COVID took everyone by surprise. In October of 2019, we were all happily enjoying the “old normal.” None of us expected what would happen just several months later, when we were all huddled in our homes, scared to look at anyone too closely lest we catch the deadly pestilence. Governments, health organizations, and even private businesses suddenly seemed to wield massive power over our everyday lives. That was a surprise for sure.

But there’s another surprise we really ought to be talking about. Aren’t you surprised at how quickly it all blew over? We seemed to be on the brink of forcing everyone to get injected—and then we weren’t. We went back to the “normal” many of us were despairing of ever seeing again. Hardly anyone stopped to talk about the incredible invasions of privacy and manipulations of data that happened under the shadow of the emergency. Seriously—don’t we get an apology? Isn’t someone going to investigate? Was Covid really as deadly as they said? Were the vaccines really as safe as we were told? Was the government’s handling of the pandemic really as justified as it claimed? Will the truth ever come out, or will we just all shrug it off and move on?

Thankfully, not everyone is content to shrug it off. Even at the highest levels of government, some strong voices are calling for the truth to come out. Look back at this exchange between U.S. Senator Rand Paul and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel in 2023. During a U.S. Senate committee hearing, Paul asked Bancel a pointed question: “Is there a higher . . . incidence of myocarditis among adolescent males 16 to 24 after taking your vaccine?”

First, Bancel took a detour to explain how much Moderna cares about people’s safety, but Paul interrupted him to ask the question again. Then Bancel answered, “There’s less myocarditis for people who get the vaccine versus [those] who get the Covid infection.”

Paul flatly contradicted the CEO. He said he wanted to enter 6 peer-reviewed papers into the record, showing that vaccinated adolescent males were more likely to develop myocarditis. He even claimed to have spoken with the President of Moderna who had acknowledged the same thing to him in private. As Paul put it, “The fact that you can’t say it in public is quite disturbing.”

Regardless of how correct or incorrect Bancel was on this point, Paul’s determination to have this exchange is an encouragement—not everyone is content to let this all blow over. As a matter of fact, this May, Senator Ron Johnson opened a Senate subcommittee hearing to explore how health officials downplayed Covid vaccine adverse events.

“I think we finally got enough documents to certainly demonstrate in this case, with myocarditis, that the federal government was well aware of it, downplayed the severity, and hid what they had actually found,” Johnson said.

In the opening minutes of the hearing, he told the audience about how myocarditis concerns were surfacing in February 2021, how FDA and CDC officials knew that the vaccine reporting system was signaling for myocarditis in May of 2021, and how CDC officials notified vaccine manufacturers but not the public at this time. Johnson also explained how he was himself censored when he tried to raise awareness of vaccine-correlated deaths. You can read more about the highlights of the hearing here.

I’m encouraged that not everyone has forgotten. Not everyone has let the world shrug off the pandemic manipulation. Some of America’s most eminent legislators are sounding the alarm about what happened in the past. Hopefully, then, we will be less likely to let something like this happen again in the future.

Ultimately, as Johnson reminds us, this shouldn’t be about mere politics. Our desire to expose corruption should transcend politics. As he put it, “My hope is that our work will be largely non-partisan. Now I use that word specifically—’non-partisan.’ There should be nothing partisan about revealing the truth.”