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auditioned on fox? a kind of ideol entre? VANISHED?  stanford fac ltr?

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Column: Does Ron DeSantis even believe his dangerous B.S. about COVID vaccines?

9/23

The latest government advisories on the new monovalent COVID-19 vaccines were not much of a surprise. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccines as safe and effective, and a day later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the shots for all Americans over the age of 6 months.

Even less of a surprise was the reaction of the resolutely anti-vax, anti-science Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican, who is angling for the GOP nomination for president, staged a roundtable of scientific mountebanks on Wednesday to attack the vaccines.

They included his crackpot state surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who is a member of a COVID-19 advisory committee assembled by DeSantis. Bhattacharya is also a purveyor of a fatuous program of useless anti-COVID policies that has been impervious to the raw data that persistently demonstrated that it did not work.

There’s been an enormous experience with this vaccine, with more than 13 billion doses distributed. It is arguably one of the best-studied vaccines in history, with a tremendous safety record.

— Vaccine authority Paul Offit, The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia

In the course of the event, Ladapo announced that the state Department of Health would advise against anyone under 65 taking the new vaccine.

DeSantis’ roundtable took place, naturally, on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is today most notable as the place where truth goes to die.

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The roundtable, as one might have predicted, was an agglomeration of misinformation, misunderstanding and misrepresentation that amounted to a public health threat in real time.

It raised the question of how many lives would be saved across the country if DeSantis’ presidential campaign completes its glide path to irrelevancy, sapping his quest for the most politically expedient right-wing policy prescriptions.

The answer, conservatively, is hundreds of thousands. Florida boasts one of the worst COVID death rates in the nation, more than 391 deaths per 100,000 people. If Florida’s rate were applied to the entire U.S. population instead of the national rate of 338.6 deaths per 100,000, then nearly 1.3 million Americans would have perished from the disease, instead of the documented toll of 1.1 million.

(By the same token, if the entire U.S. had California’s low death rate of 258 per 100,000, the national death toll would have been lower by 267,500.)

In other words, the end to DeSantis’ boorish, charisma-free performance on the campaign trail would be a public health boon. Can there be any greater proof of the adage that “elections have consequences”?

What’s curious is that DeSantis’ attack on the vaccines is a complete about-face from his initial reaction. On Dec. 14, 2020, he stood at a lectern in Tampa andbragged about having been on hand that day for the very first shipments of the vaccine to his state. “I had the privilege to be able to actually sign for the vaccines from FedEx,” he said.

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Soon after that, however, he must have concluded that his path to challenging Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination involved kowtowing to the far right wing. That included embracing the anti-vaccination movement in a bear hug.

That said, let’s take a look at the roundtable, which was a one-stop shop for anti-vaccine tropes.

The event started out as a flat-out attack on the CDC and FDA, aimed at undermining the credibility of the nation’s leading public health agencies.

This has long been a theme of DeSantis’ world. As long ago as 2021 he was fundraising off a personal attack on Anthony Fauci, who was not associated with either agency but was the nation’s most respected authority on epidemics and immunology. His campaign sold T-shirts bearing the slogan “Don’t Fauci my Florida.”

An online fundraising appeal made Fauci the subject of every paragraph. “I refused to blindly follow Dr. Fauci ... and allow him to strip Floridians of their God-given freedoms,” DeSantis declared. “I chose to lift Florida up, not follow the lead of Dr. Fauci and lock Florida down.”

Ladapo opened the roundtable by stating, “We continue to live in a world where the CDC and the FDA, when it comes to COVID at least, are just beating their own path in a direction that’s just inexplicable, in terms of thinking about data and thinking about common sense.”

This is a guy who has promoted nostrums that science has shown to be utterly useless against COVID, such as the anti-parasitic ivermectin and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.

Ladapo turned the mic over to Bhattacharya. He aired the familiar anti-vaxxers’ complaint that the new vaccine has not been subjected to a randomized clinical test. This is a claim popularized by anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it’s utterly bogus.

As I reported earlier, randomized testing of every iteration of the current vaccines is unethical, unwise and unnecessary. The truth is that such trials are important when an entirely novel product is developed, as occurred when the mRNA vaccines against COVID most widely used today were originally developed by Moderna and Pfizer.

“There’s been an enormous experience with this vaccine, with more than 13 billion doses distributed,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine authority at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. “It is arguably one of the best-studied vaccines in history, with a tremendous safety record,” Offit told me.

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Demanding a randomized prospective trial for every iteration of this vaccine makes no more sense than doing so for the annual updates of the flu vaccine, which doesn’t happen, Offit says.

Bhattacharya also implied that the protection against COVID provided by the previous vaccine versions is modest and “short-lived,” based on the waning of antibody levels over the months after the shot. Of the new shot, he said, “We don’t know that it protects you against being hospitalized, we don’t know that it protects you against dying.”

Yet it’s well understood that antibodies always fade during the months after a shot.

Is there any dabout that vaccination keeps people healthier against COVID-19? These charts from the CDC show that vaccinated Americans were safer from infection and death than the unvaccinated through the entire pandemic.

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

In the case of COVID, Offit told me, “the critical immunological component responsible for protecting against severe disease is the memory T-cells, which are long-lived and recognize parts of the virus that have been generally conserved, from Wuhan-1 [the original recognized strain] to BA.2.86 [the rapidly spreading strain against which the new vaccines are expected to be effective].”

As for the suggestion that the vaccinations don’t protect much against COVID, that’s absurd. Data have consistently shown that case and death rates have been higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated, sometimes as much as 14 times higher.

That brings us to what may be the most preposterous and irresponsible claim aired by Ladapo during the roundtable.

“Multiple studies” in the U.S., the Middle East, Iceland and other places, he said, “are now finding that after four to six months, what was just waning effectiveness ... is entering a negative area,” which means that after a period there is “risk of increased infection. This is obviously an enormous finding.”

