There follows a statement issued by the Norfolk Group of physicians and scientists outlining the questions that must be asked and answered in public by those who upended life in America during the pandemic.
The group of eight scientists includes Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration issued early on in the pandemic, that called for a response targeted towards the most vulnerable rather than unnecessary blanket restrictions on every aspect of life.
Included here are the introduction, author list and executive summary of the 80-page report. The entire document can be found on the Norfolk Group website.
Introduction
America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic failed on many levels of Government and in many aspects. Certainly, deaths are unavoidable during a pandemic. However, too many U.S. policy makers concentrated efforts on ineffective or actively harmful and divisive measures such as school closures that generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans. As a result, Americans were hard hit both by the disease and by collateral damage generated by misguided pandemic strategies and decisions that ignored years of pandemic preparation guidance crafted by numerous public health agencies, nationally and internationally.
Many crucial mistakes were made early on, in January, February, and early March 2020, and not corrected later. Mistakes made during this early critical window at the beginning of the pandemic affected our ability to collect data about COVID-19 and protect those most at risk and laid the groundwork for loss of public trust and confusion. These oversights led to unnecessary morbidity and mortality, particularly in nursing homes, and a lack of much-needed medical supplies, reagents for testing, and required medications. Delays in initiating research on key questions such as effectiveness of therapeutics, modes of transmission, length of infective periods, and other questions, meant that policy decisions were based on assumptions rather than on solid data. To this day, many of these questions have not been adequately addressed through robust trials.
At hospitals, morbidity and mortality (M&Ms) conferences are used to examine errors or omissions in order to improve medical care. Aviation agencies conduct detailed investigations after airplane accidents and incidents. Pandemics are recurring events throughout history, and there will be future pandemics. It is thus critically important that we thoroughly examine federal pandemic responses and decisions so that we can identify and learn from mistakes. Individual states should take on the responsibility of conducting similar processes to analyze their own responses to the pandemic. Other countries have conducted such inquiries (Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark) and made results available to the public and to decision makers. The United States is notably absent from this list. These inquiries pose important questions to key decision makers during the pandemic, including (i) politicians, (ii) leaders of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), (iii) state health departments, (iv) university presidents, medical school deans, hospital executives, medical journal editors, and leading public health scientists, as well as (iv) news media and technology/media companies.
This document is not a report from such an inquiry. Rather, we present a blueprint containing key public health questions for a COVID-19 commission. In separate chapters we summarise key background information and propose specific questions about failures to protect older high-risk Americans, about school closures, collateral lockdown harms, lack of robust public health data collected or made available, misleading risk communication, downplaying infection-acquired immunity, masks, testing, vaccine efficacy and safety, therapeutics and epidemiological modeling.
We chose not to discuss economic issues, although we recognise that negative effects on the economy have long-term negative effects on public health. We have also chosen not to engage in issues regarding media handling of the pandemic, nor questions of how, when and why the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated. Public health responses to a pandemic are devised and implemented independently of viral origin.
This document was prepared and written solely by its eight authors. No other person discussed its content, or saw a draft or the final version before publication. Seven of us started the work at an in-person meeting in Norfolk, Connecticut, organised by the Brownstone Institute in May of 2022. We wrote and edited the bulk of this document during the subsequent six months. In honor of the place where we met, we call ourselves the Norfolk Group.
The eight of us hold a wide range of political views and are not united by any particular political viewpoints. All the authors have voiced criticisms of how the pandemic was handled by government agencies and individuals appointed by and serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This is a public health document, and we write it as scientists with different specific areas of expertise, but sharing the same views regarding the basic principles of public health. Our work on this document was not on behalf of any institution, public or private. Further, the statements written in these articles by the Norfolk Group represent our personal interpretations and do not necessarily represent those of our employers. Last, as data are collected and new studies emerge, some of these documents and statements may become out of date or less accurate. These documents are based on current information as of January 2023 and may not have been updated past that date.
