Letter to Health and Human Services Secretary
Letter to Health and Human Services Secretary
Along with fellow scholars at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, I call upon on HHS Secretary Becerra to end the Covid-19 public health “emergency”
Along with fellow scholars at the Ethics and Public Policy Center I sent a letter today to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, urging him to immediately revoke his declaration that a Covid-19 public health emergency exists. The current emergency declaration, which was renewed for the 8th time on January 16, is set to expire next month.
The letter opens:
On January 16, 2022, you declared, for the ninth time since January 2020, a public health emergency due to the presence of Covid-19 in America.1 Enough is enough. It has been more than two years since Covid came to our shores and we have adapted to and addressed this threat. The overwhelming majority of Americans have been vaccinated or have natural immunity, and everyone has free access to potentially life-saving and disease-mitigating measures. Nevertheless, government and private actors continue to impose vaccination mandates, mask mandates, and other restrictions on Americans’ daily lives in reliance on your continued emergency declarations. We therefore ask that you immediately revoke your declaration because it is causing real and present harm and because there is no longer a public health emergency to address.
We go on in the letter to summarize a substantial body of evidence that supports ending the emergency declaration, including that 81.5% of Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine and that tens of millions more Americans have acquired natural immunity through infection. Because of the widespread availability of vaccines, therapeutics, masks, and testing to those who wish to further protect themselves, the scholars argue, “there is simply insufficient reason to mandate school closures, lockdowns, masking, or vaccination.”
One helpful section of the letter places current covid death counts in a broader context to help us interpret the current level of covid risks and make sense out of the raw epidemiological numbers:
Currently, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from Covid-19 are falling throughout the United States. The number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in use, and thus the number of stressed ICUs, has also decreased dramatically over the last month in nearly every state. This is not to dismiss the daily number of deaths, which is currently around 1,000. However, if one looks at the death rates of Covid-19 per 100,000 people, what was once nearly 300 has fallen to 0.39 per 100,000 people. There are two main explanations for this. One is that Covid is experiencing a seasonal dip as winter recedes and people congregate less indoors, and the other is that Covid is just having a hard time finding more vulnerable people to infect.
To put this in context, the annual death rate of influenza per 100,000 people is 1.8,15 the annual death rate from traffic accidents per 100,000 people is 11,16 and the annual death rate from drowning per 100,000 people is 1.23. Just as individuals choose how to approach risk in certain common scenarios, such as choosing to get in a car or go swimming, one can choose to mitigate one’s risk of death from Covid-19 to a level at or below that of other daily encounters.
The letter also recounts the “staggeringly high costs” of interventions such as school closures, lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates, and concludes that “the costs of these mandates clearly outweigh their benefits, and it is time for them to end.”
Signers of the letter include some of my valued colleagues at EPPC who have been doing excellent work on public health policies:
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D.
EPPC PresidentAaron Kheriaty, M.D.
EPPC Fellow and Director of EPPC’s Bioethics and American Democracy programAaron Rothstein, M.D.
EPPC Fellow, Bioethics and American Democracy programRoger Severino, J.D.
EPPC Senior Fellow and Director of EPPC’s HHS Accountability ProjectRachel N. Morrison, J.D.
Fellow, EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project
To read the full letter, click here.
Putting the number of covid deaths into context - against deaths by other causes - has almost always been deliberately avoided in order to create fear. Kudos to the signatories for including this "detail" - vital evidence that enables us to draw rational conclusions.
California is still enforcing Tomas J. Aragon's vaccine verification of test order for school workers. I am so tired of my school district blindly following the State's Improper Governmental Activity.
If "unvaccinated" school workers are compulsorily tested weekly to protect students and other staff, shouldn't students be compulsorily tested every week to protect school workers and other students? If fully-vaccinated school workers can still transmit the virus, as admitted by the CDC, why are fully-vaccinated school workers not compulsorily tested to protect the students and other school workers? If there is no known case of a previously infected person subsequently transmitting the virus to others, then why are the infection-induced immune school workers being compulsorily tested? Why not test everyone or no one?
It does not sound like the District is actually concerned about "protecting students and staff from COVID-19 in the school setting." It only sounds like the District is worried about its "legal obligation to comply with State mandates."