A Covid Commission Will Not Help Restore our Rights
To assemble a 9-11 style Commission on the Covid response is to grant this “health first” authoritarian view a majority in “the final say” on the Covid response.
In a recent opinion piece at The Federalist, Helen Raleigh argued that renewed hysteria about covid proves why we “need” a commission to study
what went wrong in the covid response, along the lines of the famous 9-11 Commission that studied why our government failed to prevent the infamous attack on the World Trade Center that killed almost 3,000 individuals on American soil.
The desire for a reckoning and closure on the tumultuous era of covid restrictions is understandable. But such a commission, even if co-chaired by some “victims,” as Raleigh suggests, will not bring about the justice we all deserve. “There has been no national reckoning on what went wrong in our pandemic response and who should be held accountable,” she writes. In fact, its conclusions would skew in favor of restrictions and serve as a shield against further inquiry or pushback on future public health policy, particularly as it relates to infectious diseases like covid.
Raleigh cites inquiries and commissions in other countries as a reason we should also have one. Putting aside that people said this very thing about the first lockdowns (“other countries have done it”), the tone of these inquiries are broadly what you’d expect from organizations tasked with investigating themselves. No foxes were involved in the henhouse massacre, says the fox guarding the henhouse.
The Covid inquiry in Norway, a lockdown nation, unsurprisingly found Norway did a pretty good job. The inquiry in the UK is ongoing, but seems based in the premise that lockdowns were the right response, and, as Daniel Hannan wrote, has played with standard political “gotchas” more than earnest challenges to the overall Covid narrative.
Sweden’s commission, which finished its report last year, produced an unwelcome surprise for dissidents of covid tyranny. While concluding Sweden’s no-lockdown approach was broadly correct, the 8-expert panel criticized the government for not closing restaurants, shopping centers and venues. “In February-March 2020, Sweden should have opted for more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures,” the panel wrote last year, also criticizing the health agency for dismissing the use of masks as tools of infection control.
Raleigh rightly holds that any commission in the U.S. should hold decision-makers accountable for Covid tyranny – but the only prosecutions I can find are going the other way. In Italy, the former prime minister and former health minister were put under investigation for not quarantining locales perceived to be the epicenter of the first covid wave in 2020.
We must also draw on our own history to inform what a Covid Commission would look like. The 9/11 Commission was to find “what happened, what went wrong, who was responsible, and how we could prevent mistakes from happening again or be better prepared,” as Raleigh puts it. But the 9-11 Commission was about a foreign attack on U.S. soil. And the Warren Commission that studied JFK’s assassination was an alleged attack by a citizen on a sitting government leader. These were tragedies America as a whole was outraged and sickened over. Because the cry for understanding how the 9/11 attacks could have happened was bipartisan, the 9-11 Commission was chaired by five Democrats and five Republicans.
But Covid is not like the JFK assassination or 9/11. First, a commission to study a foreign attack on U.S. citizens is fundamentally different than a commission to study an assault by the government on its own citizens. Moreover, Covid is highly partisan. It’s so toxic that families have been torn apart over it, and to this day millions defend the lockdowns, masks and even jab mandates as appropriate, while millions of others see them as gross violations of Constitutional and human rights.
Yet such a seminal report would only be politically feasible to write with the chairs evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with maybe an Independent thrown in for good measure. The analysis given in the report would split the difference between the right and left, and likely leave out points of emphasis that fall too far on either side of the political spectrum. Even if the perspectives of alleged victims of covid tyranny were included, Democrats demand to have the alleged victims of “let it rip” policies that “didn’t take covid seriously” weigh in as well. Adverse effects of the covid shots, on all groups but maybe children? Forget it. Honest assessment of efficacy, and why the FDA pushed ahead with booster approvals repeatedly on data from mice? Forget it. Digging into why schools were shut down for so long might be on the table, but criticizing why they had to come back to class in masks certainly won’t be.
