While the drama of Election Week 2.0 kept everyone occupied, the House Freedom Caucus held a COVID-19 Accountability Hearing. The polar opposite of the recent calls for “COVID Amnesty,” this hearing is the first of many that will take place if Republicans take control of the House. Hopefully, these forums could function as a proper post-mortem on the government’s response to the pandemic and ensure that Americans’ fundamental liberties are never wantonly trampled again the way they were in 2020 and 2021.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) opened the hearing with a clear statement of purpose that sounded like an opening argument in a court of law: “While some are suggesting a so-called Covid amnesty, we are instead asking, we [gestures to the Freedom Caucus members present] are instead asking for accountability for the lies and injustices resulting from government response to Covid.”
Then Roy continued with a litany of COVID-related catastrophes that Americans cannot afford to forget if they value their medical, spiritual, physical, and psychological freedoms. In under two minutes, he summarized the tragedies and personal burdens felt by so many during the pandemic along with many that will continue long after COVID becomes an annual cold. Keep it handy as Republicans form committees to investigate the origins and the response if they take control of the House.
“For the first time in American history, public health bureaucrats ground the strongest economy in the world to a halt, shut down businesses they deemed quote non-essential, and forced an initial 14 million people out of work,” he said. “They then demanded, and Congress provided $5 trillion in spending to try and save what they had broken.”
“They masked up our healthy children. Kept them from going to school,” Roy continued. “Forced them out of playgrounds, off athletic fields, and from walking across the stage at graduation. And in so doing, set them academically back a generation. They prevented us from attending church. From even attending funerals.”
“They prevented us from going to public parks, getting fresh air, and exercising. They forced the elderly to die alone in hospitals and nursing homes with no loved ones at their side. They forced fathers out of delivery rooms, separated from mothers in labor with their own children,” he added.
“They forced Americans, including the military, our border patrol, our nurses, and first responders, to choose between losing their paycheck and taking a vaccine. A vaccine that received immunity from liability while makers such as Pfizer and Moderna banked $100 million in profits.”
“They forced doctors to choose between speaking the truth and keeping their medical licenses,” Roy pointed out. “And engaged in the Great Silencing of free speech through Big Tech and political pressure. They ignored natural immunity. They ignored and swept aside dangerous side effects, seeking not truth, but a political end result.”
“And guess what? None of this stopped Covid. We now know that lockdowns had no effect on reducing COVID-19 mortality. And instead, we got 108,000 dead Americans from drug overdose deaths, the most in American history. We got a 100% increase in teenage alcohol and drug-related deaths. We got children attempting suicide at higher rates. We got historic learning losses not seen in 30 years and a broken economy with record inflation.”
“Americans are dead, lives have been destroyed, and our nation is weaker because of reckless government decisions — Federal, state, and local. Let me be clear, while many beg for amnesty, these actions demand accountability. This is the first step now, two days after an election, with Republicans taking a majority. Republicans have an obligation and a duty to expose the truth and to seek the truth through the power of subpoena and the power of committees when Republicans take the gavel,” Roy concluded.
One of the experts on the panel was Dr. Scott Atlas, who served on the Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration. Atlas talked about censorship of any information that deviated from the preferred narrative of the public health bureaucracy. He also advocated for people with a broader background in policy in addition to medicine or healthcare to lead public health responses. Experts with a single specialty, such as immunology, will offer narrowly focused solutions.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, two of the creators of the Great Barrington Declaration, also gave their insight. Kulldorff said he stopped worrying about the pandemic after the outbreaks in Italy and Iran: “It was clear to me that this would be a worldwide disease. The virus would reach every corner of the world. That was obvious to any infectious disease technologist.”
After looking at the data from Wuhan and realizing the apparent age stratification for mortality, he said, “So as a parent, I, like most parents, value my children’s lives more than mine. So from this, I knew that they were going to be fine.”
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya emphasized that all early data pointed to the need to direct policies to protect the elderly while most younger, healthier people could go about their normal activities. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya pointed out that Sweden never closed schools for children 15 and under based on early data about the role of children in spreading COVID. Early studies showed they were not spreaders.
These statements underscore one of the most egregious elements of the COVID response that Dr. Debra Birx pushed from the top. Early in the response, Birx told a story about her grandmother who, as a child, supposedly gave the Spanish flu to her own mother. Birx emphasized that her grandmother lived with guilt because her mother died of the illness.
This ridiculous story was part of a plea for Millennials and Gen Z to stay home and not socialize. It was also the beginning of creating a society that viewed children as disease vectors. It is also how the response got turned on its head with policies placing burdens on children in order to make adults feel safe. Roy detailed the burdens and losses children had imposed on them by adults whose fear of their own mortality outstripped society’s obligation to put the well-being of the youngest generation first.
If there is no accountability for anything else in the COVID response, there must be accountability for the harm the “experts’ did to our children. But hopefully, Republicans will take their oversight responsibility seriously and ensure that unelected bureaucrats never have the amount of power over the people they did during the pandemic again.
