Brad Wenstrup is a Republican Congressman from Ohio, vice-president JD Vance’s territory. He was a combat surgeon who served in Iraq and was Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. His report on the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic is credible.
In evidence, Dr Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, made a significant admission:
‘You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach a zero value to whether this … disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered, [it] is a public health mindset.’
The damage caused by the ‘public health mindset’ was immense. Lockdowns increased the use of mental health facilities by 18 per cent in regions with a lockdown compared to a one per cent decline in areas without a lockdown. The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living at home with their parents reached 52 per cent, more than during the Great Depression.
The fraud among numerous employment support programs to counter the lockdowns was staggering. The Paycheck Protection Program, equivalent of Australia’s JobKeeper, lost $64 billion. Fraudulent unemployment insurance payments were $191 billion, and the Small Business Administration Disaster Programs lost $200 billion. The exquisite irony was the finding that Chinese government-linked hackers stole $20 million in COVID-19 relief funds.
Some public health officials’ behaviour was vicious. In October 2020, scientists from the universities of Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard signed the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter responding to mass lockdowns. The authors proposed reducing the harms of lockdowns by ending the mandatory restrictions for most people while still protecting the most vulnerable.
Collins wrote to Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that a policy other than national lockdowns needed a ‘quick and devastating published take down.’ Collins called The Great Barrington Declaration ‘a fringe component of epidemiology … not mainstream science’ and ‘outright dangerous’. International media fell into line - Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Independent, and Telegraph – dismissing the Declaration.
Vaccine mandates were not supported by science and caused more harm than good. The mandates ignored natural immunity, the risk of adverse events from the vaccine, and the fact that the vaccines did not prevent the spread of COVID-19. When vaccines were found ineffective in transmission, officials advised people to wear masks, which they knew were ineffective in preventing the spread.
Infection-acquired immunity was discounted as part of the national public health response. In December 2020, President-elect Biden promised he would not make vaccines mandatory. In August 2021, Secretary Austin announced the first federal COVID-19 mandate.
The vaccine mandate (for the military) occurred one day after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved the Pfizer vaccine. After Defence, the floodgates opened. All Federal employees were to be vaccinated or risk removal or termination from their employment.
Federal health officials consistently overstated the power of vaccines and deepened political divides with statements like ‘the pandemic of the unvaccinated.’ Fauci had already made highly inflammatory remarks about the unvaccinated, where he deemed concerns about not getting vaccinated as simply ‘ideological bullshit’ and implied that institutions should make life difficult for the unvaccinated using vaccine mandates:
‘Once people feel empowered and protected legally, you were going to have schools, universities, and colleges are going to say, you want to come to this college, buddy? You're going to get vaccinated. … Amazon and Facebook … are going to say, you want to work for us, you get vaccinated.’
In May 2022, a British Medical Journal paper found that COVID-19 vaccine mandates caused significant collateral damage.
‘We question the effectiveness and consequences of coercive vaccination policy in pandemic response and urge the public health community and policymakers to return to non-discriminatory, trust-based public health approaches.’
Mandatory vaccination policies also assaulted the doctor-patient relationship. Millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines were distributed under a regime that did not ensure the common standards of informed consent. Governments inserted themselves into a decision that should have been between each patient and their doctor.
In evidence, Dr Robert Redfield, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said:
‘You have to have the courage when you’re a public health official to say, I don’t know when you don’t know’ rather than ‘I didn’t think the public was ready to hear that.’
Gary Johns is chairman of Close the Gap Research
