Why No COVID Commission In The US?

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

They were the hardest years of our lives, marked by the dissolution of rights, liberties, and hope. Sadness swept the land, as forced physical isolation and shattered civic life mutated toward mandates to wear masks and eventually to accept a new injection product.

The liturgy of life fundamentally disrupted, we lost track of the passage of time and saw our social and community networks decimated. Government spending and money printing exploded as never before. For many the whole period feels like a blur, one that resulted in a dramatic devaluation in the value of income and savings.

I speak of course of the COVID years, 2020–2023. Agencies at all levels cancelled religious holidays, closed small businesses and schools, imposed limits on house parties, and overturned traditional election protocols. It went on for three years. It was in the name of health but health collapsed during this period. It all feels like madness in retrospect.

People these days barely want to speak about the subject, because it is still somewhat divisive but mainly because it is deeply painful. It was this way following the Great War, a trauma on a similar scale. Most people just wanted it to go away, and to put it all in the rearview mirror.

That said, when people do open up about what happened, they share shocking stories of personal tragedy and loss. Only this past week, a man told me about his dream business he had started 10 years ago and then built into a growing wholesale machine with 200-plus employees and bright prospects ahead. With the lockdowns, all orders for his project stopped. The company collapsed in two weeks. All employees lost their jobs and he and his wife lost their dreams. They divorced soon after.

Today his idea and a version of his project is in most major stories, as manufactured by huge corporate enterprises. He changed professions and is still digging out from a financial hole.

It’s just one story but something replicated in some form millions of times over. Kids who experienced this will never forget it, and parents have few choices but to describe the whole thing as a time when adults lost their minds.

Remember that all of this happened not just in the United States but in 194 countries around the world. The policies were strikingly similar everywhere. It was a time in which human interaction was described as disease spreading and therefore to be avoided in the interest of “slowing the spread.”

Only a few nations resisted: Sweden, Tanzania, Nicaragua, and Belarus. Sweden in particular experienced far better outcomes even from the targeted pathogen, the best in Europe. The population in general avoided trauma.

After all this time, one might suppose that the world would be awash in apologies along with pledges never to do anything like this again. One possible path to making this happen might be a COVID Commission. The United States has never formed one. Early on, there was talk about such a thing but it never came to fruition. Even now, there are no plans for such a thing.

This is for a reason. An honest report, one informed and written by independent researchers, would implicate both political parties, most universities, many government agencies, the Big Tech and pharmaceutical sectors, churches and schools that went along, in addition to a massive swath of incumbent elites in foundations.

Sadly, that is just not going to happen. I wish it were otherwise. Any official commission report written as a coverup would be dead on arrival. Not even the establishment is that dumb.

I would like to live in a society in which mistakes are admitted, brutality is repudiated, institutions adapt in light of failure, and leadership is mature enough to seek forgiveness for wrongdoing. We hope for a narrative of history that is self-correcting in real time: error followed by pledges to improve and sin by repentance and propitiation.

Sadly none of that is to be.

Somehow it came to be that the United Kingdom did put together an official commission.

It has spent upwards of 500 million pounds and taken years in testimony. The second part of the report just appeared. It features a helpful summary of its conclusions for those who do not want to slog through the entire thing. It is one that could have been predicted from the start. It comes down to four words:

“Too little, too late.”

Translation: The commission has decided that the UK waited too long to issue stay-at-home orders and shut businesses, churches, and schools. If it had acted in February rather than March 2020 and with greater ferocity, they have declared, somehow the outcomes would have been better. In short, there is no regret at all except for one point: it should have been more and sooner.

They know this because computer models tell them so.

Sure, the report admits, there were all sorts of mistakes in coordination, communication, and costing. This is bureaucratic speak for: we need more money next time. The report takes no issue with the disease modeling that gave rise to the lockdowns in the first place. The ineffective shot is not addressed in this particular report but we can anticipate what later reports will say: its only failure traces to slow uptake and vaccine resistance.

The huge lesson: “Governments must act swiftly and decisively to stand any chance of stopping the spread of a virus.”

In other words, they are going to do it again, more quickly and harder.

There is a feature of this report that simply breaks my heart. This is because I seriously doubt that anyone really believes in the truth of it. The claim is utterly unsustainable in light of any and all evidence. The Swedish experience is not discussed in any depth. It cannot because the Swedish experience disproves everything in this report.

I’ve been writing about this topic for five going on six years. My first piece was from January 2020, and it warned that if governments try to take on the microbial kingdom it will lose and utterly discredit themselves. I said this before we even knew of the thousand-fold differential in medically significant impact between the young and elderly and infirm. Even if the virus had been more serious, the result would have been the same.

Another reason that this report is demoralizing: tens and hundreds of thousands of actual experts the world over have debunked the pandemic response in countless numbers of papers, articles, and books. Have these protests made no difference at all? Are officials at all levels going to pretend forever as if these do not exist?

I don’t know the answer but this much I know: We cannot look to official statements of these sorts to codify truth. Instead, we can only count on them to be self-serving, a means of protecting the reputations and jobs of the very people who made such dreadful errors.

Just as no one should look to government to stop a fast-spreading and fast-mutating respiratory virus, we should not be looking to government commissions to admit error and pledge to do better next time. Just as the pandemic response discredited so many institutions, kicking off a new age of widespread distrust of everything and everyone, so too will more such reports entrench our culture of incredulity.

Given these conditions, the United States is better off with no commission at all. That said, it would be good for at least one legislative body to speak clearly and plainly about all that went wrong. My choice would be the U.S. Senate.

Maybe there is some chance of that with enough push from the grassroots. So long as there are no admissions of wrongdoing, there will be no healing from the anger and distrust that characterizes our times. This problem is not going away. As time has rolled on, the reality of what happened is ever more present in our lives.