Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship on February 27, 2025.
I was recently invited to address the question “Can Institutions be Reformed?” at the international Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. ARC is a forum, begun with Jordan Peterson, that brings together voices from all over the world to discuss how to refresh the institutions and best values of Western heritage, particularly the commitment to freedom.
I asked that audience to first consider why, at this moment in history, are we finally focusing on how institutions should be reformed, or if institutions can even be reformed? After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing—editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and agenda-driven schools and universities increasingly unbalanced toward the left, with many conservative faculty and students often self-censoring, afraid to offer unpopular views.
The answer should be obvious. It is COVID-19, and the pandemic mismanagement specifically—the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.
COVID fully exposed massive, across-the-boardinstitutional failure, including the shocking reality of overt censorship, the loss of freedoms, and the frank violation of human rights—in the United States of America, a country explicitly founded on a commitment to freedom.
Yet, oddly, the pandemic remained invisible at the ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers addressing freedom until I spoke. It was the elephant in the room—just as explaining the truth about lockdowns, the pseudoscience mandates on masks and social distancing, the closing of churches and businesses and playgrounds and parks, the prohibition of visits to elderly parents in nursing homes while they die—all are missing from today’s discussions, including, notably, all the very public, brash proclamations about “truth” in health and medical science by those newly in power.
Today, we are left with an undeniable crisis in health and medicine. And that crisis is a loss of trust—in public health, in doctors, and in medical science.
In the wake of COVID since 2019, trust in health guidance has plummeted more rapidly than in any other government institution, with almost two-thirds now rating the FDA and the CDC as “only fair or poor.” Trust in our doctors and hospitals dropped from 71 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2024. Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself. The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held power, who were relied upon to use critical thinking and their ethical compass on behalf of the public. These individuals were handed the precious gift of automatic credibility and almost blind trust.
To understand how to move forward to restore trust, it’s important to acknowledge basic facts about the pandemic, because truth serves as the starting point of all rational discussion.
Remember that lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns.
Lockdowners ignored Henderson’s classic review fifteen years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, first recommended on national media in independently by Ioannidis, by Katz, and by me—and then repeatedly for months—based on data already known back then. It was not learned later—seven months later in 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration reiterated it, or in 2021, or 2022, or more recently.
Why is that timeline important to understand? Because the Birx–Fauci lockdowns, therefore, were implemented by elected officials after knowing the facts for months—since early spring 2020.
Indeed, lockdowns were widely instituted, they failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread—that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024; Atlas, 2024.
And the Birx–Fauci lockdowns directly inflicted massive damage on children and actually killed millions, especially and sinfully, of the poor. “The United States of America alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths (through July 2023) if it had the performance of Sweden,” according to a review of thirty-four countries. Bianchi calculates that over the next fifteen to twenty years, the unemployment alone will cause another million American deaths—from the economic shutdown, not the virus.
Mandatory school closings, the forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America.
Why did free people accept these draconian, unprecedented, and illogical lockdowns? This is the question. And the answer reveals the reason for today’s silence on the pandemic.
Clearly, censorship and propaganda are key parts of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two fallacies—that a consensus of experts on lockdowns existed, and that dissenters to that false consensus were highly dangerous.
Why is censorship used? To shut someone up, yes, but more importantly, to deceive the public, to stop others from hearing, to convince a naive public there is a “consensus on truth.”
But truth is not a team sport. Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others.
I am proud to be an outlier—happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong—but cancel culture is effective because it stops others from speaking. I received hundreds of emails from doctors and scientists all over the country, including from Stanford, even from inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—saying “keep talking, Scott, you’re 100 percent right, but we’re afraid for our families and our jobs.” And indeed, no one at Stanford Medical School—not a single faculty member there, and not a single person in any leadership position at Stanford University—spoke publicly against Stanford’s politically based attack on me, including a formal censure. Yet, I was correct and was the only COVID advisor to the president who had both medical-science and health-policy expertise, the single advisor who focused on both the harms from the virus and the policy itself.
But censorship and cancel culture alone do not explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. The cause is not simply “issue fatigue.”