It also appears to be wholly mythical. Ladapo wasn’t very precise about where he got the idea that vaccination can increase susceptibility to COVID, a phenomenon known as “negative immunity” or “negative efficacy.” But it needs to be stifled at birth.

I asked Ladapo’s health department to identify the studies he referred to. The agency didn’t respond, but the vaccine advisory it issued later Thursday listed 14 studies backing up Ladapo’s claims supporting his caution about the vaccines.

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Not a single one supported his claims about negative immunity. One, of vaccination outcomes in Qatar, mentioned such a finding, but cautioned that it was almost certainly due to bias in the study design and “not true negative biological effectiveness.” On the whole, the study certified that the mRNA vaccines provide “strong and durable protection against COVID-19 hospitalization and death.”

As for Iceland, the health department advisory listed a study from that country that found that the rate of reinfection from the Omicron variant of COVID increased with the time since vaccination, and that the rate of reinfection was slightly higher among Icelanders who had two shots than those who had one. But it advised that the finding should be “interpreted with caution” because of the complexities of assessing the conditions under which the shots were administered and the Icelandic lifestyle.

The notion of “negative immunity” appears mostly to derive from a 2022 article on a right-wing website that stupidly misconstrued graphs in a scientific paper.

That paper’s author, Danyu Lin of the University of North Carolina, conclusively refuted the interpretation in interviews with Reuters and the Associated Press. “The statement that ‘the vaccine destroys any protection a person has from natural immunity’ is unfounded,” he told Reuters. He told the AP, “The evidence we have supports the finding that natural immunity is boosted by vaccination rather than being destroyed by vaccination as claimed.”

Yet the claim was swiftly taken up by the far right and anti-vax communities because it fed their conspiracy theories so well.

Ladapo and DeSantis, despite their claim to adhere to science and data, are all too happy to retail this claptrap. Have they come to believe their claims? Or are they just trying to slip lies past a credulous public for their own malignant purposes?

We have one clue from Ladapo’s history of flagrant falsehoods. We know from reporting last April in Politico that he personally altered a state-sponsored study of the COVID vaccines to inflate their risk to young men, which fed his anti-vaccination mind-set.

In March, the FDA and CDC warned Ladapo in an unusual, if not unique, joint letter that his claims about the purported dangers of the COVID vaccines were “incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public.” Misinformation like his denigrating vaccine safety “has led to unnecessary death, severe illness and hospitalization.”

In short, he and his mentor in the Florida statehouse are menaces to the public health. Perhaps if DeSantis’ presidential campaign finally crashes and burns, he’ll give up on the attacks on COVID vaccination and return to his original stance, when the vaccines were first introduced in early 2020 and he gloated about obtaining an early shipment for his state.

Until then, unfortunately, public health sits on a knife‘s edge. DeSantis and Ladapo are the most prominent public officials undermining the crucial effort to get more Americans vaccinated. As the toll continues to mount, the blood is on their hands.

Latest from Michael Hiltzik](https://www.latimes.com/people/michael-hiltzik)

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Column: As measles spreads, ‘herd stupidity’ grips Florida’s government

Feb. 27, 2024

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5/23 LAT

they’ve held credentials from some of the world’s most elite universities — Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They’ve been welcomed into the highest government policy councils. They became fixtures on television news shows and were quoted incessantly by some of the nation’s leading newspapers.

They’re a cadre of academics and scientists who pushed a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic, shunning masks, school closings, even vaccines, all in the name of reaching the elusive goal of “herd immunity,” resulting in what may have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.

That’s the contention of “We Want Them Infected,” a painstakingly documented new book by Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a veteran debunker of the pseudoscience contaminating our efforts to fight the pandemic.

In 2019 you would have been considered a quack if you suggested that the best way to get rid of a virus is to spread the virus. But that became mainstream and influenced politicians at the highest levels.

— Jonathan Howard, M.D.

Howard takes his title from Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist in the Health and Human Services Department during the Trump administration.

In July 2020, Alexander offered his view of how to exploit the relative risks of COVID to discrete populations to reach herd immunity. The idea was that so many people would eventually become naturally infected with the virus, and therefore immune from further infection, that the virus would be unable to spread further.

“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk,” he told top HHS officials. “So we use them to develop herd ... we want them infected.”

Alexander’s proposal was essentially a screed against lockdowns. That suited the Trump White House, which was searching for ways around the economic dislocations caused by the virus. But he was wrong about the toll of sickness and death that would result, allowing the virus to rage among these ostensibly low-risk groups, and wrong about the prospects of reaching herd immunity naturally.

“We Want Them Infected” may be the most appalling and infuriating book you’ll read about America’s response to the pandemic. It’s also essential reading.

The book is populated by quacks, mountebanks and charlatans — and not a few scholars with distinguished academic records — many of whom appear to have been seduced by the embrace of the right-wing echo chamber into promoting unproven and disproved policies.

“It’s unbelievable that while doctors like myself were working to treat sick COVID patients, begging people to stay at home and be safe,” Howard told me, “there was another group of doctors working at cross-currents to us — prominent doctors wanting to purposely infect unvaccinated young people with the promise that herd immunity would arrive in a couple of months.”

They consistently minimized the gravity of the pandemic, but rarely if ever acknowledged that their optimistic forecasts of illness and deaths were consistently proved wrong.

There are a number of problems with the herd immunity theory. One is that immunity from COVID infection tends to wane over time rather than become permanent. Also, infection with one variant of the virus doesn’t necessarily confer immunity from other variants, of which there have been many.

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Another problem is that COVID can be a devastating disease for victims of any age. Allowing anyone to become infected can expose them to serious health problems.

