The report closes the book on two-plus years of investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

By Alice Miranda Ollstein

12/09/2022 12:32 PM EST

Democrats on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Friday released their final report, which argues that structural weaknesses, leadership failings and the spread of misinformation contributed to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans during the pandemic.

The report closes the book on two-plus years of investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic and arrives amid uncertainty about how oversight will shift under the incoming Republican House majority.

The 200-plus page document lays out the “pre-existing vulnerabilities, failures in leadership and program implementation, and predatory actions by private actors that contributed to extraordinary loss of life, economic suffering, and waste, fraud, and abuse during the crisis.”

The committee lays out 30 recommendations for protecting the country during future pandemics, ranging from replenishing the Strategic National Stockpile to passing legislation to improve research and treatment of long Covid to enacting universal paid sick and family leave for U.S. workers.

Yet the report comes as Congress is poised to repeat some of the very mistakes the committee highlights. Partisan fighting appears likely to doom the Biden administration’s request for $10 billion to combat the Covid-19 pandemic — funding...

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