Final Congressional Report on COVID Policies

By Neenah Payne

From 2020-2023, anyone who questioned the COVID-19 “consensus” was ridiculed, condemned, vilified, silenced, ostracized, and accused of being a “conspiracy theorist” who was causing “vaccine hesitancy” and “killing grandma”. Big Tech and social media banned top doctors and scientists who questioned the unprecedented lockdown of healthy people. Several MDs had their licenses threatened or lost their jobs.

From October 1-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a remarkable meeting of top epidemiologists, economists, and journalists, to discuss the global emergency created by the unprecedented use of state compulsion in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The result was The Great Barrington Declaration, which urged a “Focused Protection” strategy in which only the elderly, the most vulnerable people, would be locked down and the rest of society would function as normal.

The Declaration was written from a global public health and humanitarian perspective with special concerns about how the COVID-19 strategies were forcing children, the working class, and the poor to carry the heaviest burdens. The response to the pandemic in many countries focused on lockdowns, contact tracing and isolation, imposed enormous unnecessary health costs. The Declaration warned that the policies would lead to higher COVID and non-COVID mortality than the focused protection plan called for in the Declaration.

The Declaration was written by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Dr. Martin Kulldorff then of Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. The Declaration has since been signed by more than 940,000 people including doctors and scientists!

How To Restore Free Speech In Academia reminds us that when Dr. Francis Collins was the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH) in 2021, he dismissed the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe scientists”.

Collins refused to meet with these esteemed doctors to discuss their recommendations on how to end the lockdown. Had Collins done so, America could have been spared the devastating consequences of the lockdown, mask mandates, PCR testing, vaccine mandates, school closures, etc. Instead, Dr. Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci who was then head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), imposed a false COVID “consensus” although many top doctors and scientists had publicly disagreed with it.

Better late than never: former NIH director Francis Collins admits COVID mistakes

The Great Barrington Declaration Was Right

NYT: Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H.

Trump’s NIH Pick Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on COVID Lies, Vaccine Truth, and the Breakdown of Science 9/12/24

I sat down with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and a leading voice in public health policy, to explore the catastrophic failures of the COVID response and what they reveal about the scientific establishment and government institutions. Dr. Bhattacharya argues that the heavy-handed approach taken during the pandemic, from lockdowns to vaccine mandates and everything in between, reflects deeper issues in the cultural norms of the scientific community.

He became well known during 2020 as one of the most prominent critics of these policies and co-authored The Great Barrington Declaration, which outlined an alternative course of action focused on protecting high-risk individuals. Drawing on his additional background in economics, Dr. Bhattacharya also outlines how he believes we can reform the NIH, CDC, FDA, and the American healthcare system more broadly to improve outcomes and restore trust in our institutions.

Dr. Bhattacharya Wins Prize For Intellectual Freedom

Dr. Bhattacharya won the Zimmer Medal from the Academy of American Science and Letters in October 2024. Bhattacharya Awarded the Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom. The annual award from the American Academy of Sciences & Letters is presented to a public thinker who displays “extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom.” It’s the second award, and Salman Rushdie was given the first. The award was given to Dr. Bhattacharya for sticking his neck out during the pandemic when many, many other scientists and intellectuals did not.

Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement
Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award

Questioning Conventional Wisdom in the COVID-19 Crisis, with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (video) 3/31/20

Restoring Free Speech in Academia

In Restoring Free Speech in Academia: Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Bhattachrya discusses the extreme dangers of a government-mandated scientific “consensus” that censors top scientists and doctors who have different views. He discusses how to restore free speech in academia now.

In October 2024, Dr. Bhattacharya organized the Stanford Pandemic Policy Conference. “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past. He said:

The conference that we just held at Stanford in October 2024 is four years late I think, but nevertheless, still quite an accomplishment. It was the first major university to host a large conference where people who disagreed about the pandemic policy were sitting in the same room talking to each other in a civil way….

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Head NIH

Trump puts final piece in his MAHA puzzle with NIH nominee

President-Elect Donald Trump has revealed his pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), completing the roster of appointments that will be charged with fulfilling his ‘Make America Health Again’ (MAHA) drive.

Trump has nominated Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and health economist at Stanford University School of Medicine, to lead the NIH, which is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of over $47 billion.

Rounding out his public health-related picks, Trump also nominated Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department, reporting to Robert F Kennedy Jr. O’Neill is an associate of billionaire Trump supporter and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and previously held a senior role in the HHS under the George W Bush administration. He also lobbied to be Trump’s nomination for the top HHS job before that went to RFK Jr.

