A bipartisan team of lawmakers, Sens. Patty Murray and Richard Burr, want Congress to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and how the Trump and Biden White Houses responded to the pandemic.
The New York Times reported Friday that a draft proposal is being circulated around Capitol Hill for legislation that would create a 12-member body to ‘get a full accounting of what went wrong during this pandemic,’ Murray said.
It comes as The Washington Post reported that pandemic funds could run out, as $265 billion from the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund have already been allocated.
A bipartisan team of lawmakers, Sens. Richard Burr (left) and Patty Murray (right), want Congress to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and how the Trump and Biden White Houses responded to the pandemic.
Burr and Murray, who are the leaders of the Senate Health Committee, are getting broad and bipartisan support for their proposal now that Democratic President Joe Biden’s COVID response can be scrutinized as much as former Republican President Donald Trump’s.
Similar bills introduced last year, including one sponsored by the bipartisan team of Sens. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, went nowhere.
‘I’m all for it,’ Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, told The Times this week.
Marshall is working with New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on a similar piece of legislation.
‘As a doctor, if a patient dies and we don’t know why, we do an autopsy. In the military, when we have a major event we go back and figure out waht we did right and what we did wrong,’ added Marshall, who is a medical doctor.
Philip Zelikow, a lawyer who led the 9/11 Commission, and who has been laying the groundwork to create a similar commission on the pandemic called it ‘shockingly polarizing.’
‘This is the first signal that maybe leading Democrats and Republicans are now ready to come together,’ he told The times. ‘I think that’s really heartening. A lot of people would not have predicted it.’
Zelikow has already received financial backing from four foundations and has a paid staff.
HIs group has already interviewed hundreds of people involved in the pandemic including public health officials, politicians, victims and their families, The Times reported.
He told the paper that he would be willing to turn his work over to Congress if the bipartisan commission is formed.
So far, Biden’s White House has been noncommital.
The administration wouldn’t get to pick any members for the commission the way the draft stands, with Congressional Democrats and Republicans splitting those decisions.
‘We tried to structure it in a way that would make a partisan approach difficult,’ Burr told The Times.
