“We’ve just had the worst calamity in most living Americans’ lives — real deaths, real suffering, a lot of future issues, economic issues,” Mr. Schmidt said in his first interview about his involvement. “I would like to see a detailed analysis of what happened and I’d like to see recommendations to prevent it from happening in the future. I think Americans are owed that.”
Just as victims and their families were instrumental in calling for a 9/11 commission, coronavirus victims and their families are pushing for a Covid-19 panel. On Wednesday, after this article was published online, a victims’ group, Marked By Covid, issued a statement praising Mr. Zelikow’s effort and calling on President Biden to “support a full and transparent investigation.”
The planning group is not engaged in substantive interviews and has avoided key figures like Drs. Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah L. Birx, the Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, who would be critical in any investigation. Instead it is conducting “listening sessions,” Mr. Zelikow said, to ask health experts, governors, mayors, business leaders and others what a commission should investigate.
With more than two dozen expert advisers from across the political spectrum, including two former Food and Drug Administration commissioners and a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the group has made detailed notes of these sessions and drafted a blueprint for a wide-ranging inquiry that would include, but hardly be limited to, an examination of the origins of the virus — including the contentious “lab leak” theory. That part of the inquiry would be conducted with national and international panels of scientists, Mr. Zelikow said.
“We’d like to know everything from the origins of the virus to how to make diagnostic testing more widely available to why we saw such big difference in the impact of the pandemic across different socioeconomic and racial and ethnic groups,” said Mark B. McClellan, an adviser to the group and former F.D.A. commissioner in the administration of George W. Bush.
Mr. Zelikow, a national security expert and former diplomat, is now a history professor at the University of Virginia. His group operates out of the university’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, in cooperation with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security and Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The Sept. 11 commission, created by an act of Congress that was signed into law at the end of 2002 by an initially reluctant Mr. Bush, was an independent, bipartisan panel that spent a year and a half investigating the attacks and the country’s preparedness for them, holding public hearings in what amounted to a national reckoning.