The selection of Bhattacharya is entirely in keeping with the President-Elect’s decision to appoint candidates for his health team who have a history of challenging conventional wisdom. The Stanford academic was a prominent opponent of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and was a signatory to an open letter published in 2020 – before the availability of vaccines – that called for focused protection of vulnerable individuals and allowing the virus to spread and generate herd immunity, which prompted furious scientific debate.

That is a view also voiced by Martin Makary, who has been nominated by Trump to lead the FDA and who has also criticised lockdowns for causing harm to society and the economy. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, has been a critic of Anthony Fauci, who led the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the pandemic and fell out spectacularly with Trump.

Bhattacharya and Makary were both among prominent researchers in the so-called Norfolk Group, who published a report on the government’s response to COVID-19 in 2022 that highlighted the damage caused by policies such as school closures, the delayed approval of therapeutics, and failings in data collection, and set out questions that should be asked by a COVID-19 commission.

Trump’s CDC Director pick, Dave Weldon, and RFK Jr have also criticised the pandemic response, although, their comments have focused mainly on vaccination programmes and, in particular, the safety of COVID-19 shots.

In a statement, Trump said Bhattacharya would work with RFK Jr to “restore the NIH to a gold standard of medical research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges,” including its “crisis of chronic illness and disease.”

In a post on X.com (formerly Twitter), Bhattacharya wrote that he was “honoured and humbled” by the nomination and – if his appointment is ratified by Congress – will “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”

Final Congressional Report on COVID Policies

House Covid-19 panel releases final report criticizing public health response to the pandemic 12/2/24

A Republican-led House committee investigating broad aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects in the US released a final report Monday summarizing its two-year effort, saying it hoped the work would “serve as a road map for Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector to prepare for and respond to future pandemics.”….

In the new report, the subcommittee also faulted the pandemic efforts of the World Health Organization, saying it placed the political interests of the Chinese Communist Party ahead of its mission to help people around the world and even allowed the party to control its investigation into the virus’ origins…..

The report is also critical of common Covid mitigation measures. Social distancing and mask mandates were not based on hard science, the report says, and “prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens.”….

The administration is also lauded for Operation Warp Speed, the effort to quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine, which the report calls “an incredible feat of science” that saved millions of lives. The report notes that the operation even received praise from Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a frequent target of the subcommittee.

But the report also says that health officials and the Biden administration oversold the power of the vaccines to prevent transmission or infection, possibly contributing to the public’s lack of trust in Covid shots and in vaccines overall.

The report also accuses public health officials of taking part in a “coordinated effort … to ignore natural immunity and suppress dissenting opinions.” Research has showed that immune protection after an infection seems strong but wanes over time, and experts say Covid-19 vaccines help fill that immunity gap. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FDA in his coming administration, Dr. Marty Makary, has long been a proponent of the importance of natural immunity and argued in a 2021 opinion piece that it’s superior to immunity after vaccination.

Health officials are further criticized in the report for spreading misinformation, especially on the lab-leak origin theory and on off-label use of medications such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which the US Food and Drug Administration says are not effective against the coronavirus.

FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward 12/3/24

The single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date

WASHINGTON – Today, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded its two-year investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic and released a final report titled “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward.”

The final report will serve as a road map for Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector to prepare for and respond to future pandemics. Since February 2023, the Select Subcommittee has sent more than 100 investigative letters, conducted more than 30 transcribed interviews and depositions, held 25 hearings and meetings, and reviewed more than one million pages of documents.

Members and staff have exposed high-level corruption in America’s public health system, confirmed the most likely origin of the pandemic, held COVID-19 bad actors publicly accountable, fostered bipartisan consensus on consequential pandemic-era issues, and more. This 520-page final report details all findings of the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.

“This work will help the United States, and the world, predict the next pandemic, prepare for the next pandemic, protect ourselves from the next pandemic, and hopefully prevent the next pandemic. Members of the 119th Congress should continue and build off this work, there is more information to find and honest actions to be taken,” wrote Chairman Wenstrup in a letter to Congress.

“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”

On Wednesday, December 4, 2024, at 10:30am, the Select Subcommittee will hold a markup of the final report and officially submit the report to the Congressional record. Ahead of the markup, the Select Subcommittee will also release additional supporting materials and recommendations.

The full, 520-page final report can be found here. A summary of the information can be found below:

The Origins of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including but Not Limited to the Federal Government’s Funding of Gain-of-Function Research

2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS (557 pages)