Moreover, the prospect that COVID could be defeated by the natural expansion of herd immunity persuaded many people not to bother with proven countermeasures, including social distancing, masking and vaccination.

Today, more than three years after COVID first appeared, the U.S. still has not achieved herd immunity although it is nearing the goal, in the view of Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco. The disease’s trajectory has been cataclysmic — the U.S. death toll stands at 1.13 million, hundreds of children have died, and an estimated 245,000 children have lost one or both parents to COVID. The U.S. leads the world in COVID deaths; its death rate of 3,478 per million population is worse than that of Britain, Spain, France, the Nordic countries, Canada and Israel.

Some herd immunity advocates offered their blithe forecasts in a misguided, if not dishonest, attempt to provide comfort to the American public. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, urged HHS officials in March 2020 to advocate against lockdowns on grounds they were “inciting irrational fear” of the virus, which he estimated would cause about 10,000 deaths. “The panic needs to be stopped,” Atlas wrote.

Atlas soon became a top advisor to Trump, promoting the herd immunity theory in the White House despite the objections of more experienced advisors such as Dr. Deborah Birx.

Howard is especially disturbed at how politicizing the pandemic has allowed fringe ideas to infiltrate public health policies.

“In 2019 you would have been considered a quack if you suggested that the best way to get rid of a virus is to spread the virus,” he says. “But that became mainstream and influenced politicians at the highest levels.”

In his book, Howard reserves his deepest scorn for the promoters of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020 and signed initially by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford; Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard; and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. (Thousands of other academics and scientists would later add their signatures.)

The core of the declaration was opposition to lockdowns. Its solution was what its drafters called “focused protection,” which meant allowing “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — chiefly seniors.

Older people living at home, the declaration said, should be kept apart from other family members except by meeting them outside, and “should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home.”

Focused protection, the promoters wrote, would allow society to achieve herd immunity and return to normalcy in three to six months.

As Howard documents, the declaration was little more than a libertarian fantasy. That may not have been surprising, because one of its organizers was an arch-libertarian named Jeffrey Tucker.

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For a taste of Tucker’s worldview, consider a 2016 article entitled “Let the kids work.” There he ridiculed the Washington Post for publishing a photo gallery of child laborers from 100 years ago, including miners and sweatshop workers as young as 10.

Tucker’s response was that those children were “working in the adult world, surrounded by cool bustling things and new technology. They are on the streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with peers, learning and doing. They are being valued for what they do, which is to say being valued as people.... Whatever else you want to say about this, it’s an exciting life.”

A better life, at least, than “pushed by compulsion into government holding tanks for a full decade” — that is, going to school.

The declaration’s promoters, Howard writes, never specified how to achieve their goals. Delivering food and supplies to millions of housebound seniors? In a Hoover Institution interview, Bhattacharya said, “We could have offered free DoorDash to older people.”

As Howard observes, Bhattacharya was remarkably sanguine about “creating a program overnight to deliver fresh food to tens of millions of seniors for months on end throughout the entire country.”

Similar hand-waving addressed the problems of multigenerational households, in which millions of vulnerable elders live. Older family members, the declaration authors wrote, “might temporarily be able to live with an older friend or sibling, with whom they can self-isolate together during the height of community transmission. As a last resort, empty hotel rooms could be used for temporary housing.”

Of course, hermetically sealing off tens of millions of “nonvulnerable” people from tens of millions of vulnerable people in a few weeks would be “the single greatest logistical challenge humanity had ever undertaken,” Howard observes. “Nowhere in the world used focused protection to achieve herd immunity in three to six months, as the Great Barrington Declaration promised.”

What the declaration really promoted was complacency. Its drafters, Howard says, were “people with no real-world responsibility for much of anything who made impossible things sound very easy. The task of actually getting food into the houses of elderly people was left up to public health authorities who were understaffed, overwhelmed and underfunded.”

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What may be the most inexcusable element of the herd immunity movement was its implication that children could be used as shields for the rest of the population. Its advocates counseled against vaccinating young children on the grounds that their susceptibility to the virus was minimal or even nonexistent, so they could safely acquire immunity naturally — and perhaps, as Vinay Prasad of UC San Francisco implied, provide an immunity boost to adults in their families.

Yet although children tended to suffer less from symptoms when they were infected, they were anything but immune. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1,600 American children under the age of 18 have died from COVID during the pandemic.

In any case, death is not the only serious outcome from COVID. The CDC says more than 14,000 children were hospitalized for COVID during the pandemic. An untold number of children may suffer from long COVID or other lifelong manifestations of the disease. For doctors to counsel deliberately exposing children to COVID when a vaccine is available, especially if the purpose is to protect adults, is “a moral abomination,” Howard says. He’s right.

In a world guided by science, the promoters of an unsuccessful herd immunity theory would long ago have lost their credibility and their public soapboxes.

The opposite has happened. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff still have their platforms (Kulldorff is now associated with the right-wing Hillsdale College). Both were appointed in December by Florida’s anti-vaccine governor, Ron DeSantis, to a “Public Health Integrity Committee” charged with questioning federal public health policies.

Scott Atlas, meanwhile, was tapped to deliver the commencement address at New College of Florida, a once-renowned liberal arts institution that DeSantis has turned into a haven for right-wing pedagogy. He was greeted with boos from the audience of graduating seniors, however, indicating that the youth of America perhaps can’t be gulled as easily as their parents.

At this moment, anti-science ideology on the right appears to be in the ascendance. Agitation against the COVID vaccine is metastasizing into an opposition movement against all childhood vaccinations, a trend that threatens to produce a surge in other vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and polio.

“The anti-vaccine movement has spotted an opportunity to sow doubt,” Howard told me. “Getting rid of all school vaccine mandates has always been the Holy Grail for them.”

