When Saudi hijackers killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, the U.S. Congress set up an independent commission to investigate what happened. All 10 members of the bipartisan commission approved the resulting report, putting their full weight behind its recommendations. That prompted changes to everything from immigration law enforcement to how the U.S. intelligence community is organized.
Yet the pandemic, which is blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Americans, has yet to inspire Congress to put aside partisan differences and establish a similar commission.
Members of both the House and Senate proposed bills to establish a commission. Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, sought to lay the groundwork by pulling together a diverse group of experts. But the bills languished, and Mr. Zelikow’s group published “Lessons From the COVID War” on their own in April 2023, just ahead of the May declaration that the pandemic had ended. As I reported at the time, the authors hoped their examination of how the U.S. government had responded, why it made certain choices, and what the trade-offs were would prompt a “rethink.”
As Stephen Humphries writes in the cover story featured in the Aug. 4 issue of the Monitor Weekly, any pandemic reckoning so far has been piecemeal – isolated interviews by key figures in the administration, individual studies, bits of data here and there. But nothing as comprehensive as the commissions established by other countries like the United Kingdom and Sweden.
So as we approached this topic, we asked ourselves: What is really needed here? It’s not just truth but a constructive tone. Part 1, which was excerpted in print and ran in full online, provides a foundation of facts. Part 2, which made up the bulk of our print offering, features people seeking a reckoning – and why they think qualities like humanity, honesty, compassion, and temperance are needed.
Our cover illustration brings out further dimensions of this crossroads, five years since the pandemic began. I loved what lead designer and illustrator Karen Norris shared with us as the inspiration behind her design:
The image shows a solitary figure standing on a rock, surrounded by calm water. He looks back over a vast and altered landscape – an echo of the recent past – while a rising sun suggests the possibility of renewal. The rock’s reflection in the water is refracted, hinting at the distortions in our collective memory and the uncertainty of perspective.
The illustration evokes a moment of pause and reckoning: an invitation to reflect on what happened during the pandemic, why the U.S. has yet to conduct a national review as have many other countries, and what it would take to rebuild public trust moving forward.
Editor’s note: This column was first published in the Aug. 4, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