The Authors
- Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD; epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
- Leslie Bienen, MFA, DVM; veterinarian, zoonotic disease researcher, and faculty member at Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (through December 31st 2022). She left in January 2023 to work in healthcare policy.
- Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD; emergency room physician and computational engineer for medical decision making; associate professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
- Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD; physician and PhD epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California-San Francisco, clinical researcher in healthcare policy and practicing Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation physician.
- Martin Kulldorff, PhD, FDhc; epidemiologist and biostatistician; professor of medicine at Harvard University (on leave); founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom.
- Marty Makary, MD, MPH; surgeon and healthcare policy scientist; professor at Johns Hopkins University.
- Margery Smelkinson, PhD; infectious disease scientist and microscopist whose research predominantly focuses on host/pathogen interactions.
- Steven Templeton, PhD; immunologist; associate professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.
The Executive Summary
In this document we list specific questions on specific topics related to COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States. We believe these questions are vital for the nation to ask the White House, the CDC, the FDA, and other Government officials, as well as state health departments, scientists and the media. The public deserves answers to these questions so we can learn from our mistakes. Key issues include:
1. What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalised due to COVID-19?
2. Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by Government officials and some prominent scientists? How did this hinder our fight against the virus?
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 early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?
4. Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognising and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including but not limited to cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations and mental health?
5. Why did the CDC 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 behaviour 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 politicised?
8. Why did vaccine randomised trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalisation and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems?
9. Why was the USA slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why was there more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk Americans? Why was so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?
10. Why was there an 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? Why did the CDC or NIH not fund large randomised trials to evaluate the efficacy and potential harms of mask wearing? Why didn’t policy recommendations change after the publication of randomised trial data from Denmark and Bangladesh which showed no or minimal efficacy of mask wearing by the public?
Stop Press: Steve Templeton, one of the authors, has written for the Brownstone Institute about the statement.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Same questions to our government about it’s ludicrous, irrational Covid response please
Funny they included the UK here as a country conducting an ‘investigation’, we currently have some box ticking excercise where the government is congratulating itself and the only question asked is ‘would doing it faster and harder have been even better’
Whilst politicians live in another universe hiding from what they have done there will be no admissions or progress. They won’t even acknowledge that there was 20 percent excess mortality in January and a constant 12 to 15 percent now.
After every stabbination program the ‘excess deaths’ ie those murdered rose.
Millions injured. For what? IFR was 0.3 to 0.05%. A bloody rounding error.
This document laments the lack of ‘testing’. Testing for what? There are 300.000 Corona viruses, no test is going to ‘isolate’ SARS II scariant xyz.
The UK commission will ejaculate that it was the world leader in quacksine rollouts, which saved 70 trillion lives, that the LDs saved another 70 trillion, and the PCR testing and isolating at home saved the NHS.
And that of course, we need to improve our pandemic response for the next scam due out in 2025.
Absolutely governments should have pressure relentlessly applied to them and be made to answer all questions but, unless any Americans can correct me, I don’t think I recall anyone from the US government going on record and explaining why this whole thing was years in the planning and literally was a military operation. Absolutely sweet FA to do with a virus, in other words. We’re getting more answers from independent truth-seekers than from anybody in authority. Here is Katherine Watt’s latest;
”To prosecute defendants for their willed acts and omissions, the theory of the case is that the products in use are military bioweapons, not pharmaceutical drugs, devices, biologics, or vaccines; the program is a covert, state-sponsored, contract terrorism/mass murder program; and there is ample evidence to demonstrate the bioweapons were developed and deployed through military programs (not drug regulation programs) with intent to harm recipients, by named defendants in their official or personal capacities.
To defend, US Gov must take one of two positions:
1.Mass murder using bioweapons is the official policy of the US Government, and officials carrying it out are fully authorized to do so, or
2.Mass murder using bioweapons is prohibited under US law, and US Government officials carrying it out are rogue elements who can and should be removed from power, charged, tried and punished.