Howard’s book is a warning. We may be on the verge of a public health disaster, because the promoters of a failed theory that COVID could be fought through “natural immunity” without vaccines have been able to wrap themselves in the mantle of truth-tellers. But they’re not.

Latest from Michael Hiltzik

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/06/matt-gaetz-bombardier-books-conservatism-00013383

in recent years, major publishers and their conservative imprints have grown increasingly skittish over conservative firebrands. Simon & Schuster dropped provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017 after controversial comments surfaced, and last year dropped Missouri Senator Josh Hawley for his support of the January 6 insurrection, stating that they could not “support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”

As larger publishers have stepped away from such authors, newer ventures are stepping up to fill that void — including Post Hill Press, a Tennessee-based independent publisher founded in 2013, and its new conservative imprint, Bombardier Books. Bombardier was founded in 2019 by Adam Bellow, who left stints editing conservative imprints at HarperCollins and St. Martins in order, as he put it at the time, “to play a role in rediscovering what it means to be conservative at a time when ideological priorities are changing and political identities are in flux.”

So what does it mean to be conservative today? If Bombardier’s catalog is any indication, it would seem to be an increasingly extreme and unapologetic attitude. When Laura Loomer — a former candidate who ran in, and lost, former President Donald Trump’s Florida congressional district on a platform of Islamaphobia and was banned from social media — brought out her memoir, it was with Bombardier. When Scott Atlas, the largely discredited doctor who advised Trump’s Covid response from August to November 2020, sought to put out his side of the story, he did it through Bombardier. Controversial Congressman Matt Gaetz’s memoir, Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution? Bombardier. More and more, Bombardier’s stock-in-trade is in the kinds of writers who are too controversial to be worth the headache for more established presses. As Bellow told the New York Times in April of 2021, “The reaction of people on the right to the cancellation of political books is to double down, so we have lots of books to publish.”

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As the title of the imprint suggests, these books are meant to be explosive; and Bombardier seems at first blush poised to become a clearinghouse for the right’s most radical ideas. The publisher, which did not respond to a list of questions about its sales figures, fact-checking process and whether it considers any authors too controversial, seemed as good a place as any to divine where the future of the conservative movement might be heading. So over the course of a few months, I read through 10 titles of Bombardier, including Robert Spencer’s Confessions of an Islamophobeand Benjamin Weingarten’s American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party. I also read a robust number of contrarian takes on the Covid-19 pandemic, from people like Scott Atlas (A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America), The Federalist contributor David Marcus(Charade: The Covid Lies that Crushed a Nation), as well as I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Cultureby Simone Gold,a doctor who was an early and persistent champion for hydroxychloroquine, which has not been proven to work against Covid.

And I was deeply underwhelmed.

Again and again, what struck me while reading these books was how conservative they are — not in a political sense, but in the word’s more fundamental meaning. For an imprint whose logo is a stealth bomber, there’s very little stealthy about this enterprise, nor are these, in any rhetorical sense, real bombs being thrown. As some parts of the conservative movement and Republican party become more focused on the culture wars and attacking their liberal counterparts, Bombardier suggests this might be the end-point of those trend lines: a lot of posturing and bombast, and very little in the way of new ideas or even new approaches to old ones.

From the start, I was shocked by the quality. Unlike conservative imprints at major publishers like Broadside, or more established independent rightwing presses like Regnery, Bombardier’s titles display an almost open contempt for their readers. Gold’s book lacked any printing on the spine itself. Attorney Alan Dershowitz’s Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy,turns out, despite its title, to be a copy-paste assemblage of all manner of previously published op-eds, including Dershowitz’s musings on President Barack Obama’s Israel policy, the 2016 Democratic primary and other things that have nothing to do whatsoever with Trump or the book’s stated topic. The nicest thing I can say about the production of these books is that they appear to be spell-checked.

As for the ideas contained in these books, Spencer’s Confessions of an Islamophobe seems to be par for much of the course. Beyond its incendiary title, the book’s stated positions don’t veer too far from the standard rightwing talking points regarding Islam: It’s bad and dangerous, intolerant and violent, and poses a threat to Christians, Jews and women everywhere. These arguments are odious, to be sure, and they are often hypocritical. Spencer devotes a whole chapter, for example, attacking Islam as a homophobic religion, while of course remaining silent on American rightwing evangelicals’ attitudes on the LGBTQI community.

But what’s most salient about this attack on Islam is not its hypocrisy but how tired it is. The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was the first to articulate it from the right in 2002. From Dutch politician Geert Wilders to French politician Marine le Pen to Trump, the attack has been used so regularly it’s an old classic by now. Spencer’s treatment brings nothing new to it — not even additional vitriol or hate. The same goes for the rest of his arguments; Confessions of an Islamophobereads, at best, like a greatest hits piece.

Spencer’s only move is to embrace the label he’s long been given. “I am an Islamophobe,” he states at the book’s opening. “It’s true. I’ve denied it for years. But now I admit it.” Rather than make a new or convincing argument for his beliefs, the book’s primary goal is to attempt to destigmatize the term itself. This move is standard for how these books operate: take a position the right has focused on for years, albeit one where they’ve relied on euphemism and dog-whistle, and drop the pretense, trying to reclaim the critique.

Gaetz’s book, similarly, is in many ways an attempt to turn the most sordid aspects of political life into virtues. “Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once knocked me for going on TV too much,” he says in Firebrand’sopening pages, adding that it’s “impossible to get canceled if you’re on every channel … And if you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” The best these books have to offer, it seems at times, is nothing beyond ham-handed attempts to normalize abhorrent but already widespread attitudes.

