Heritage Covid Commission Wants China Accountable… What About Trump?

On July 8, The Heritage Foundation released a report from their own ‘Non-Partisan Commission on China and COVID-19’ and held an event bearing the same name as the report’s title: “Holding China Accountable for Its Role in the Most Catastrophic Pandemic of Our Time: COVID-19.” This commission, from the organization behind Trump’s Project 2025, lays out recommendations for legal and policy strategies for the White House and Congress to take against China.

Doubling down

I previously discussed Heritage’s “Road Map for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” that the decidedly partisan House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) appears to be following. It embraces Trump’s “censored” herd immunity-pushing doctors and promotes the evidence-lacking lab leak origin theory. Unsurprisingly, this new Heritage report doubles down on the lab leak as part of their arguments to hold China accountable for U.S. pandemic damage.

HSSCP Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) gave introductory remarks at the July 8 event hosted by Heritage president Kevin Roberts. Also featured were:

• John L. Ratcliffe, a former Republican Congressman, the Director of National Intelligence under Trump, and a Heritage visiting fellow
• David Feith, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the U.S. Department of State
• Jamie Metzl, founder of OneShared.World who served on the U.S. National Security Council and in the State Department in the Clinton administration
• Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Trump

Metzl and Redfield have both promoted the lab leak theory and testified before the HSSCP during a March 2023 hearing on COVID-19 origins as guests of the Republican subcommittee majority.

Who are these people?

Redfield, a controversial figure from the HIV crisis, has been sharply criticized for his CDC’s handling of the pandemic outbreak. Under his leadership, the CDC rejected the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 test in favor of creating a more complicated one, which faltered and wasted crucial early weeks in the U.S. response.

Later, the public messaging of Redfield’s CDC was commandeered by the Trump administration. An October 2022 report from the HSSCP’s Democrat-led predecessor, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC), detailed the unprecedented political control exerted over their gold-standard Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports during a time of crisis. While Redfield broke with Trump over the importance of masks, he was largely seen as submissive to the then-president. 

Another controversial COVID-19 character from the former president’s administration, Dr. Robert Kadlec, who served as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Trump, is listed as a “commissioner” of the new Heritage report. Going into the pandemic, Air Force veteran Kadlec was said to have been more focused on bioweapons than his public health-focused Obama era predecessor Dr. Nicole Lurie.

In May 2020, Dr. Rick Bright, who Kadlec had removed from his position as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority the previous month, filed a whistleblower complaint against Kadlec and the HHS (settled the following year) and testified before Congress about the lack of leadership and plan within the pandemic response.

Trump’s Big HCQ Lie

Bright claimed he was ousted over his raising concerns about the Trump administration’s embrace of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a COVID-19 cure and their desire to make it publicly available outside of clinical trials. Trump’s promotion of HCQ as a “game changer” forced his chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci to publicly counter the president, damaging their working relationship. HCQ would prove ineffective against the virus in a major trial by early June 2020.

An August 2022 HSSCC report details Trump insiders’ behind-the-scenes “knife fight” with the Food and Drug Administration over HCQ and their relentless (but ultimately failed) attempts to get its COVID-19 emergency use authorization reapproved after it had already proven ineffective. At the same time, a group of right-wing physicians, America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), was brought together in coordination with the Trump 2020 reelection campaign to publicly push the MAGA-endorsed, scientifically disproven pandemic miracle drug and instill faith in reopening the U.S. economy before a vaccine was available.

Pot, meet Kettle

Troublingly, Heritage continues to uphold Trump’s Big HCQ Lie. Pharmacist and Heritage fellow David Gortler testified before the HSSCP in March, stating that those who prescribed HCQ or its follow-up GOP “cure” ivermectin were correct to do so. They were not, and Heritage and the HSSCP have been working to protect Trump and the GOP by distracting from pandemic leadership failures and gaslighting the public.

The new Heritage report opens by quantifying the U.S. pandemic damage, citing the 1.1 million American death toll and their calculation of $18 trillion in economic losses. While the report “does not rule out that many other governments, institutions, and individuals may have played contributing roles in the pandemic,” it asserts that “China has been in a league uniquely of its own in its active and aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability regarding the virus and its spread.”

