A Disease X pandemic is on the way, or at least that’s what our global ruling class tells us. Yet, before we get our next pandemic, it would be nice if our leaders learned something from the last one given how poorly they managed it.
In an attempt to help facilitate this, former White House Coronavirus Task Force member Scott Atlas, along with Steve H. Hanke from the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Applied Economics, Philip G. Kerpen from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and University of Chicago economics professor Casey B. Mulligan, put out a report documenting what they view as the biggest lessons from COVID-19.
Throughout the report, published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Atlas and his co-authors revisit many of the pandemic-era’s biggest controversies, by and large reiterating critiques others have made before, although with some additional data showing the arguments still hold or are perhaps a bit stronger today than a year ago.
There was never solid evidence supporting lockdowns or masks. Stay-at-home orders put working-age adults out of work, children out of school, and sick people out of hospitals. Paying people not to work kept people out of work longer than they otherwise would have been. Teachers unions kept children from returning to classrooms well after it was understood COVID-19 posed little threat to them. Cancer patients failed to receive proper medical care due to prohibitions on “elective” procedures or fear they would contract the virus.
However, one all but forgotten point of contention of which Atlas and his colleagues remind readers is the one that is perhaps most important moving forward. That is, for a period of several months, if not two years in some places, members of the executive branch, along with unelected public health bureaucrats, ruled with near-absolute power — something that never should have happened and should not be allowed to happen again.
“From the very start of COVID,” Atlas and his colleagues wrote, “politicians assigned unprecedented powers to public health agencies — many of which imposed strict limits on Americans’ basic civil liberties.”
“There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to these agencies,” they added. “Granting public health agencies these extraordinary powers was a major error.”
To avert a repeat of such mistakes in the future, Atlas and his co-authors “recommend that Congress and the states define by law ‘public health emergency’ with strict limitations on powers conferred to the executives,” as well as rein in the powers exercised directly or indirectly by those in senior health agency positions such as Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former directors of the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, respectively.
“Crises are when checks and balances and well-functioning institutions are most needed — not when they should be discarded and decision-making outsourced to alleged experts like Francis Collins, who casually confessed to a completely incorrect decision calculus years later,” Atlas and his colleagues wrote, referencing a 2023 acknowledgment by Collins of the disregard he and other “experts” had for the collateral damage done by the policies they supported.
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“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,” they noted.
To prevent such agencies and their senior bureaucrats from wielding such power again, Atlas and his co-authors advise: “Congress and the states should establish term limits (e.g., six years) for all senior health agency positions” and “restate definitively that the CDC and other health agencies are strictly advisory and do not have the power to set laws or mandates.”
Daniel Nuccio is a doctoral student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.