Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

When an airplane crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration conducts a detailed and thorough investigation. The purpose is not to find a scapegoat, but to ensure the same problem never resurfaces again.

Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted history’s biggest public health mistake. We did not properly protect older high-risk Americans, while many ineffective COVID restrictions have generated long-term collateral public health damage that is now upon us. Both have yielded excess deaths. Public health crashed.

It is now imperative to form a commission to conduct a thorough and open-minded COVID inquiry. To help such a commission, we have produced an 80-page blueprint with essential questions that such a commission should ask. We wrote this document with six colleagues with expertise in infectious disease, epidemiology, immunology, health policy, and public health. We call ourselves the Norfolk Group.

Here is a sample of the questions from that report:

• Limiting COVID Transmission in Nursing Homes: It was common for staff to work multiple jobs at different facilities during the same day or week. Were there any efforts from nursing care companies, state health departments, or the CDC to reduce staff rotation?
• Natural Immunity: Why did the CDC routinely downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust scientific evidence demonstrating its importance?
• School Closures: In July 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published an articleconcerning “reopening primary schools during the pandemic” without mentioning data from Sweden, the only major western country that had kept schools open throughout the 2020 spring semester. Why?
• Excess Deaths: The U.S. had around 170,000excess non-COVID deaths through 2021, while countries with fewer restrictions, such as Sweden and Denmark, had negative excess deaths over the same period. Why did the U.S. focus almost exclusively on COVID, while Scandinavia took a more balanced approach that considered all aspects of public health?
• Estimating Disease Spread: In early 2020, it was critical to quickly estimate disease prevalence. Why did the CDC fail to conduct seroprevalence surveys in representative communities?