In lieu of new ideas, what do such books offer their readers? Primarily, a rehash of current events. Nearly every book I surveyed — from Loomeredto I Do Not Consentto A Plague Upon Our House —was focused primarily on offering a blow-by-blow of the Trump years from the writer’s specific perspective. Gaetz’s Firebrandhas very little to offer by way of an ideology or a legislative agenda, but it fills this absence with name-dropping and gossip from Mar-A-Lago (the absolute horniness of Firebrand,with its depictions of making out in hot tubs in the presence of the Secret Service and condoms setting off metal detectors, would be revolting enough even if Gaetz was not under investigation for under-age sex trafficking). Marcus’ Charadeoffers a slanted re-telling of the past few years, with the overarching goal of convincing his reader that the initial Covid-19 lockdown of spring 2020 “must never happen again.”

This need to almost compulsively revisit and re-narrativize the past few years is not just repetitious or useless, though. What’s being done here is a very specific kind of work. As the country has been plunged into chaos and uncertainty in the past few years, we’ve seen how, on any given day, some new or shocking revelation might be enough to up-end anyone’s prior beliefs or convictions. The Covid-19 pandemic in particular has scrambled a number of rightwing talking points: vaccines are bad, for example, but Trump deserves credit for developing them so quickly. Retelling the events of the past two years is vital, then, in controlling the storyline: The chaos of the past has to be ordered and explained in an ideologically consistent manner.

Thus Atlas’ insistence that we all completely misunderstood the basic science of Covid-19 from the very beginning. “The more I studied the data and the literature,” he writes of his experience at the dawn of the outbreak, “the more obvious it became that basic biology and simple logic were missing from the discussion. Instead, fear had seemingly displaced critical thinking about the data already at hand.” Atlas’ contention that fears of the virus were overblown read as ludicrous in the wake of more than 900,000 deaths in this country alone, but the goal here is not to accurately describe reality. Rather, the goal is to offer a narrative that bridges — as best as is possible — the observable reality around us and the reader’s pre-established beliefs.

It’s in this sense that Bombardier’s books are most explicitly “conservative”: not in their ideology, per se, but in their attempts to conserve a movement. In recent years, the basic meaning of conservatism has been scrambled as Trump, an anti-free-trade, anti-intervention president seized the mantle of the Republican party. Then, the pandemic added a new anti-vax and anti-mask element to conservatism, usually at odds with the prevailing medical consensus.

One feels in these pages an active fight against a splintering of a movement, a reassurance that everything you saw and experienced confirms your prior convictions. These books are not here to throw bombs so much as they are to dispel doubt. Reading through Bombardier’s catalog, it’s hard not to think of Orwell’s line from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” These are books that hope to control the future by obsessing on the recent past, attempting to make sense of everything that’s just happened in the hope of husbanding the fire of an ideologically confused movement.

The other theme that runs through these books, appearing again and again, is a fixation on “Big Tech.” Loomer’s book is the most obvious; it opens with the night she learned she was permanently banned from Twitter, and continues in that vein unabated for the rest of the book. A psychological portrait of someone addicted to social media, Loomer’s book alternates between blaming social media companies for making their platforms so addictive, and railing against them for banning her, until she resembles a junkie whose dealer has cut her off. “These companies scientifically manipulate their products to be alluring to us,” she writes at one point, “and then for dementedly trivial or blatantly partisan reasons, they take them away forever with no recourse or appeal possible.”

But this same theme appears in nearly every other book I read, in some form or another. Gold, watching her own misinformation scraped off of Youtube and other platforms, proclaims that we are “quite possibly watching free speech in its death throes,” going as far as to say that “Big Media and Big Tech have manipulated the social reality of America and Americans.” Gaetz likewise frets about how the right “tried to be polite conservatives for the past few decades, like quiet, well-behaved children in a church pew. But the big tech companies — Youtube, Facebook, Twitter (which shadowbanned and ‘labeled’ me)— have removed or demonetized our channels.”

Again, these accusations of censorship are nothing new, and seem especially odd when coming from people like Gaetz who are simultaneously demanding “Critical Race Theory” be banned from America’s classrooms. But this obsession with “Big Tech censorship” answers a more pressing question: Why are these figures writing books in the first place? As they’ve been banned from Twitter and Facebook, some of these writers have attempted to migrate to sites like Gettr, Gab, and Parler, but this is not a long-term solution. Their goal is not to linger in the cesspits of racist trolls and anti-vax gurus, but to get their voices heard in mainstream discourse. Publishers like Bombardier, which has a distribution deal with Simon & Schuster, may be the last hope for far-right figures to have a say in the public square — getting them table space at Barnes and Noble even as Twitter grows tired of them. Book publishing, in 2022, has become an alternative to social media for those who’ve worn out their welcome there.

Reading so many books that pretend to be shocking while serving up reheated talking points gives one a grudging respect for the older generation of rightwing media trolls like Ann Coulter. Coulter never had any new or interesting ideas either, but her rhetorical moves accomplished what they set out to do. By working a relentless mockery and derision toward the left, coupled with an air of splendid definitiveness about the rightness of her ideas, Coulter was effectively able to ridicule her political opponents while reassuring her readers that they were morally and culturally superior

Reading Bombardier’s pouters, who default to a sense of wounded grievance, it’s easy to see why Coulter’s schtick worked so well and for so long. But now, it seems, Coulter’s “Can you believe the Left is this stupid?” has transformed into Loomer’s “Can you believe the Left did this to me?” Even as she tries occasionally to make a case for someone other than herself, she can never quite get away from her own solipsism. “I am confident that by the end of this book, I’ll have persuaded you that it’s a big deal that companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple have a power of veto over your social and professional life,” she writes, and then immediately adds: “And you might have a better understanding of why it has been so damaging to my life — and why I’m still recovering.”

This perpetually wounded air of grievance makes for rough reading when it’s repeated for 200 pages. It’s a posture that indicates a decadent and exhausted end of a movement’s fire and ideology, a spent force consuming itself with self-pity and recriminations.