Either
A. They lied, knowingly and with intent, when they told the world that the products known as Covid-19 vaccines are FDA-authorized/FDA-approved pharmaceutical products, or
B. They killed, knowingly and with intent, using military bioweapons that were never and could never be, subject to FDA pharmaceutical regulation.
The correct answer is:
C. Both of the above.
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/on-the-impalement-of-embedded-treasonous
Sasha Latypova’s recent presentation ( 25min ) is also well worth watching for a clear explanation;
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/my-talk-from-lakaruppropet-conference
This seems to be an excellent document despite it’s too long for me to read all of it at the moment.
But I think there’s an important addition: Considering that concepts like objectivity and trueness or falseness of statements indepdenent of who has been uttering them are decried as nothing but dominance-maintaining constructs of white supremacists by so-called progressive politicians in the USA, how one God’s bloody f***in earth can these people be allowed to make public health decisions affecting others? By their very own ideology, correct decisionsmaking in this (or any other area) is impossible. Hence, they’ll necessarily end up feeling justified to implement whatever they want regardless of the consequences for others.
Flaming heck. I thought this was a skit at first, but it seems yet another pandemic simulation exercise flew under the radar in 2021, this time in Italy. These people really are obsessive nutjobs aren’t they? They need to get a hobby! Behold, Outbreak 24 with their pretend SARS-5 virus;
https://rumble.com/v28nqro-outbreak-24-simulazione-della-pandemia-2024-dove-il-virus-sars-cov-5-creer-.html
saw this a while back ,hiding in plain sight I think you’d call it !
I don’t think they’ll ever stop obsessing over ”the next pandemic” will they, and playing their silly games and role plays, so I hardly think these simulations are worth mentioning any more going forward. I’m sure there’s many more that have also gone under the radar and there’ll be plenty still to come. Let them get their kicks in fantasy land, meanwhile real people have real lives to live. Yawntastic..
I watched it.
Did not recognise any of the participants as Lockdown sceptics… but maybe it was a room full of them?
There was a lot of ‘unified response’ talk. Have they not learned that if they had informed and then just left everyone alone the outcome of this past pandemic would have been so much better?
The clip does not mention any of the conclusions they came to, just that they will take the conclusions back to their countries…
Yes I agree, but I don’t think there ever are any lockdown sceptics expected at these events are there? Only Covidian, lockdown/mask/jab fanatics who don’t want the hysteria to end. But what I don’t understand is why the world needs multiple, non-stop events such as this. It obviously doesn’t, but the last few years have resulted in what amounts to a global obsession with pandemics and these ‘table top exercises’ ( why are they called that? ) seem to appeal to a certain type of person. I just think to myself, ”Get a life!” It’s not healthy or normal.
Seriously, prior to 2020 I don’t think I’d ever said or typed the word ”pandemic” and the word ”lockdown” was only ever heard in the context of referring to prisons. Now both of these words appear to be part of every day vocabulary, or at least they still are for some. Well the above simulation does win the award for ‘Most Beautiful Location In Which To Indulge In Your Viral pandemic Obsession’ anyway..
If you’re an obscenely rich, areligious boom baby uncomfortably aware that it cannot be too long until death comes a-knockin, classic killers of old people, like pneumonia, can easily become terribly important to you. At least, that’s my best guess.
BTW, they’re called ‘table-top exercises’ because this goes back to the war games the Prussian general staff developed for (staff) officer training in the second half of the 19th century. These would involve having a large map on top of a table and moving gaming peaces representing troops on them.
Key issue 11
Why did governments fail to listen to a globally acknowledged coronavirus expert in China at the time of the outbreak when, on 06 Feb. 2020, he said the following:
‘…my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’
Prof. John Nicholls, Clinical Professor in Pathology, University of Hong Kong.
Well, severe colds kill people. And there, you have it: No death someone believes to be able to prevent by some silly ritual at other people’s expense is acceptable!!1