U.S. Senate Committee Documents Covid Policy Failures But Illinois Still Doing Nothing – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

At least somebody in the federal government’s ruling majority has shown a serious interest in getting to the bottom of Covid response failures.

Why won’t Illinois do the same?

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) this month released a scathing, 242-page report on federal failures prepared at his direction by the staff of the Senate committee he chairs, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In October, we wrote that Illinois and other states should do a similar retrospective of their own failures, in hopes of doing better next time. What has Illinois done on that? Nothing, not a peep, even though the state’s failures were deep and multiple. We listed those that were apparent to us, many of which were obvious blunders even as they were made.

Many in Washington had hoped for a full-scale national commission to look at Covid policy failures, but President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threw cold water on that, as recently reported by Politico.

Too many blunders would be exposed. Better to pretend that Covid policy was a great triumph. The same goes for Illinois.

The new, federal report was prepared by the right committee – Homeland Security – for the reason we stated earlier: The Covid policy response was nothing short of a national security failure, and an egregious one at that. While Covid does not appear to have been a terrorist attack or a bioweapon deliberately released, it might as well have been because the effects were the same. It turned out that the nation and the states had no plan ready to roll out to deal with a comparable emergency. The reality of how unprepared America remains for a similar national security emergency has yet to sink in.

On that point, my brother, Mike Glennon, this week published a major article in Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal that includes that theme – Covid as a national security failure.

His article is primarily about freedom of speech and the federal government’s collusion in suppressing it, using the censorship of dissenting opinions on Covid policy as one example. He offers his views on how First Amendment law should evolve to address that extraordinarily important topic. Anybody seriously interested in freedom of speech and the First Amendment should read it, but the suppression of dissenting opinion on Covid by the government-tech-media cartel is also documented.

That suppression of dissenting viewpoints of Covid was rampant throughout the pandemic in Illinois as well. Illinois media seemed to regard it as their duty to adhere to what the state said and recognize no dissent, and the state mostly copied federal policy, at least after Joe Biden took office. The Chicago Tribune even said this in its endorsement of JB Pritzker for Governor. “Even among those who did not support him politically, he engendered trust during some of the darkest hours in the history of this great state.”

Yeah, well, maybe among those who relied on the Tribune and regular media for Covid news. But large numbers of Americans apparently looked to other information sources and roughly half lost confidence in public health officials.

So here we are. Still no calls for a retrospective on Illinois’ Covid policy errors. And if you never heard of the new Homeland Security Committee report, that illustrates the point: It too, got little press, and none in Illinois that we’ve seen, though it was released three weeks ago.

The Homeland Security Committee’s report includes 17 specific fact findings and 17 recommendations to prevent another failure. The committee staff interviewed 70 officials in the course of its review. It’s mostly about federal matters but running through it are examples of poor execution, data collection and communication by state and local health authorities that were similarly unprepared.

By no means, however, should either the committee’s report or our list be regarded as complete. In fact, the Brownstone Institute this week published a list of open questions on which it wants answers, quite a few of which apply at the state level to Illinois. Brownstone and the distinguished experts behind it were among the voices systematically censored during the pandemic by the government-tech-media cartel. Their list of unanswered questions is reproduced below.

We need accountability at both the federal and state level, not silence, for the simple reason stated at the end of the Homeland Security Committee’s report: “If we fail to address these issues, our nation will remain unprepared for the next public health crisis.”

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

From the Brownstone Institute:

Below are just some of the many disturbing questions to which any leader who claims to represent the public ought to demand answers

