There were many tragedies associated with the Covid pandemic of 2020. Millions died worldwide and nearly a million Americans were included in that estimate. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was the loss of confidence in our public health officials.

Dr. Scott Atlas says this loss of confidence extends to science itself, and that is the public health emergency of today. Dr. Atlas is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and was briefly associated with the Trump Covid response team near the end of his presidency.

Dr. Atlas, writing for independent.org, says, “The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held 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 15 years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection,recommended as early as March 2020 by Ioannidis, Katz, and Atlas. Beyond a reckless disregard for foreseeable destruction from their policies, America’s leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage on our children, the totality of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America. And the truth cannot be denied—the Birx-Fauci lockdowns failed to stop the death and the spread of infection (see Bjornskov, Bendavid, Agarwal, Herby, and Kerpen) and inflicted tremendous harms, shifting the pandemic burden to low-income families to spare the affluent.

What can be done about this?

Dr. Atlas says America’s next president needs to lead with strong reforms, because the Birx-Fauci stain on public health and science jeopardizes the credibility of all future health guidance. He does offer some suggested executive orders to fix the problem:

• Clearly define by law “public health emergency” with strict time limits (e.g. two weeks), requiring legislation to extend. This is to protect our human rights, which were violated during the pandemic. Guarantees of the most fundamental freedoms upon which this country was founded – speech, religion, assembly – were suddenly reversed, without limit, by lockdowns justified under the guise of “the science” and “safety.”
• Add term limits (e.g. six years) to all health agency positions, including top and mid-level posts, after first cleaning house of all heads of CDC, NIH, and FDA. For instance, Anthony Fauci worked as a bureaucrat for 38 years. Such longevity accrues power and seems to inhibit dissenting voices, while setting up unhealthy relationships with outside parties, including the media.
• Forbid all drug royalty-sharing by employees of FDA, NIH, CDC – and forbid related private jobs for five years after government service. OpenThe Books revealed that between 2009 and 2021, approximately 54,000 royalty payments totaling $325.8 million were paid by third party entities to NIH researchers, sources redacted. Dr. Francis Collins, former NIH director, received 21 payments and Dr. Anthony Fauci received 37 payments between 2010 and 2021. This represents a shocking conflict of interest.
• Require 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 startling October 26, 2021,recommendation of Eric Rubin, M.D., FDA advisor for children’s COVID vaccines, that “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is [in children] unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes,” must be widely visible to the public.

• Restatement with executive order that the CDC and other health agencies are strictly advisory and do not have power to set laws or mandates. Limiting health agency power is a way to begin holding elected officials accountable to the citizens, rather than allowing the pretense of hiding behind those agencies.

• Decentralize today’s cartel of NIH funding that controls all academic science careers and university medical centers.The NIH is the dominant funder of all scientific research, to the tune of $45 billion per year. This may explain the February 202 Lancet publication concocted behind closed doors calling the lab origin of the SARS2 virus a “conspiracy theory” – perhaps to conceal NIH malfeasance overseen by Drs. Collins and Fauci, who sent more than $2 million taxpayer dollars to fund China’s dangerous gain-of-function research to circumvent our country’s restrictions. Instead, disseminating control of NIH funding across regions with block grants to states would reduce this grip on independent voices.
• Immediately halt all binding agreements or pledges to the World Health Organization. The U.S. is the largest funding nation to WHO activities, but the WHO record is abysmal. In addition to supporting China’s stonewalling, Director Tedros backed China’s reckless human rights violations, stating “the Chinese government is to becongratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak,” even as it used pseudoscience to essentially imprison its citizens. WHO disregarded evidence in its guidelines on mitigation, censored its own staff for acknowledging limits of asymptomatic spread, and flipped fundamental definitions like “herd immunity” to influence behavior, rather than to dispassionately inform with data.

That’s a lot to digest, but Dr. Atlas is on point in his understanding of the deficiencies of our current public health system. Too many bureaucrats are looking out for their own interests instead of providing scientific advice to benefit the country. We must ensure that we can trust the scientists in our public-health system or we will repeat the chaos of the last pandemic the next time.

(Author’s note: For more on this subject, I recommend Dr. Atlas’s book,  A Plague Upon Our House.)