Opinion: Public health still hasn’t reckoned with which Covid policies and interventions failed
If science is to reclaim credibility, it must be seen interrogating its own failures, not shielding them. That is particularly true when it comes to Covid.
The fifth anniversary of President Trump’s March 2020 declaration of a national Covid-19 emergency has prompted a surge of retrospective assessments. Government agencies, expert panels, think tanks, and media outlets all contributed to a sprawling postmortem. The goal was to draw lessons from the pandemic’s devastating toll in hopes of better preparing for future crises.
Much of this analysis is sound — calls to improve stockpiles, streamline data-sharing, communicate more clearly in a crisis, and increase public trust in government and science, are hard to argue with.
