The time has come for a COVID Truth Commission, say two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the 2020 document that argued the case against pandemic lockdowns and was signed by over 936,000 doctors, scientists, and concerned citizens.
A commission like the one examining the Challenger disaster is needed, wrote Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, in an op-ed in the New York Post, on February 21.
The Challenger commission included physicist Richard Feynman, who demonstrated that, contrary to NASA’s denial, a faulty O-ring did not withstand cold temperatures and caused the shuttle to explode upon launch.
“The American people deserve a similar bipartisan, scientifically minded COVID-19 commission so the public health disaster of the past three years is not repeated,” Kulldorff and Bhattacharya wrote.
Issues To Investigate
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya have formed the Norfolk Group to provide a blueprint for such a fact-finding commission, and the group has published a list of 10 issues to investigate.
Among topics that should be investigated, states a document on the group’s website: could anything have been done to better protect older Americans who were more at risk for hospitalization and death, why schools and universities closed, and why epidemiological models were so strongly emphasized. The commission should also investigate mask and vaccine mandates, and why the rollout of testing was so poorly rolled out, says the group.
In addition to Kullforff and Bhattacharya, the other members of the Norfolk Group are physicians Ram Duriseti, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and Marty Makary; veterinarian Leslie Bienen; and immune and infection disease scientists Margery Smelkinson and Steven Templeton.
Natural Immunity Ignored
Kulldorff elaborated on the failure of the COVID-19 response in a talk at Hillsdale College, on March 13.
“After the (mRMA shots) had been approved, they were pushed on people who had COVID—which is very strange because there was no clinical data on it; and, we’ve known for two and a half thousand years, if you have an infectious disease, then, you have natural immunity,” said Kulforff. “It might not be permanent or complete, but it would at least reduce the severity of the disease. In fact, hospitals should hire nurses with natural immunity because they’re less likely to pass it on to patients. Instead, they fired nurses with natural immunity.”
In response to a question about whether U.S. pandemic policy was stupid or criminal, Kuldorff said it was a combination of several factors: groupthink, censorship by the government, silence by the science community, and Anthony Fauci.
“He (Fauci) is a lab scientist,” said Kuldorff. “He does not know about public health, so ‘stupidity’ because it is not his field, but he ended up being the key person for the COVID response and he basically violated most of the principles of public health. “
Kevin Stone (kevin.s.stone@gmail.com) writes from Arlington, Texas
AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News contributed to this article.