A group of scientists have raised 10 relevant questions regarding the COVID-19 response in the US.
The questions are also relevant in Denmark and many other countries
Martin Kulldorff
@MartinKulldorff
JUST OUT: Our 80-page report with questions that a #Covid commission/hearing should ask government, media & scientists. Written by Drs. @DrJBhattacharya @LeslieBienen Ram Duriseti @TracyBethHoeg @MartinKulldorff @MartyMakary @MSmelkinsonPhD & @stemplet74.
norfolkgroup.or
1. What could have been done to better protect older high-risk citizens, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?
2. Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists?
3. Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality, early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and school closures would cause enormous collateral damage?
4. Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health?
5. Why did we fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines?
6. Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions?
7. Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner? How was information on drug effectiveness and safety disseminated to doctors and clinicians? Were effective therapeutics easily accessible across the population? How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?
8. (my favorite): Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early?
9. (another favorite): Why the slowness to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk citizens? Why so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?
10. Why emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them, at the expense of efficient and critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts?
I warmly support the call for COVID-19 commissions to answer these questions.
The full scientific background for raising these questions - 80 pages in total - can be read here:
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