propose to insulate the CDC from government-promoted orthodoxies voiced by government-financed scientists?
“Gain of function” research involves engineering especially transmissible and/or deadly viruses to understand future pandemics and develop vaccines. Fauci has denied funding such research at Wuhan. But John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, called Fauci’s disavowal of funding “inconsistent” with some intelligence and said “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense.” Do Americans perhaps have too much confidence in government’s handling of science?
The New York Times reports that during the pandemic, CDC officials “held ‘weekly sync’ meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 ‘misinformation’ posts.” A federal appeals court has held that the CDC, among other government institutions, probably violated the First Amendment with “intimidating” communications to get social media companies to remove lawful content concerning pandemic policies. The court held that government cannot pressure social media to do something the government itself cannot constitutionally do: censor speech. Should the CDC apologize and embrace legality?
About four months ago, Fauci challenged The New York Times to “show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down.” But in October 2020, Fauci, who once described lockdowns as merely “inconvenient,” said, “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” He now says his recommendations merely “echoed the CDC’s.” Is this a modified Nuremberg defense—I was only obeying other people?
During the pandemic, as North Carolina’s chief public health official, you were enthusiastic about lockdowns, and issued a “secretarial directive” telling people, inter alia, to “wear a mask at all times” outside the home, “do not enter any indoor public space where anyone isn’t masked” and to “remain at home between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.” And you sometimes wore a mask featuring Fauci’s picture. Any second thoughts about your enthusiasms?
If Congress has curiosity about these lifeor-death matters, it will pass Cruz’s legislation. Then summon Mandy Cohen.