The seriousness with which the Heritage report takes the damage wrought by COVID-19 must be contrasted with the actions of public health-antagonizing and publicly non-transparent Trump during the early days of the pandemic. Despite privately confiding in journalist Bob Woodward that COVID-19 was “deadly stuff” in early February 2020, Trump tweeted that the situation was “very much under control in the USA” and referred to the virus as the Democrats’ “new hoax” during a rally later that month.

Casualties of politics

As Fauci recently recounted, the former president – who was focused on his 2020 re-election campaign and desperate for the pandemic to disappear – went from embracing HCQ as a pandemic quick fix to bringing in contrarian advisors like Dr. Scott Atlas who told him what he wanted to hear, science be damned.

Heritage’s “Road Map” highlights Great Barrington Declaration authors turned HSSCP “experts” Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who are subjects of a June 2022 HSSCC report on their “dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy”, insinuated themselves into the Trump White House with Atlas. Their work was done behind the back of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who testified to the HSSCC in 2022 that Atlas’s presence “destroyed any cohesion in the response in the White House itself.”

Birx stated that failure to deliver “concise, consistent communication about the seriousness of the pandemic resulted in inaction early on across our agencies” and “created a false sense of security in America.” She claimed this federal mismanagement led to 130,000 preventable COVID-19 deaths before the vaccines were available.

The GOP – and groups like AFLDS – would wage war on the life-saving vaccines, creating massive public confusion leading to 232,000 preventable unvaccinated COVID-19 deaths during the delta and initial omicron waves and an increased death rate among Republican voters compared to their Democrat counterparts by 2022.

Look! Over there!

While the Heritage report claims to “lay the groundwork for holding accountable those whose negligence or overt actions exacerbated the pandemic’s severity,” this only extends to China. Through their HSSCP “Road Map,” Heritage has laid the groundwork for Trump and the MAGA GOP’s evasion of accountability for lack of leadership and exacerbation of the pandemic’s severity in the U.S. While the commission has wrangled some individuals with Democrat pedigrees in order to call themselves “non-partisan,” this report must be viewed in the context of Heritage’s other work.

There is agreement throughout the scientific community and across the political aisle that China has not been forthcoming with information regarding the COVID-19 outbreak. There should be calls for accountability for this, but not in the absence of calls for accountability for our nation’s own failures in 2020. China is not responsible for Trump’s dereliction of duty.

There must be an understanding that China’s lack of cooperation and transparency in investigating how COVID-19 came to upend global life does not make it any more likely that the virus emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The consensus amongst the majority of virologists is still that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely occurred as a result of animal spillover, as has been the case in previous pandemics. 

Bring in the scapegoat

But the lab leak narrative generates emotion and buzz. And, in addition to distracting from Trump’s failures, it has had the added benefit of being a narrative the HSSCP could weaponize against MAGA Public Enemy #1 – former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci — via questions regarding US funding of viral research in Wuhan. Thus far,however, the HSSCP’s attempts to smear Fauci with this have fallen flat and garnered the now retired doctor support from both Democrats and the public

The same cannot be said for Peter Daszak. As the president of EcoHealth Alliance – an organization that conducts federally-funded global research into viruses, which has included work at the WIV – Daszak has been the target of a years-long unfounded attack originating under Trump, who was quick to push the lab leak narrative. Most recently, this has seen Daszak dragged before the HSSCP and debarred from funding, putting the organization’s future at risk.

EcoHealth has a decades-long track record of important work researching viral epidemics and attempting to predict and thwart viruses that pose a risk to human life. This must be understood as a form of international security. Shutting them down for a short-sighted political strategy or a geo-political agenda only harms us.

What’s to be done?

In the calls for accountability for the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic outbreak and MAGA’s subsequent vengeful war on science, we must include the atrocious treatment of our own scientists over the last few years. And we must not let the deeply politically compromised Heritage Foundation drive this discussion on pandemic accountability.