Free Republic

Here’s what Congress should be asking health officials about the handling of the Covid pandemic. In March 2020, American politicians orchestrated what would become the greatest assault against their citizens’ civil liberties in the modern era. Under the guise of “public health,” federal and state officials employed the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus to implement disastrous and ineffective lockdown policies, which crushed American jobs and small businesses, shuttered places of worship, and kept low-risk children out of school. Despite a lack of evidence showing such policies were effective at containing the respiratory virus, politicians and government bureaucrats charged ahead, abusing...

In October, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, hosted a conferenceopens in a new tab or window on the lessons of COVID-19 in order "to do better in the next pandemic." He invited scholars, journalists, and policy wonks who, like him, have criticized the U.S. management of the crisis as overly draconian. Bhattacharya also invited public health authorities who had considered his alternative approach reckless. None of them showed up. Now, the "contrarians" are seizing the reins: President Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to lead the NIH and Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, MD, MPH, to run the...