This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Scott W. Atlas
Real bright wire
The public health emergency caused by the SARS2-CoV pandemic ended long ago, but America is facing a new emergency. Trust in health agencies has plummeted faster than any other government agency since 2019, with nearly two-thirds now rating the FDA and CDC as “poor or fair.” Half of America no longer has much faith in science itself.
The loss of trust is part of the shameful legacy of those in power during the pandemic. Two presidents and dozens of governors hid behind public health bureaucrats Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky. They ignored Henderson’s classic review from fifteen years earlier, which found lockdowns to be both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, which was already recommended by Ioannidis, Katz and Atlas in March 2020. In addition to a reckless disregard for the foreseeable destruction of their policies, America’s leaders have imposed sinful and long-lasting harm on our children, the full extent of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closures, forced isolation of teens and students, and mandatory injections of healthy children with experimental drugs that seek to protect adults will be a permanent black mark on America. And the truth cannot be denied – the Birx-Fauci lockdowns have failed to stop death and the spread of infections (see Bjornskov, Bendavid, Agrawal, Herby and Kerpen) and have caused enormous damage, increasing the pandemic burden has shifted to low-income families. spare the rich.
America’s next president must lead the way with strong reforms, because the Birx-Fauci stain on public health and science threatens the credibility of any future health guidelines. Here are some recommended initial executive orders:
- Clearly define by law a “public health emergency” with strict time limits (e.g. two weeks), for which the legislation must be extended. Human rights were violated in the United States. Guarantees for the most basic freedoms on which this country was founded – speech, religion, assembly – were suddenly rolled back, without limitation, by lockdowners under the guise of ‘science’ and ‘safety’. The US, with freedoms explicitly defined as “endowed by their Creator,” must be governed in accordance with its legal system, even during health emergencies.
- Add term limits (e.g., six years) to all health agency positions, including top and middle posts, after the initial clean-up of all heads of CDC, NIH, and FDA. Anthony Fauci, for example, worked as a bureaucrat for 38 years. Such longevity confers power and appears to stymie dissenting voices while creating unhealthy relationships with external parties, including the media.
- Prohibit drug royalty sharing by employees of the FDA, NIH, CDC, and ban related private employment for five years after government service. OpenTheBooks revealed that approximately 54,000 royalty payments totaling $325.8 million were paid by outside entities to NIH researchers between 2009 and 2021, sources redacted. We know that Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the NIH, received 21 payments between 2010 and 2021, and Dr. Anthony Fauci received 37 payments. This shocking conflict of interest, involving hundreds of agency employees for personal gain, is being forcibly exposed by FOIA requests. the most urgent of many reforms.
- Requires full transparency of all FDA, CDC and NIH discussions with immediate posting to public forums. Statements from all advisors in those meetings, such as the October 26, 2021 surprise recommendation from Eric Rubin, MD, FDA Advisor on COVID Vaccines for Children, that “we will never learn how safe this vaccine is [in children] unless we’re going to give it. That’s just the way it goes,” must be widely visible to the public.
- Executive order restatement that the CDC and other health agencies are strictly advisory and have no power to enact laws or mandates. Limiting the power of health agencies is a way to keep elected officials accountable to citizens, rather than appearing to hide behind those agencies.
- Decentralize the current cartel of NIH funding that controls all academic scientific careers and university medical centers. More than fifteen US medical centers each receive more than $500 million a year from the NIH, the primary funder of all scientific research, at a cost of $45 billion a year. The use of individual university scientists who owe their careers to NIH funding explains the closed-door Lancet publication of February 2020, which calls the laboratory origins of the SARS2 virus a “conspiracy theory” – perhaps to justify the crime of NIH under the supervision of Drs. Collins and Fauci, who sent more than $2 million of taxpayer dollars to fund China’s dangerous gain-of-function research to circumvent our country’s restrictions. Instead, spreading control of NIH funding across regions with block grants to states could loosen this hold on independent voices.
- Immediately halt any binding agreements or commitments to the World Health Organization. The US is the largest funding country for WHO activities, but WHO’s results are terrible. In addition to supporting China’s pushback, Director Tedros also supported China’s reckless human rights violations, stating that “the Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak” even as it used pseudoscience to effectively imprisoning its citizens. The WHO ignored evidence in its guidelines about softening, censured its own staff for recognizing the limits of asymptomatic spread, and twisted fundamental definitions like “herd immunity” to influence behavior, rather than to inform data in an unbiased way. We have to hope that Tedros was joking when he said, “China is essentially setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Blind to the clear need for reassessment, the Biden administration’s ambassador to the WHO, Pamela Hamamoto, already promised: “The United States is committed to [WHO’s] Pandemic Accord,” even without seeing the final version. In that agreement, the WHO will define a “public health emergency” for other countries – the fundamental basis for justifying restrictions on the public. What is the rationale for a sovereign nation to allow a third party to legally define and impose such a critical state?
Finally, American voters need to wake up and hold elected officials accountable. Without substantive reforms, the promised freedoms of the United States will have lost their legitimacy.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.