It may be too early to know whether or not this attitude will pay off. Public sales figures of Bombardier books aren’t public, but sales of Gaetz’s Firebrandhave been fairly underwhelming, per his congressional financial disclosure, suggesting that he’s only sold a few thousand copies of the book.

But Bombardier may already be learning that pushing the edges of acceptable discourse while remaining palatable to the mainstream is a tough balance to maintain. Last year, it was announced that Post Hill (the publisher of which Bombardier is an imprint) was going to publish a memoir by Jonathan Mattingly — the police officer involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor — until their distributor Simon & Schuster faced such a backlash that they refused to distribute it, leading Mattingly to ultimately part ways with Post Hill. But there’s always a new upstart ready to publish the figures too controversial for the mainstream; the book found a home with a new imprint, DW books, published by news site The Daily Wire.

This story has been updated to correct David Marcus’ role at The Federalist.

alexander et al suppress covid #, kids

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-administration

veema s on task force? pix]

Former President Donald Trump's administration is under fire for hindering the government's pandemic response and rolling back Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coronavirus mitigation guidelines in an effort to protect his interests.

According to CNBC News, the latest reports stem from documentation compiled during the House Oversight investigation launched back in September 2020. Based on the documents, the Trump administration is said to have intentionally suppressed COVID-19 testing by rolling back the CDC guidelines.

To justify the scaling back of COVID testing, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) scientific advisor Paul Alexander argued there was little significance in testing asymptomatic individuals, according to emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

"Testing asymptomatic people to seek asymptomatic cases is not the point of testing, for in the end, all this accomplishes is we end up quarantining asymptomatic, low-risk people and preventing the workforce from working," Alexander wrote shortly after HHS officials received an update about the CDC's guidelines. "In this light, it would be unreasonable based on the prevailing data to have widespread testing of schools and colleges/universities. This will not allow them to optimally re-open."

According to the Daily Beast, another report — which would have highlighted elevated death totals in young people — was an area of concern for Alexander. Although the report was true, :{Alexander emailed :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{White House COVID Task Force Senior Adviser Scott Atlas:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}::{ warning that it was "very duplicitous to damage the administration.":(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

Alexander said, "The timing of this is meant to interfere with school re-opening and we need to get something out fast to preempt this in the next day or so and I can work with you on it."

According to the documentation, Alexander also attempted to convince Atlas to "craft an op-ed .. disputing the reporting for on face value, it is meant to mislead."

After deep scrutiny about the rollback of guidelines, the CDC quietly backpedaled on the changes, replacing the previous guidance with recommendations suggesting that anyone who "has been in close contact with an infected person needs a Covid-19 test."

In December, email correspondence to HHS public-affairs adviser Michael Caputo also highlighted Alexander's attemptto advocate for the former president to consider a "herd immunity" strategy" for the United States in handling the coronavirus.

"There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high-risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," Alexander's letter read. "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc. have zero to little risk…. so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected…."

The latest report comes less than one week after veteran election consultant Tony Fabrizio and Republican pollster John McLaughlin both released assessments of the 2020 election and what led to Trump's loss. Despite the former president's claims of voter fraud, both analyses suggest Trump's failed leadership amid the pandemic contributed significantly to his electoral defeat.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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did he quit?

mma

hosting Scott Atlas, Laura Ingraham mocks the COVID-19 fatality rate even as thousands die a day

12/11/20 11:16 PM EST

As the pandemic death toll soars, Laura Ingraham declares the virus “a lot less lethal than previously thought”

stanford distance

rep redemption gone awry?

trump’s COVID advisor urges Americans to visit elderly for Thanksgiving because it may be their ‘final’ one

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

President Donald Trump's highly controversial COVID-19 advisor,**Dr. Scott Atlas**, is urging Americans to visit their elderly family members for Thanksgiving because it may be their ...

an 1120

no lnx twt

trump COVID-19 advisor accused of 'inciting violence' after calling for Michigan to 'rise up' against Whitmer

David Badash November 16, 2020

President Donald Trump's top coronavirus advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, is being accused of sedition and inciting violence by calling for Michigan to "rise up" after Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued new orders to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

"The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept," Atlas, who is a radiologist – not an epidemiologist – tweeted Sunday night. He added the hashtags "#FreedomMatters" and "#StepUp" to his tweet.

Last month 14 people were charged in an alleged domestic terror plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Some reportedly also had a plan to "overthrow" the government, and some allegedly had "made plans to kidnap Whitmer and commit violence with the hopes of sparking a 'civil war,'" MLive.com reports, quoting Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Back in May another man was charged with "credible threats to kill" Gov. Whitmer.

Dr. Atlas is currently serving as a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, which is headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Michigan's Governor Whitmer Sunday night quickly pushed back against Atlas's transparent attempts at what some are calling an attempt to incite violence (something First Daughter Ivanka Trump was also accused of attempting to do Sunday.)

Hours after Atlas's tweet, he returned to Twitter to insist he wasn't attempting to incite violence, but was merely talking about the electoral process and the right to peacefully protest....

aha: latest fallback , magical thinking?  does not req admit fail

250k KIA azar praise

Trump plan for mass death is unfolding before our eyes

Cody Fenwick

On Friday, the COVID Tracking Project reported that the number of positive coronavirus infections in the last day had reached 170,000, the highest record ever and a number tha...

aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-dr-scott-atlas-says-all-lockdowns-do-are-destroy-families-really-kill

aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-and-the-right-share-a-darwinist-herd-mentality-and-preference-for-sacrificing-the-weak-to-capitalism/

carl pope salon

Donald Trump's promise in an ABC News town hall last month that the United States would soon achieve herd immunity for the coronavirus, and conflating that with herd mentality, may be explained because Trump is counting on the latter to rescue his second term. It's otherwise impossible to imagine a campaign whose endgame is to recover the lost loyalty of voters over 65 selecting as its closing argument, "Not enough of you have died yet."

