Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya discusses the Norfolk Group, the failures of the US government's response to COVID-19, and the questions any honest assessment should answer

Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya discusses the Norfolk Group, the failures of the US government's response to COVID-19, and the questions any honest assessment should answer:

1. 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?

2. Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists?

3. Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age gradient in COVID-19 mortality, 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?

4. 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, including but not limited to, cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health?

5. Why did the CDC fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines?

6. Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions?

7. Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner?

8. Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems?

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