Roundtable on “Preparing for the Future by Learning From the Past: Examining COVID Policy Decisions”
House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
2023-02-28
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Unknown (SPEAKER_04)
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Unknown (SPEAKER_04)
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Unknown (SPEAKER_04)
The select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic will come to order. I want to welcome everyone, and I want to thank our panelists and all of our members that are here for being here, and I look forward to discussions that we will have. I also want to thank the ranking member, Dr. Ruiz, for his willingness to work on this subcommittee, and we have worked together very well for a long period of time since we came in together. on many issues. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. And I now recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening statement. This is the first time the new select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic has officially gathered for the 118th Congress. It's an honor and a privilege to be chair, and I look forward to the next two years of challenging but impactful work. We're the only committee in Congress explicitly charged with investigating a large swath of what happened over the course of the past three years associated with the pandemic. Including the origins of COVID-19, policies surrounding and the use of gain of function or chimera type research, fraud and taxpayer funded pandemic programs, the impacts of lockdowns and other government policies, The impacts of school closures, including learning loss, social, mental, and physical health ramifications, and economic opportunity loss. Vaccine and therapeutic development, and the subsequent mandates and more. We are here to deliver an after-action review of the past three years. To learn from the past, not just what went wrong, but what was done right, and to prepare for the future. This is work that must be done. must be done thoroughly and must be done with reverence, with an eye toward the truth, and based on facts.
This is work that was put on the back burner or entirely ignored by the previous majority. But now is now. And frankly, our work and final report should be largely bipartisan. I look forward to working with everyone in this room on both sides of the aisle to achieve these goals and produce a product that can stand the test of time. and I strongly believe we have the team to achieve it. On each side of the aisle, we have a wide range of knowledge and experiences, voices representing medicine and science, moms and dads, parents, business owners, local government leaders, and obviously, every member here has lived through the impacts of COVID-19. Today, we get started and are joined by esteemed public health officials to help us chart a path forward to help us understand what policies went wrong and how we as a country can improve. Americans feel that time and time again, the government failed to adequately protect the American people and often failed to follow the science. Did we truly support America's children by not reopening schools? The government failed to rapidly reopen schools for in-person instruction. According to a study by Brown University economist Dr. Emily Oster, students who attended school mostly online for the 2020 to 2021 school year performed 13% lower in math and 8% lower in reading than their in-person counterparts. Further, according to the US Surgeon General, children and teenagers are going through a once-in-a-lifetime mental health crisis, with 25% reporting experiencing depression and 20% experiencing anxiety symptoms. Suicide is also now the second leading cause of death nationally for children aged 10 to 14. Across the federal government, taxpayer-funded employees,
failed to report to work even after vaccines were widely available. According to data from the Office of Personnel Management in 2018, approximately 483,000 government workers were remote. During the pandemic, that number rose to more than 1 million. This left Americans across the country who were being laid off because of lockdowns struggling to get government services while government employees continued to receive all their benefits. Even more surprising, about 90% of the CDC were working remotely while responding to a once-in-a-century pandemic. Dr. Deborah Birx testified that the country would have been better served if the CDC operated in person.
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