From the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration–the public health officials and economists who warned that the government’s response to COVID would be a disaster–comes the Norfolk Declaration, which calls for a COVID-19 Commission to look back at the lessons we have, or at least should have learned from the past 3 years.

The authors come from diverse backgrounds, but are unified by one central characteristic: they saw the disaster coming and tried to warn us. For their troubles, they were attacked, slandered, censored, and professionally harmed.

That is not their focus, though. Rather they want to salvage something from the disaster. As with a post-crash investigation of an airplane accident, they are calling for a commission to comb through the evidence and discover some lessons to learn.

At hospitals, morbidity and mortality (M&Ms) conferences are used to examine errors or omissions in order to improve medical care. Aviation agencies conduct detailed investigations after airplane accidents and incidents. Pandemics are recurring events throughout history, and there will be future pandemics. It is thus critically important that we thoroughly examine federal pandemic responses and decisions so that we can identify and learn from mistakes. Individual states should take on the responsibility of conducting similar processes to analyze their own responses to the pandemic. Other countries have conducted such inquiries (Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark) and made results available to the public and to decision makers. The United States is notably absent from this list.

This is such a blindingly obvious idea that it makes you wonder why nobody is pursuing it.

Not really. There is a reason why: the powers that be got exactly what they wanted out of the pandemic, and the collateral damage was merely the price that was paid to consolidate power and money into a few hands and move a step closer to the American version of the Great Reset.

Norfolk’s authors are focused on the public health aspects of the questions that need to be asked, and I applaud their focus. But I also think that somebody–perhaps Congress–needs to focus on serious political questions that are glossed over by the authors.

This document is not a report from such an inquiry. Rather, we present a blueprint containing key public health questions for a COVID-19 commission. In separate chapters we summarize key background information and propose specific questions about failures to protect older high-risk Americans, about school closures, collateral lockdown harms, lack of robust public health data collected and/or made available, misleading risk communication, downplaying infection-acquired immunity, masks, testing, vaccine efficacy and safety, therapeutics, and epidemiological modeling.

We chose not to discuss economic issues, although we recognize that negative effects on the economy have long-term negative effects on public health. We have also chosen not to engage in issues regarding media handling of the pandemic, nor questions of how, when and why the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated. Public health responses to a pandemic are devised and implemented independently of viral origin.

Learning public health lessons is a vital step in repairing what damage can be repaired; rooting out the corruption and rot of the political and cultural establishment that went full fascist on Americans is at least as important. Jim Jordan is doing his part by investigating the weaponization of government, but that is a small part of the puzzle.

Major news figures should be called before Congress. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others should be raked over the coals. To what extent were they colluding with government officials, law enforcement, and fake non-profit, non-partisan organizations to suppress dissent? We just learned this week about Microsoft colluding with the State Department to demonetize conservative news sites, including Townhall and Hotair.

Some government officials should go to jail for that. It is a violation of our constitutional rights. And misuse of government funds for political purposes. I would be happy to escort them to the gates of the prison myself.

Still, I heartily endorse the work of the Norfolk Group and suggest you peruse their website because it is a treasure trove of insight and information.

Here is their opening salvo of questions they believe need answers:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In this document we list specific questions on specific topics related to COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States. We believe these questions are vital for the nation to ask the White House, the CDC, the FDA, and other government officials, as well as state health departments, scientists, and the media. The public deserves answers to these questions so we can learn from our mistakes. Key issues include:

1. What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?

2. Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists? How did this hinder our fight against the virus?

3. Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality, early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?

4. Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including but not limited to, cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health?

5. Why did the CDC fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines?

6. Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions?

7. Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner? How was information on drug effectiveness and safety disseminated to doctors and clinicians? Were effective therapeutics easily accessible across the population? How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?

8. Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems?

9. Why was the USA slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why was there more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk Americans? Why was so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?

10. Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them, at the expense of efficient and critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts? Why did the CDC or NIH not fund large randomized trials to evaluate the efficacy and potential harms of mask wearing? Why didn’t policy recommendations change after the publication of randomized trial data from Denmark and Bangladesh which showed no or minimal efficacy of mask wearing by the public?

Please, if you have the time and inclination, visit their website yourself.