The Covid Response Has Broken Our Trust in American Institutions

I am hopeful that we are coming toward the end of the SARS2 coronavirus pandemic. Deaths are not likely to rise dramatically when cases sharply increase, a different pattern than in the initial waves. That “decoupling” between cases and deaths would be to a great extent due to the successful vaccination of those at risk to die, as well as acquired natural immunity. Unfortunately, it is unlikely the recurring hysteria and mismanagement by those in power will end so quickly.

After more than eighteen months of experience, there remains an almost bizarre lack of understanding that the virus will not simply disappear. Instead, on its way to becoming endemic, cases will continue to peak and ebb periodically, as they have done and continue to do in characteristic cycles all over the world and regionally in the United States. We must learn to live with the virus by offering vaccines to the vulnerable, aggressively exploring early treatments, while also accepting some risk, rather than employing failed, harmful restrictions on low-risk people every time the pattern recurs. Instead of recognizing the evidence, the flow of misleading information lacking perspective, policies counter to scientific data, and the absence of transparency continue.

The unscientific obsession with stopping all cases of COVID-19 continues, including the variants that all scientists expected as the virus mutates and becomes less lethal, without acknowledging the low risk for the overwhelming majority and what should be today’s protection of the most vulnerable to death.

Accountability remains absent from government leaders, public health officials, and scientists in failing to admit errors about lockdowns; some even distort their records and portray disastrous death tallies as “successes.” And now we witness an Orwellian attempt by those who advised what was widely implemented — lockdowns — to blame those who opposed lockdowns for the failure of the lockdowns.

The CDC and public health leaders still fail to visibly acknowledge and then educate the public about the natural immunity in recovered COVID patients or to incorporate that biological fact into our nation’s vaccine policies. The public needs to know that data continues to accrue showing natural immunity after SARS2 infection, like other infectious diseases, is probably superior to vaccine-related protection.

Public health officials and government leaders keep using wildly incorrect projections that instill fear and alarm the public, and when they’re wrong, they fail to acknowledge this fact.

Our public health recommendations did not change after scientific data showed previous rules were arbitrary, incorrect, and ineffective. The six-foot guidelines were not revisited despite the evidence. Many schools force children to wear masks, contrary to science and simple logic. Must we prove the earth is round again?

Serious problems with the data, including misleading PCR testing and overcounting of COVID as the cause of many hospitalizations and deaths in the United States, have never been explained to the public and acknowledged, even though it has been documented in the medical literature.

There continue to be delays in clinical trials and approvals of safe, widely available drugs that show potential efficacy in clinical reports, as if vaccination is the only option.

A COVID testing requirement has been imposed in schools and university campuses, grossly violating ethical standards, including the CDC’s own statement only months ago published in late 2020 that “it is both unethical and illegal to test someone who doesn’t want to be tested, including students whose parents or guardians do not want them to be tested.”

The spirit if not the letter of informed consent has been violated with a vaccine clinical trial in young, healthy children who have extremely low risk from the illness and rarely spread it.

The nation still awaits any indication that there will be a full investigation into the origin of the deadly virus, even if it uncovers potential corruption in our nation’s top science agencies and public health leaders. The world is owed full exposure of the truth without delay.

Why do these failures persist in a nominally science-based, freethinking, and ethical society like ours? Is the herd mentality so powerful, is fear such a dominant emotion, that all critical thinking and values disappear? If the US tallies 50,000 deaths from COVID next year, will we accept that with the relaxed attitude we have about the flu, which has that death toll every year? If not, why not? Are we a nation of science or science-deniers? Do we demand accountability and learn from past error? Is this country committed to the free exchange of ideas, so that truth is determined by evidence and debate rather than decree and false declarations of consensus? Do facts still matter? And what is the end-point, an endless series of panic-driven lockdowns or finally a recognition that the virus will become endemic? Are we committed to civil liberties? The answers to these questions are profoundly consequential.

One issue stands above all others—the urgent need to restore trust