We Need Truth Commissions to Restore Faith in Public Health

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Commentary

​Two blazing political controversies are destroying our trust in the integrity of medicine. One is, thankfully, mostly in the past—the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. The second is ongoing and growing increasingly bitter: how to best care for children who “feel” that they aren’t the sex that they were born as.

These are different debates, but they share certain commonalities. Both issues involve the suspicion that officially preferred policies are more ideological than scientific. Both involve intense efforts by the establishment institutions to squelch heterodox opinions. Both have seen the erosion of the scientific method through the suppression of dissenting points of view. Both controversies have become so mired in partisan politics and culture war argumentation that it’s difficult to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of propaganda.

But how to reverse course and restore societal comity is a vexing question. How do we find accord in an atmosphere of intense factionalism when even the most basic facts can’t be agreed upon?

On the COVID-19 front, a group of medical notables known as the Norfolk Group—which includes two co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, along with other medical notables—has issued a public call for the creation of a national commission to dispassionately investigate the nation’s response to the pandemic. Importantly, the Norfolk Group isn’t calling for a stacked deck inquiry that’s primarily about pointing fingers, but rather, an objective fact-finding process to learn what was done right during the pandemic, what was mistaken, and how to best prepare policies to deploy next time.

Here are some of the questions it wants to explore:

• “What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?”
• “Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity,” also known as “natural immunity,” by government officials and some prominent scientists?
• “Why were schools and universities closed despite ... early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?”
• “Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health,” such as cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, and mental health?”
• “How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?”
• “Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints?”
• “Why was the United States slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity?”
• “Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them?”

These are important questions worthy of public exploration. However, they don’t represent a complete list of issues that should be explored. For example, here’s one that I want to know: Since we know that vaccination doesn’t prevent coronavirus transmission, were mandates ever justified?

Organizing a formal inquiry into official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will take heavy lifting. It will require lawmakers to create the panel and craft its parameters: not easy in this age of partisan distrust. The committee should be granted subpoena power to ensure that recalcitrant witnesses can’t just refuse to cooperate. And then the president will have to sign off—something that Joe Biden, Donald Trump (should either be reelected), and Mike Pence (should he win) might be reluctant to do given that their policies would be under a magnifying glass. It also will have to be created in such a way that fairness and transparency, rather than score-settling, are controlling.

As one of the Great Barrington Declaration authors and Norfolk Group member Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told me in a recent podcast interview, “The only way you get trust back is [by] asking these questions, answering them honestly, and just essentially saying mea culpa in areas where we need reform so that we don’t have this problem again.”

The same approach could be deployed to explore the efficacy of “gender-affirming care.” That’s because unearned trust has been put in the orthodox one-size-fits-all, “go for it” policy that’s currently pushed by the medical establishment, the Biden administration, liberal journalists, and heavyweight LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign. Indeed, just as we saw during the darkest days of the pandemic, heterodox views on how to best care for gender dysphoric children are being actively suppressed, as was argumentation against vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic. Worse, those expressing substantial concerns about transitioning adolescents are accused of “transphobic” bigotry and intentionally causing harm. That’s hardly a path to achieving consensus.

Moreover, the argument that “the science is settled” about the propriety of gender-affirming care is hard to believe at a time when the mass numbers of young people—particularly girls—deciding that they’re transgender, non-binary, or some other non-conforming gender identification is unprecedented. In addition, public health officials in other countries are reviewing the same available data as U.S. medical experts and coming to opposite conclusions.

If we’re going to fully understand what’s going on—is this a case of moral panic, or people feeling more free in a less judgmental age to reveal their true selves?—and determine a trustworthy methodology for treating underage patients, an honest and dispassionate investigation is essential. Here are just a few of the questions such a public inquiry should pose:

• Why do organizations such as the American Association of Pediatrics and World Professional Association for Transgender Health claim that it’s science denialism to oppose gender-affirming care when public health officials in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France, and Finland have concluded that scientific evidence doesn’t demonstrate that the benefits of medical affirmation are real or worth the attendant risks of physical and emotional harm?
• Is the risk of suicide higher for children with gender dysphoria if they don’t receive social and medical affirmation, or is that an ideological scare tactic?
• Why are so many young people who have previous histories of mental illness being diagnosed as trans?
• Why provide body-altering medical affirmation to underaged patients when the data appear to indicate that transgender ideation in the young is often transitory?
• How many transgender patients “de-transition,” i.e., return to identifying as their sex?
• Do the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care get sufficient information to fully give their informed consent to transitioning their children?

Trust can’t be imposed. It must be earned. The formal investigation that the Norfolk Group proposes around COVID-19 and the less formal investigation that I’m suggesting about gender dysphoria in youth could achieve that end. But they will have to be scientifically, rather than ideologically, oriented. Their aim should be to learn, explore, debate, and share data, not dictate, punish, castigate, or exclude heterodox thought.

We had better get to it. Another pandemic could threaten us at any time. Children’s bodies are daily being impacted in potentially catastrophic ways. Only dispassionate inquiries can forge a consensus that will allow us to find commonality in these contentious arenas of health policy conflict.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.