By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org.

With the reorganized and restaffed agencies of the Dept of Health and Human Services (DHHS) firmly in place, and the release of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, now's a good time to look at the state of play with regard to all things Covid, and the public health establishment, in general, in the United States.

Almost two years ago, I had written in Brownstone Journal that the entire country (including healthcare providers) could be placed into one of three scenarios regarding the Covid response:

Scenario 1: We handled the pandemic as best we could, given the information we had at the time. The results were less than desired due to the nature of the virus.

Scenario 2: Things didn't go well because the mitigation modalities put in place (lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and multiple mRNA jabs) were not sufficiently followed and/or enforced. Of note, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry findings are most consistent with this scenario.

Scenario 3: Everything that was done was wrong, and was known to be wrong (and contrary to more than a century of public health policy and practice) when implemented. However, due to geopolitical, economic, and power considerations, it was done anyway.

Back then, I placed the percentage of the population that supported each scenario at 75%, 5%, and 20%, respectively. Sadly, despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that Scenario 3 is correct, and DHHS now has the expertise in place to move this evidence forward, as of today, the percentages have not budged from two years ago.

While in my mind, it is way past time that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, the Empire (consisting of the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex) continues to strike back with as much ferocity as ever, and appears to still be holding court. The Empire has been strengthened by the fact that healthcare providers, particularly physicians, are now overwhelmingly employees of the health systems establishment (an unstated, but key outcome goal of the Affordable Care Act), and with the loss of autonomy (and concurrent loss of their souls), healthcare providers' state of denial reigns supreme.

Six months ago, I had provided evidence of this entrenchment by citing three Commentary articles from the same issue of the American Journal of Medicine (AKA: The Green Journal), which has been an important resource for internists for almost 80 years. It indicated that Scenario 1 was still controlling the agenda more than five years after the start of the pandemic.

In the December 2025 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, there are three more Commentary articles (1, 2, 3) that track in exactly the same direction. In each case, there is recognition that there are significant problems with the healthcare delivery system in this country and globally.

However, there appears to be absolutely no self-awareness that the problem is staring right back at them in the mirror. This has occurred, despite the fact that DHHS has been in the spotlight much more frequently during the past six months, although the pace of information release has been frustratingly slow.

Frankly, I can relate to the tendency towards denial. For decades, I resisted the notion that there could be any link between vaccines and autism. I justified my resistance on the fact that I had been taught (and firmly believed) that no vaccine was released for public consumption before it had been studied for 5 to 10 years in order to reveal potential longer term issues. It turns out that this dogma is actually dog-doo!

Given the violation of every tenet of good patient care that we saw during the Covid response, to not extrapolate these same types of violations to other aspects of patient care is naïve and dangerously foolish. Maybe it partially explains the fact that life expectancy in this country over the past 10-12 years has been flat-to-down, and the prospects going forward are not looking good. This should not be surprising, given that the de...