1. 1. Why did the CDC suddenly adopt “measures to increase social distance” as official policy in 2004, contrary to all the epidemiological guidance it had developed throughout the 20th century?
   2. Who was behind the campaign to export the concept of “lockdown” to Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014?
   3. Some intelligence reports have indicated that members of the Western national security community were aware a new virus had emerged in China by fall 2019. What was being said about the virus at that time?
   4. If some national security officials had been worrying about a new virus in China since fall 2019, how could they have possibly believed China’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated the virus several months later?
   5. By January 2020, tips began to emerge that the World Health Organization was planning to recreate China’s lockdowns across the world, starting in Italy. When and on what basis did the World Health Organization make this decision?
   6. Lockdowns had been ruled out by the pandemic plans of the WHO and every developed nation. Why weren’t these pandemic plans followed?
   7. Why were health security officials talking about “curfews of indefinite duration” by February 24, 2020?
   8. Why does the WHO’s February 2020 report rely on logical fallacies in its promulgation of China’s lockdown measures as global policy?
   9. Why was the current Director of National Intelligence sitting next to China’s CDC director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic in October 2019, shortly before a real coronavirus pandemic emerged?
   10. Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx has made conflicting statements about how she got her job. For example, the former Deputy National Security Advisor offered her a job in the White House as public health security advisor as far back as November 2019. How was Birx chosen for this role?
   11. Who was behind the terror campaign of fake videos showing Wuhan residents spontaneously dying and convulsing in the streets in January and February 2020?
   12. Why is there no record of the hero doctor Li Wenliang before he appeared in Chinese state media at the end of January 2020? On what basis did Western media outlets adopt this story as true?
   13. High-level members of the national security community including the former Director of National Intelligence and the former Secretary of Statehave stated as fact that Covid came from a lab in Wuhan. At the same time, high-level scientific officials including NIAID Director Anthony Fauci have stated that it is “molecularly impossible” for Covid to have come from that lab. How can we still have this disconnect at the highest levels of the federal government?
   14. A report revealed that military leaders saw Covid as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public. Who advised Western leaders to use military-grade propaganda on their own people?
   15. Some officials in the UK later expressed contrition about the fearcampaigns that the UK Government used on its own people to convince them to support Covid mandates. How was the decision to use these fear campaigns made?
   16. Who was behind the massive bot and astroturf campaigns to popularize lockdowns among Western citizens and officials in March 2020?
   17. What was the origin of international slogans such as “follow the science,” “together apart,” “just stay home,” and “two weeks to slow the spread” which were used to drive support for Covid mandates? 
   18. How many people were killed by the WHO’s initial guidance on mechanical ventilators based on Chinese journal articles advising ventilators as the “first choice” for those hospitalized with Covid?
   19. The initial guidance from the WHO advised using mechanical ventilators not necessarily for the patient’s benefit, but to control the spread of the virus. Why was the WHO advising doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath?
   20. Why were numerous, credible predictions of famine, human rights disasters, and economic collapse as a result of lockdowns ignored?
   21. Why was natural immunity so long ignored?
   22. Why were initial seroprevalence studies downplayed?
   23. Why were beaches and other outdoor spaces closed?
   24. Why was the public kept in the dark about low early estimates of Covid’s actual infection fatality rate?
   25. What was the source of the guidance to move patients who were still sick into nursing homes?
   26. Remdesivir and midazolam were initially widely used, but didn’t lead to positive health outcomes. How was the decision made to use these over other treatment protocols?
   27. Leading officials have made conflicting statements as to whether the goal of lockdowns was to eliminate the virus, slow the spread, or buy time for vaccines. What was the actual goal they had in mind at the time they implemented these policies?
   28. Why did key public health officials make statements about using the response to Covid to advance non-health-related policy goals?
   29. How was the decision made to suppress and censor scientific opinions that dissented from lockdowns?
   30. Why were so many federal officials so intimately involved in the censorship of dissenting opinions on social media?
   31. Why did elite Western newspapers, media networks, and public health leaders so diligently repeat the absurd line that China had eliminated Covid by shutting down one city for two months?
   32. Why did elite Western publications begin explicitly urging the public to adopt a response to Covid that was more like China’s?
   33. Why were mechanical drones initially deployed by various states and countries to monitor lockdown compliance?
   34. What accounted for the close international synchronization of Covid mandates?
   35. Why did masks shift from being not advised to being mandatory?
   36. The New York Times confirmed that at the standard cycle threshold level used for PCR testing, 85 to 90 percent of Covid cases were false positives. How did this practice become standard?
   37. Why were widely-known and publicized problems with PCR testing and comorbidities ignored for purposes of counting Covid deaths?
   38. Why did key public health officials so quickly shift from saying vaccines would prevent Covid to saying proof of vaccination should be mandatory to partake in everyday activities?
   39. Why has there been so little public discussion of China’s influence on the global response to Covid, despite FBI Director Christopher Wray’s disclosure that Chinese officials were “aggressively urging support for China’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis?”
   40. Why was the UK Government so deferential to Neil Ferguson and Imperial College London during the response to Covid despite Imperial’s close relationship with China?
   41. Why has the editor-in-chief of the Lancet been so publicly deferential to China?
   42. Why did Bill Gates express such admiration for China’s response to Covid?
   43. Why did the German government privately disseminate a list of authoritarian measures provided in part by China lobbyists?
   44. How did a 40-year member of the British Communist Party with no background in epidemiology become a leading advisor to the UK Government, and why was she recently promoted to lead the WHO’s nudge unit?
   45. Why did leading economists assume that a short, sharp lockdown would “eliminate the resurgence risk” when the policy had no precedent?
   46. Why did the Federal Reserve and its international counterparts disregard inflation?
   47. Why did the Supreme Court and its international counterparts step aside while lockdowns were being implemented?
   48. Why did the judiciary acquiesce to an indefinite state of legal emergency?
   49. Why did Western politicians and public health officials demonstrate so little concern for following their own Covid rules?
   50. If the virus was deadly enough to kill millions and justify an indefinite state of emergency, why has so little effort been expended to hold China accountable for its initial coverup of that virus?