The root of their failure is also that so many smart people, successful people, influential people, including many claiming to support the new “disruptors,” bought into the irrational measures—when it counted most, when our kids and particularly the poor were being destroyed, in 2020. It is uncomfortable to discuss and admit, but it is far more fundamental than the COVID origin, or the failings of Dr. Fauci, or the vaccine. That acquiescence, that silence and cowardice, and that failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that no one wants to admit.
Today, disruption is sorely needed, and many are basking in the resounding victory of history’s most disruptive politician, President Donald J. Trump.
In healthcare, important changes in the status quo have also begun, first with the much needed DOGE initiative, spearheaded by Elon Musk, streamlining the tens of thousands of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats while exposing massive fraud and waste in programs like Medicaid.
And the secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has also provoked an important new national dialogue with his “Make America Healthy Again” mantra, focused on wholesome foods to achieve a goal everyone readily supports—good health for themselves and their children. And no doubt, ensuring safety of all drugs and eliminating corruption in the pharmaceutical and food industries is also crucial to health. I am a strong supporter of those ideas.
Restoring trust, however, should by far be the most urgent mission of the new healthcare leadership.
I am very concerned that most are eager to “turn the page” on the human-rights violations, the censorship, the true “constitutional crisis”—no setting the record straight, no official recognition of facts, no accountability? The ultimate disruptor won, and his disruptor appointees will now be in charge—so all is well?
Silently turning the page on modern history’s most egregious societal failure would be extraordinarily harmful. Failure by the new government health-agency leaders to issue official statements of truth about the pandemic management would prevent closure for the millions who lost loved ones and whose children suffered harms.
Additionally, it would completely eliminate accountability. Remember, only public accountability will prevent recurrence, and accountability is necessary to restore trust in institutions, leadership, and among fellow citizens.
My second concern: yes, the era of trusting experts based solely on credentials must be over, but will that backlash against the failed “expert class” usher in a different wave of pseudoscience, including wild beliefs about wellness remedies, nutritional supplements, hallucinogens? We cannot forget that legitimate expertise is vital; that known, solid medical science is still valid; that unfounded theories based on simple correlations are not scientifically sound.
What reforms are needed to restore trust?
The first step to restore trust is formal, official statements of truth on the COVID lockdowns, masks, and other pseudoscience mandates from the new HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS leaders.
We need to forbid—by law—all shutdowns and return the role of the CDC and other health agencies to be (only) advisory. They recommend; they give information—they don’t set laws. They don’t have the power to set mandates. And if our guaranteed freedoms are not always valid, especially during crises, then they are not guaranteed at all.
We need to add term limits (perhaps five years) to all mid- and top-level health-agency positions. We cannot continue the perverse incentives of career bureaucrats accruing personal power, like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their thirty-plus years in government.
All new heads of the HHS, the NIH, the FDA, the CDC, and the CMS should be prohibited from post-government company-board positions in the health sectors they regulate for around five years. It’s unethical, an overt conflict of interest.
We need to forbid drug-royalty sharing by employees of the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC. $325 million in royalties were shared with pharmaceutical companies by those people over the ten years prior to the pandemic. That’s a shocking conflict of interest.
We should explicitly ban all mandates for drugs. First, the essence of all ethical medical practice is informed consent. And what kind of a “free country” requires you to inject a drug into your child or yourself? No—that’s antithetical to freedom. You give the information. You shouldn’t even need to force anything legitimate, but you do need to prove the case.
We should require, by law, the immediate posting of discussions in all of the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH meetings. They work for us. What are they saying? We should know in real time.
We need accountability for all government funding. We have fifteen or more universities getting more than $500 million per year from the NIH alone. The essence of research is free debate. If they’re thwarting that with intimidation, like faculty censures, why would they be entitled to U.S. taxpayers’ money?
More broadly, I and others are working on policies to ensure the free exchange of ideas—the essence of all legitimate science, the basis for the mission of education. Ideological gatekeeping in public discourse has no place in free societies, especially in science and health.
Here’s the point: the solution to misinformation is more information. No one should be trusted to be the arbiter of truth—after all, the so-called experts were the biggest purveyors of false information.
Ultimately, most solutions come from individuals, and ultimately it is individuals, not institutions, who will save freedom.
I fear we still have a disastrous void in courage in our society today. To quote C. S. Lewis, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” We cannot have a peaceful, free society if it’s filled with people who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty on what Hannah Arendt called “elementary questions of morality.”
