The COVID-19 pandemic will be seen as one of the most catastrophic interludes in American history. Not only was the loss of life extraordinary (1.2 million Americans dead and counting), but the assault by the government on our basic rights and liberties was unprecedented.
Unless there is some kind of reckoning in public health, in the public response by the government, and the criminal negligence of bureaucrats in handling public funds, we are certain to repeat most of the mistakes that led us to this sorry state of affairs.
The ray of hope is that Donald Trump's election brought not only a needed turnover in leadership of our public health system, but also that the new leaders realize how badly these public health agencies performed during the pandemic, and necessary changes are underway.
I've been calling for a reckoning of COVID-19 across several fronts since 2021. Where do scientists go to get their reputations back who were smeared for suggesting COVID might have originated in a Chinese lab? Where do writers go for an apology for having articles covering the controversy demonetized by Twitter and Facebook? Where do taxpayers go to reclaim the $500 billion in COVID relief funds that were stolen or fraudulently obtained?
Where do Americans go to get justice for the lies, the incompetence, the abject failures of politicians, bureaucrats, and the mainstream media that led to the economic catastrophe (made much worse by Joe Biden's policies), the loss of freedom, and the utter loss of trust in the ability of the government to act within the law while protecting our basic liberties?
The government saw the pandemic as an opportunity to advance a political agenda.
"Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was part of the new guard brought in to oversee vaccine approvals at the FDA as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, believes that before he worked at the agency, the FDA colluded with Pfizer to slow-roll the initial approval of the first COVID vaccine in order to prevent Trump from taking credit for it before the November 2020 election," writes Reason's Zach Weissmueller.
"If somebody wants to say, 'When was the first moment that politics played a role in this [vaccine approval] process?' I think it was the initial release date," said Prasad during a July 2025 FDA press conference.
Pfizer had been on track to have the data from a 40,000-person trial by mid-October, but changed the study's endpoint at the last minute. Prasad says there was no scientific or medical basis for the change.
"Why was the initial statistical analysis plan changed?" he asks. "Was it changed for scientific reason, a medical reason, a statistical reason? As somebody who's been a professor of epidemiology and in medicine for 20 years, I cannot see any scientific or medical basis to change the physical plan."
Delaying the vaccine, Prasad says, led to unnecessary deaths from COVID. "That winter was a very terrible winter," he says, "and had the vaccine been available five weeks sooner…I think a lot of people's lives would have been saved. So we may be talking about tens of thousands of lives. So to me, this is the original sin…this moment in time."
Deaths from COVID remain concentrated among older adults. Recent CDC data indicate that individuals aged 65 and older account for over 80% of all COVID-related deaths. Forcing healthy adults and children to get vaccinated was wrong. But for me, Sue, and millions of other seniors, the vaccine was a godsend. Historically, unvaccinated adults have faced a 53.2 times higher risk of COVID-associated death compared to those who are fully vaccinated and boosted.
There were side effects to the vaccine that made it imperative to leave the decision to take it in the hands of the individual. Biden wanted to force everyone to take it with mandates that cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs.
"President Biden got up to the microphone and said, as of September, one month hence, we are going to offer a third dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine," says Dr. Paul Offit. "Based on what data?"
Offit was a member of the FDA's vaccine advisory committee at the time and voted against the Biden administration's booster timeline. There was already evidence that with the COVID vaccine, there was a risk of myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. Two senior FDA officials resigned following Biden's announcement, with one of them, Philip Krause, later telling Congress that the political pressure to clear the way for mandates was overbearing.
"There was some significant circumstantial evidence that a desire to implement mandates likely had something to do with the speeding up of the review timeline," Krause testified to Congress in 2024. "Even the perception of political influence can undermine trust in the agency, especially during a pandemic…The system is set up to permit hierarchy to overrule science."
Perhaps it's inevitable that political interference will roil the public health system. During the pandemic, the interference cost lives. And it cost Americans the trust that the government needs to manage a public health crisis effectively.
From top to bottom, from Washington to state governments, to town councils and village boards, there was failure. Where do we go to get that trust back so that in the next crisis, we're not questioning the motives of those who should have our interests foremost in their minds?
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