It's a safe bet that none of his 2016 Republican primary challengers would have embraced the idea that the solution to the pandemic was more American casualties than the Civil War and World War II combined. But many of Trump's Republican comrades-in-arms have embraced, often eagerly, a default preference for herd immunity — harkening back to the harsh social Darwinism that underlies much of modern conservatism. Early on in the pandemic there were Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and radio host Glenn Beck, all of whom argued that the loss of more American lives was preferable to scaling back the economy. Then, when the issue became wearing masks, some opponents argued "if I'm going to get COVID and die from it, so be it …" Of course they really meant, "If you are going to get COVID ..." Wearing masks was a deprivation of freedom — although this argument seems never to have been extended by Republicans to the prohibition on public nudity.

As the pandemic surged again, by October Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was referring to "unjustified hysteria" about covid, and asked, after he became infected, ""Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?" (The obvious answer is that we have been doing so, with increasing success, since the 1854 cholera pump moment. That is rejected by many on the right, because stopping a pandemic may require the government to prevent citizens from endangering others.)

Herd immunity can sometimes reduce mortality from a disease, but over the centuries has failed to end the curse of influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, rabies or dengue fever. It fits neatly, however, into a social Darwinist framework. Those who die are the "weak" — the poorest, the youngest and the oldest young —or can at any rate be classified as weak and deserving to die, because they died.Survival of the fittest requires discarding the weak.Remember the "let them die" hecklers who populated some of the 2011 Republican debates on health care.

This underlying value distortion — my personal freedom extends to my right to endanger you — spreads out across a range of other issues.Today's Republican reluctance to curb pollution even when it is demonstrably is killing a power plant's neighbors, to keep pesticides that kill farm workers out of the fields or to do anything at all about the climate crisis, which conservatives have privately conceded for years was real and caused by carbon pollution, are all illustrations of how the toxin of social Darwinism still contaminates much of the right's thinking about freedom.

So Trump's response to the COVID crisis — and the willingness of the Republican congressional establishment to enable it — illustrates a deep-rooted flaw in the American right. In a world in which we are, like it or not, all bound together, a tolerable conservatism is one that is willing to protect me from irresponsible neighbors, whether those are COVID-risking teenagers, irresponsible gun owners or multinational chemical companies.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/governance-by-fox-news-the-right-wing-cable-outlet-has-propped-up-dr-scott-atlas-at-the-expense-of-experts-like-fauci

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, has stressed that if the United States took a "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic, millions would die. But over at Fox News, Dr. Scott Atlas — a major proponent of the "herd immunity" argument — has received a lot of favorable coverage. And Media Matters' Matt Gertz, this week, argues that Fox News has endangered the public's health by encouraging President Donald Trump to make Atlas more prominent on the White House's coronavirus task force.

"Atlas seized control from Dr. Anthony Fauci and other government experts on public health and infectious diseases, and he has derailed their efforts to slow the spread of the virus," Gertz explains. "This is what governance by Fox News looks like. The White House plucked a purveyor of the network's coronavirus happy talk from its green room, and his view has overwhelmed those who have actual expertise on the subject — with potentially disastrous results."

Hosts at Fox News, Gertz notes, have "denounced public health officials like Fauci" but "propped up Atlas" — who, Gertz stresses, now "dominates" the White House coronavirus task force despite his "lack of qualifications in public health or infectious diseases." Atlas, who joined the task force in August, is a neuroradiologist. But unlike Fauci, he isn't an immunologist. Fauci is one of the United States' leading experts on infectious diseases.

Gertz quotes a report from the Washington Post, noting that Atlas "has pushed a baseless theory inside the task force that the U.S. population is close to herd immunity — the point at which enough people become immune to a disease either by becoming infected or getting vaccinated that its spread slows — despite a scientific consensus that the United States is nowhere close."

Atlas, Gertz points out, has argued against social distancing measures, saying, "All restrictions should be lifted, schools should be opened and only the most vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, should be sheltered." And when Fox hosts praise Atlas, according to Gertz, Trump is paying close attention.

"Fox hosts dictated the pandemic response through their shows and in meetings with Trump and his top advisers, until they finally managed to place one of their own within his ranks," Gertz explains. "The result has been a calamity: hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead, the economy is in shambles, and the virus is still out of control."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/dr-i-p-freely/

dr bananas

Having basically surrendered to the coronavirus, Republican President Donald Trump has increasingly said that he'd like to stop focusing on COVID-19 prevention measures and instead go for "herd immunity." The White House is even backing a petition signed by thousands of doctors around the world who support the idea.

The only problem: Many of the petition's signers are fake, using names like "Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas," according to TruthOut.org.

Herd immunity is a term often applied to widespread vaccine use, in this case means "allowing the virus to spread in the general population … so that allowing those least likely to be killed by the virus to return to normal life" while protecting those most vulnerable to the virus' lethality.

While that might sound appealing, the Trump administration has shown how poorly it protects the most vulnerable—the lack of a national prevention strategy, widespread affordable testing, and Trump's refusal to use the Defense Production Act to get manufacturers to make widely available personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare workers are just its most glaring failures.

Dr. Fauci says herd immunity through widespread infection—w/ vulnerable populations protected—is “really problemati… https://t.co/PnVTKvQQDO

—Firing Line with Margaret Hoover(@Firing Line with Margaret Hoover)1602885919.0

To promote the idea, which Trump has repeatedly mentioned on the campaign trail, the White House has shared a petitioned calledThe Great Barrington Declaration,promoting the idea. However, anyone can sign the petition and declare themselves as a doctor, including people who work as massage therapists, psychotherapists and homeopaths, a practice with no proven medical benefits.

