As an ER doctor, I treated thousands of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had a front-line view of the struggles of hardworking families and the heroism of my fellow doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. I also saw our federal government jump into action with the best of intentions, only to get tangled in a mess of mandates, censorship, and faulty science.
Americans deserve answers about how Washington responded to the pandemic. They deserve policies that better protect public health while honoring our inalienable rights. And they deserve honest conversations with their doctors about the best treatment options without government inserting itself into the process.
That’s why I have been asked to serve on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which will investigate and report on the mistakes and successes of the last three years to improve future pandemic response.
We will start with exploring the origins of COVID-19, including the extent of our government’s participation in gain-of-function research at home and abroad. These important questions have been waved away by powerful people for too long.
We also need to look at the economic impact of Washington’s pandemic response. Shutdowns and restrictions upended millions of lives, destroying jobs and businesses across the nation. On the flip side, we need to see how effectively taxpayer dollars were used for relief programs and uncover any fraud, waste, and abuse that occurred. Our government shouldn’t be bankrupting anyone to fight a disease, and it shouldn’t be making anyone rich, either.
We’re going to examine how closing schools affected the education and development of America’s children and see whether these decisions were guided by science or politics. We also need to have a tough conversation about vaccine mandates and the wisdom of forcing members of our military and government employees to comply, and discuss non-coercive ways to keep everyone healthy.
Of course, I’m not the first person to voice these concerns. Millions of people have been asking Washington for transparency and accountability in its COVID-19 response from day one, only to face censorship on social networks and mockery from the media. As time has passed, more and more of their concerns have proven to be based in reality and worthy of serious discussion.
This committee will succeed if we can shine a light on our government’s actions over the last three years while using that information to build a robust, effective, and compassionate pandemic response for the future. Most importantly, we need to keep medicine between patients and their doctors and keep politics out of it.
To heal someone, every doctor must begin with an honest conversation about what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what to do about it. That’s our job now: to start an honest conversation with the public.
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Rep. Rich McCormick is an emergency room physician representing Georgia’s 6th Congressional District and a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
