The Norfolk Group
These are concerned physicians and scientists who first met in Norfolk, Connecticut in May of 2022 to discuss the requirement for a commission to conduct an inquiry into America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous countries have conducted such inquiries (Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Denmark) and made the results available to the public and decision-makers. Other jurisdictions including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should do the same.
The eight members of the Norfolk Group are:
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD; epidemiologist, health economist, and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom. Twitter page
Leslie Bienen, MFA, DVM; veterinarian, zoonotic disease researcher, and faculty member at Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (through December 31st, 2022). She left in January 2023 to work in healthcare policy. About Leslie Bienen
Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD; emergency room physician and computational engineer for medical decision making; associate professor at Stanford School of Medicine. Ram Duriseti Bio
Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD; physician and PhD epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California-San Francisco, clinical researcher in healthcare policy and practicing Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation physician. Twitter page
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, FDhc; epidemiologist and biostatistician; professor of medicine at Harvard University (on leave); founding fellow of the Academy of Science and Freedom. Twitter page
Marty Makary, MD, MPH; surgeon and healthcare policy scientist; professor at Johns Hopkins University. martymd.com
Margery Smelkinson, PhD; infectious disease scientist and microscopist whose research predominantly focuses on host/pathogen interactions. Twitter page
Steven Templeton, PhD; immunologist; associate professor at Indiana University School of Medicine. Twitter page Substack
As you can see, these professionals are eminently qualified in the fields of medicine, scientific research, and public health.
The document this group produced is excellent. The questions are straightforward and provide a blueprint to prevent another debacle like the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire document is available in pdf for free download and sharing on their website: norfolkgroup.org
This summary is from The Norfolk Group website. Every government in the world that adopted draconian measures in response to COVID-19 should be asked these questions.
Executive Summary
In this document, we list specific questions on specific topics related to COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States. We believe these questions are vital for the nation to ask the White House, the CDC, the FDA, and other government officials, as well as state health departments, scientists, and the media. The public deserves answers to these questions so we can learn from our mistakes. Key issues include:
What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?
Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists? How did this hinder our fight against the virus?
Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age gradient in COVID-19 mortality, early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?
Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including but not limited to, cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health?
Why did the CDC fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines?
Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions?
Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner? How was information on drug effectiveness and safety disseminated to doctors and clinicians? Were effective therapeutics easily accessible across the population? How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?
Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems?
Why was the USA slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why was there more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk Americans? Why was so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?
Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them, at the expense of efficient and critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts? Why did the CDC or NIH not fund large randomized trials to evaluate the efficacy and potential harms of mask-wearing? Why didn’t policy recommendations change after the publication of randomized trial data from Denmark and Bangladesh which showed no or minimal efficacy of mask-wearing by the public?
I don’t know about you, but after what our governments put us through over the past three years, I want answers to these questions.
Wouldn’t we love to watch the public grilling of Dr. Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, Health Canada, and all the other agencies? We could watch them squirm as they try to defend the ineffective, actively harmful, and divisive measures they imposed on us.
That’s the least they deserve.
This will be my last newsletter for a while. I need to devote all my energy to finishing the last book of the Evocatus Series Evoctus Stratagem.
Thank you all for supporting The Skeptical Investigator. I hope you continue your own investigations. The archives of this newsletter contain numerous links to others who are investigating and revealing the truth about our times.
So, until next time, remember:
“If you consider all possibilities and never rule anything out, you’ll never be surprised.”
Steven J. Daniels
The Skeptical Investigator