Who among Democrats in Congress, besides RFK Jr., has seriously questioned the fundamentals of the Covid response? Who would be worthy to sit down and earnestly analyze and criticize: the abuse of emergency powers, the rampant disinformation about the risks of Covid and the efficacy of interventions, the overt efforts by government to censor information and opinions about Covid, the veritable abandonment of nursing home residents, the shutdowns of addiction recovery centers, the confinement of children who would be at school with abusive relatives, the horrifying deaths of patients alone in the hospital, the forced masking of toddlers and removal of families from planes because children were unable to comply, the very idea that Americans could be forcibly confined to their homes, denied their right to assemble for protest or for religious practice, forced to keep certain distances apart, that jobs could be arbitrarily defined as “non-essential” and therefore cancelled? Who among the Democrats will criticize these things, will call a spade a spade? And who would be politically feasible for Democrats in Congress to support in such a role? Nobody who would dare to side with the so-called “covid deniers.” Not in the near future, anyway.
Democrats are far too invested in the ongoing scandal of scrapping our rights and our welfare to be trusted with half the chairs on a Commission. The fact that such misinformation-spreaders like Chuck Todd are favorable to the idea of a commission should be a stadium-sized red flag to anyone who thinks this is a good idea. If Chuck Todd is hot on it, run the other direction as fast as you can.
The idea of a commission has been floated for drawing final conclusions on the origin of SARS-COV-2. But such a mission would be irrelevant to the human rights abuses experienced by Americans after we knew with a high degree of certainty that the virus was not a lethal biological weapon of mass destruction, but a cold-like illness for most.
More than disputes over what “the science and the data” say, it is the philosophical divide over the covid response that will prevent any commission from seriously challenging government actions. The proper role of government is to safeguard your rights, not trample them in an attempt to safeguard your perfect health. But half the country, definitely more than half of Congress, think the role of government is to safeguard your health first, and when health is deemed secure (by whatever metric is most convenient in the moment), only then can you have your rights and your liberty. To assemble a 9-11 style Commission on the Covid response is to grant this “health first” authoritarian view a majority in “the final say” on lockdowns, the moral imperative to be present with loved ones in hospital and to visit them in long term care, the mass distribution of experimental drugs, and bodily autonomy regarding mask and shot mandates.
The following problems that enabled the “health first” view are responsible for most of the covid tyranny: state emergency powers are far too broad so that state executives can quash our rights whenever panic is sufficiently cultivated; federal agencies can push rules as “guidance” onto states while states can simple punt blame back to agencies while enacting those same rules, creating a vicious cycle of unaccountability; and government forsook its duty to properly regulate the safety of covid drugs when it decided to work hand in glove with the companies that made them and ensure that something would be available at “warp speed” (government had already staked “a return to normal” on the availability of effective vaccines or therapeutics, and the public was promised a vaccine before trials even began).
These problems will not be adequately addressed by a Covid commission, much less force any kind of accountability. The solutions must be fought for, tooth and nail, at the state and local levels. Federally, a complete rebuild of the FDA and the rebuild or elimination of the Center for Disease Control is necessary by reformers in the executive and legislative branches who are willing to boot out corrupt, lying bureaucrats and make protecting and defending the Constitution from attacks both foreign and domestic the priority far and above anything else. It’s far easier said than done. But one thing that would stand in the way of these reforms is a lengthy report from a supposedly “credible” Covid Commission that would reinforce the premise that liberty is only available when certain health threats are neutralized.
Again, the core problem with the covid response that overshadows all questions of science, as important as they are, is the utter disregard for our freedom: to be with loved ones, to connect socially and physically, to show our faces, to control what we put into our bodies, to work for money that feeds, clothes, and shelters our families. This will not be recognized by a “9-11 style” Covid Commission. Not within this decade, at least.
Another problem with assuming that a covid/lockdowns commission can do the same work the 9/11 and Warren Commissions did is that those two investigated discrete, singular events, not a vast suite of government actions. It's not only that government has trouble finding fault with itself: how do you choose which actions to investigate, and what tools do you use to investigate the actions?
There was a very good reason that both of the major political parties began as anti-federalist parties.
It is a shame that both of them have completely forgotten and abandoned their beginnings.