We do, we really do, in order to expose all the malfeasance, authoritarianism, and hypocritical behavior from those being authoritarian
America Needs a COVID-19 Bipartisan Commission to Prepare for the Next Pandemic
Postmortems, or autopsies, which were common practice until well into the 20th-century but have recently become more rare, are conducted to determine a cause of death….
For the same reasons, America needs a national postmortem on our response to the COVID-19 pandemic—to learn from our mistakes and improve responses to the next pandemic. Policy quality control, as it were. An honest postmortem can only occur, however, if Congress finds the will to create and fund a bipartisan commission that will bring in outside experts to analyze data and use the commission’s subpoena power to question policy makers.
With blame and embarrassment undoubtedly belonging on both sides of the aisle, it is not surprising that there is insufficient appetite for setting one up. A few senators have tried to get a bill to the floor to approve a COVID-19 commission, but so far have not succeeded. In the absence of such a commission, we will simply have more of what we have now: tribes of people yelling at each other furiously, both sides convinced that all could have been different and turned out better if only someone else had been in charge or some other set of experts had been listened to.
It would certainly get ugly, because we’d see all the insanity pushed mostly by Democratic Party governors, with a smattering of Republicans, like Maryland’s Larry Hogan. Things like restricting American Citizens from traveling to their 2nd homes (which is wise policy, those summer towns were not set up for the influx, but, the governors did not explain, and still do not have the legal power). Restricting them from buying seeds for gardening. Filling skateboard parks with sand. Arresting a person paddleboarding in the ocean. The examples go on and on. Then all the hypocrisy from the Elites, where they traveled, got caught without masks. Did the mandates work? Did the vaccines work?
The House, under control of the Republicans, recently conducted a hearing, the Select Subcommittee Roundtable: Examining Covid Policy Decisions, led by Chairman Wenstrup (R-OH), which he said in opening remarks aimed to be bipartisan and which did contain members from both parties. The sole witness called by the Democrats, Dr. Georges Benjamin, the Executive Dir. of the American Public Health Assoc., said explicitly, as did Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the three witnesses called by the Republicans, that U.S. citizens deserve a bipartisan commission. He referenced the 9/11 Commission as a key step in reforming U.S. national security policies.
Unfortunately, while the committee did raise important questions, for example about school closures and children’s mental health, it in no way mirrored the lengthy, deliberate, and thoughtful processes of a bipartisan commission. There was no extended fact finding phase nor did the committee have subpoena power, although experts were called, including three authors of an eighty page report on the U.S. pandemic response that was released in February. As coauthors on this report, our hope was that a pandemic commission could use it as a blueprint to help inform an extensive investigation into what went wrong–and what went right–and craft a set of recommendations to improve the next pandemic response. So far, this has not happened and numerous attempts to launch such a commission have been squelched.
Yes, let’s learn about the school closures, how much it negatively affected the children. About the idiocy of making them mask up. Eat outside in the cold temps while being masked. How the teacher’s unions actually made policy instead of the duly elected general assemblies. How lockdowns did not work. The list goes on and on, you know it, you lived it. Democrats will never go for a full commission, because it would expose the Wrong Doing coming mostly from their people and policies.
Read: Time Recommends A Full Wuhan Flu Bipartisan Commission »