Shattered Trust: Experts Want to Prevent Government Overreach in Future Pandemic Responses

Sen. Rand Paul, along with several medical and policy public experts, highlighted Tuesday how the government’s mishandling of COVID-19 has left in its wake challenges regarding vaccines and a distrust of government and the medical industry.

The Kentucky Republican spoke at a Heritage Foundation event titled “Shattered Trust: Parents, COVID, and the Vaccine Reckoning.” He discussed what measures the nation must take to prevent history from repeating itself, promoting the idea of limiting the government’s emergency powers as well as curbing the influence and involvement of people like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“The Left thinks the public is stupid. The Left has a very disdainful outlook on who you are,” Paul said. “They think you can make your decisions—‘My body my choice’—unless it applies to a vaccine, unless it applies to your health care decisions, unless it applies to going to work or going to church, then it’s no longer your choice. But we need to be careful that we are very, very certain of what happened [during the pandemic], so we don’t have it happen again.”

He continued: “The bottom line also is, we need to decentralize these things. I may not be right on everything, but you got a choice whether to listen to me or not. Once your governor mandates it [living restrictions], you don’t have a choice. We need to decentralize these things out of Washington, out of state capitals, and let health care remain where it ought to be, and that’s with the individual.”

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty and chair of the Parental Rights Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, discussed the effects mandates and fearmongering during COVID-19 had on school systems, children, and parents.

“A spirit of fear gripped our nation. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that there was so much government overreach that was happening or that the American people had seemed to lose their will to fight to defend our freedom and our liberty. Our children were sacrificed on an altar of adult selfishness and fear,” Justice said.

There was so much misinformation propagated by media outlets and health organizations that teachers unions were able put out a “fantastical list of demands,” said David Zweig, journalist and author of “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” “In many places, we [couldn’t] open the school until there [were] HEPA filters in place. We [couldn’t] open until, you know, there’s barriers on the desk,” he said.

“None of these things were being used across the board in Europe where kids, millions of children—millions of them—had already been back in school,” he continued. “Yet we were essentially held hostage to a list of demands that had no scientific underpinning, and moreover, [we] had evidence that showed they weren’t necessary because kids were in school without them. Yet there wasn’t any pushback from the people who actually should have known better. There wasn’t pushback either from the media by and large. So, this enabled the teachers unions to sort of leverage these circumstances.”

Mary Holland, CEO and general counsel of Children’s Health Defense, said she supports Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s “radical transparency, gold standard science.” Kennedy and others have stated that transparency means federal health recommendations, treatments, advisories, vaccine approvals, and so on would be based on scientific evidence, not a political or ideological agenda being pushed by the government, the bureaucracy, or those in the health care industry.

“It’s becoming a movement,” Dr. Kimberly Vacca said about parents resisting vaccines for their babies at the time of birth. Vacca is the secretary and a fellow at the American College of Pediatricians. “Whether it [the movement] is right, wrong, or indifferent, I don’t know, but we need to find the information so that we can be giving it to the parents, so that they are making a decision not just based on fear, but based on science and understanding truly what the risks are on either side of it.”

Leland Lehrman, executive director of the Make American Healthy Again Institute, said the Heritage event “was a stunningly courageous look at the most egregious aspects of not just the last five years, but the entire American medical system.”

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