White House coronavirus task force member Scott Atlas said Tuesday that top infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci is “just one person on the task force.”

The medical response to COVID-19 was hampered in speed and effectiveness by obstacles to effective coordination across federal agencies, between local, state, and federal governments, and among public and private-sector organizations. Drawing on interviews with practitioners and open-source research, this report describes those obstacles and recommends policies and actions to help overcome them and improve our nation’s response to this pandemic as well as future biomedical crises.

An urgent new class of challenges to independent intellectual inquiry has emerged on the global stage. These challenges stem primarily from the vulnerabilities that economic and technological change have introduced into the knowledge sectors of open societies, including both mature and developing democracies. In recent years, intensifying marketization has placed ever-greater financial and competitive pressures on publishers, universities, and other knowledge-sector institutions critical to the functioning of democracies. 

Eric A. Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow in Education and Distinguished Visiting Fellow Ludger Woessmann at Stanford’s Hoover Institution released an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)  analysis on The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.  This groundbreaking OECD analysis was presented at the G20 Education Ministers virtual meeting on September 5, 2020.  While not addressing when or how schools re-open, it points to the long-run harm to students and to the nation of the accumulating learning losses.