Republicans Need to Investigate the Pandemic Response

O ne of the cliches of the past few years is that “nobody wants to remember a pandemic.” Over and over it was said that there were many commemorations of the First World War, a civilization-redefining event that impressed itself across the Western cultural consciousness through poetry, fiction, film, and art in the following decades, leaving us a much more cynical civilization than before. But so little was said about the great influenza! Wasn’t that mysterious?

Well, I can understand why now. I lost friends during the pandemic. Not to the disease, fortunately. To the moralizing. The constant drumbeat from the authorities that the people themselves, by their behavior, could control, slow down, and turn back the pandemic imbued all action with moral significance and political meaning. This in turn meant that a true Covid-era stickler could upbraid you as something like a traitor or mass murderer for putting your garbage can on the street while not wearing your mask properly.

This moralizing was based on a simple but utterly useless truth: We really could have stopped Covid from spreading or mutating. All we had to do was bury our children alive, and then ourselves — each and every one of us. Having failed to do that or invent and administer a “sterilizing vaccine,” nearly every individual on earth was destined to catch Covid, and most of us have.

The highly charged arguments about Covid and our interventions against it were not just across partisan lines on social media, but within families, in the workplace, and on school boards. This was painful. And polls show that Covid is fading in relevance as a political issue, with people now rating the economy and inflation as their top issues.

Well of course. But the Covid era saw us take utterly extraordinary steps with monetary and fiscal policy. The word “lockdown” entered our normal political vocabulary — as if the measures used to quell a prison riot were just the sort of thing that governors or the federal government could impose on free citizens. An odd private–public partnership for censorship emerged in which government information became the basis for mass editing of America’s most important public forums: digital social media.

And the history is being rewritten as we speak. Dr. Anthony Fauci this week has said two astonishing things. First, to the Hill’s Batya Ungar-Sargon he said, “I didn’t recommend locking anything down.” He continued: “I have always felt — and go back and look at my statements — that we need to do everything we can to keep the schools open and safe.” In the exact same interview, he said that if he could go back, he would recommend a “much more stringent” response.

But as Noah Rothman helpfully reminds us at Commentary, Fauci previously told reporters, “When it became clear that we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread — this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area — I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” Not only that, but he urged against any school reopenings in the 2020 calendar year.

But it’s worse than school closure; it’s also trust in the vaccines. Earlier this week, Fauci was confronted on Fox News with a New York Times article about how the vaccine affected menstrual cycles for women. The results, that nearly half did experience irregularities after the vaccine, are not a surprise to anyone who lives in a human society with a lot of women who got vaccinated and who felt free enough of the era’s political taboos to talk about their experiences. This was talked about commonly throughout 2021.

But officially, talking about it was a great way to get lumped in with conspiracy theories about depopulation and vaccine “shedding.” The mainstream media, in a froth to promote the vaccines, constantly asserted, “There is no evidence that any of the vaccines are causal factors in those who experience irregularities in their menstrual cycles after receiving any of the shots.” And of course any talk about this on social media was subject to censorship or a right-of-reply by the government linking to CDC’s information.

Fauci shrugged, “Well, the menstrual thing is something that seems to be quite transient and temporary. That’s the point. That’s one of the points. We need to study it more.” Oh, no kidding.

Or there is Dr. Deborah Birx, who this week unburdened herself: “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,” she said. “And I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization. It will. But let’s be very clear: 50 percent of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older, vaccinated. So that’s why I’m saying even if you’re vaccinated and boosted, if you’re unvaccinated right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid. It’s effective. It’s a great antiviral.”

If Birx knew this, did Fauci? Remember he told people in May of last year that vaccinated people would have a “very, very low likelihood, that they’re going to transmit it.”

And if they did know, why did Fauci and public health get behind vaccine mandates, which could make sense only if the vaccine actually did prevent transmission? Even when the mandates were coming down, there were studies suggesting that people who had simply recovered from a Covid-19 infection were less likely to get infected by a subsequent wave than those who were vaccinated.

I know women who were trying to conceive and who were spooked by the reports of menstrual irregularities in their friends. Some of them faced the prospect of being fired from their jobs for choosing what they thought was best for their family. Millions of others calculated correctly that they were at low risk to develop a severe case if they contracted Covid, and they avoided the vaccine for whatever reason — because they’d had the disease and recovered, or were young but once had a bad reaction to a shot, or had an issue with blood clotting in their medical history. They faced ostracism or unemployment because public-health officials and the government — backed and amplified by social-media behemoths — were telling them lies about the vaccine. Or “overselling” it, as Birx put it.

Scores of millions of parents figured out that their children weren’t at serious risk and by the summer of 2020 could read credible science showing their kids at school did not pose serious risks to others. Yet they were shut down.

These millions of people have reasons privately to feel vindicated. But they deserve to have someone in public life affirm the fact that they weren’t crazy, that in fact public health did mislead them, shaded the truth, and occasionally abused the trust placed in them.

All the other issues — including inflation, the youth mental-health crisis, and the cultural battles over education in schools — flow out of our pandemic response, and the mistakes we made in it. Auditing the pandemic response should be a prerequisite for Republican governance after the 2022 election and for any Republican hoping to represent the party in 2024.