Furthermore, on Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the herd immunity strategy "scientifically and ethically problematic" because scientists don't know enough about how much immunity a person gains after catching COVID-19 and how long it lasts, especially since some people have been infected by the virus more than once.

"Letting the virus circulate unchecked therefore means allowing unnecessary infections, suffering and death," he said.

an 920

Everything he says is false’: NBC reporter overheard CDC director slamming Trump coronavirus adviser

Alex Henderson

September 28, 2020

Dr. Scott Atlas has turned into President Donald Trump's favorite member of the White House coronavirus response team, and Atlas is clashing with other health experts in the federal government — including Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Center

In an open letter, the Stanford doctors wrote of Dr. Atlas, “The guidance he is giving to the White House does not reflect sound epidemiological reasoning, nor is it consistent with the current body of scientific knowledge about COVID-19.”

Attorney Marc Kasowitz, who is now representing Atlas, has threatened to sue signatories of the open letter and has demanded a retraction, saying the letter “maliciously defames” his client.

Stanford professor Michael Fischbach responded to the threat by writing on Twitter, “I stand by everything we said. More facts, more science. Less Kasowitz.” Full disclosure: Amy Goodman’s brother Steven Goodman is a dean at the Stanford School of Medicine and one of the writers of the letter.

==

see wapo dn expose 9/1/20

trump advised to find ivy league ~ to fauci

open schools, kids don't get it; open college sports

on fox says 25% yng ppl contemplate suicide; shutdown is destroying am lives [slippage to literal life]

ogus QAnon misinformation campaign against the CDC flooded social media, and made its way to Trump

President Donald Trump has once again amplified a bogus coronavirus misinformation campaign -- this time by retweeting a QAnon supporter’s false claim against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that only 6% of recorded COVID-19 deaths are actually due to the disease, while the other 94% are falsified. While this conspiracy theory isn’t new, Trump has amplified the false 6% narrative, and it has since spread even further.

The narrative Trump retweeted focused on the CDC’s update of comorbidity data, which shows “the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease.” The tweet shared by the president claimed that the CDC had “quietly updated” its earlier figures to show that “only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid,” while “the other 94% had 2-3 other serious illnesses,” implying that the CDC had covered up this fact.

But the CDC data update was not secretive or done “quietly” — it was published as part of a weekly update — and it simply provided additional details about reported COVID-19 fatalities. It distinguished COVID-19 deaths with no underlying health conditions (6%) from those of patients with underlying health conditions (94%). An underlying health condition does not inherently mean someone is on the brink of death, let alone that it is the primary cause of COVID-19 fatalities; for instance, an underlying health condition reported by the CDC can be diabetes, heart disease, or obesity (more than 42% of Americans are obese).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had to push back against the conspiracy theory after Trump amplified it, saying, “The numbers that you’ve been hearing, the 180,000-plus deaths, are real deaths from COVID-19. Let there not be any confusion about that. It’s not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19. It’s 180-plus thousand deaths.”
Millions could die if Trump listens to the adviser he hired from Fox’s green room

This is what happens when you get your pandemic advice from Fox News. White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas is urging President Donald Trump to allow the virus to spread through the country’s population in order to build “herd immunity,” and the administration has already taken steps in that direction, according to a reportfrom The Washington Post. Public health experts inside and outside the government warned the Post that a “herd immunity” strategy may prove ultimately ineffective if people who recover from COVID-19 can become reinfected. And it could result in a staggering death toll -- a Post analysis found that “it may require 2.13 million deaths to reach a 65 percent threshold of herd immunity.”

Atlas, a radiologist, used Fox’s airwaves to tell the president exactly what he wanted to hear. He regularly downplayed the threat posed by the virus over 20 Fox appearances between the end of April and his August hiring, as we documented. He repeatedly used those interviews to push for swiftly reopening businesses and schools based on the false premisethat young people “do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die” from COVID-19.

Fox’s coronavirus coverage is a public health menace, and we are all living -- or dying -- with the consequences.

==

doctors warn against ‘herd immunity’ plan

Nicole Karlis / Salon

One of President Trump’s top medical advisers, Scott Atlas, is urging the administration to lean into a national “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, according to a report by the…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-the-gop-is-so-susceptible-to-denialism

no lnx

Why the GOP is so susceptible to coronavirus denialism

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon September 2, 2020

Donald Trump didn’t like what the experts were telling him about the coronavirus pandemic, so he found a guy with “Dr.” in front of his name who will tell the president the bedtime stories he wants to hear. Dr. Scott Atlas isn’t an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology, as are coronavirus task force advisers Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he has pretty much usurped. Atlas is a radiologist and, more importantly, a senior fellow at the far-right bad-idea incubator known as the Hoover Institution (previously home to the infamous prediction that the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic would be around 5,000).

According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Atlas — who apparently caught Trump’s eye the way so many of his advisers do, by peddling BS on Fox News — is ready and willing to say all sorts of medically unsound things that just happen to align with everything Trump wants to believe about the coronavirus. So Atlas has risen rapidly as a power player and is reportedly even getting venerable institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to echo his unscientific beliefs.

Atlas has questioned whether wearing face masks slows viral spread (it does) and pushed for the CDC to change its recommendation on coronavirus testing to cover only people with symptoms, even though the science clearly shows that asymptomatic people are spreading the disease — and may indeed be a principal vector for spread.

Perhaps most distressingly, Atlas is reportedly behind Trump’s new enthusiasm for “herd immunity,” which is the latest euphemism for a non-policy letting the coronavirus run rampant, like a nationwide chicken pox party. Actual scientific experts in disease are uniformly against this idea, because it would dramatically raise the death rate and likely wouldn’t restore the economy anytime soon, as huge percentages of the population would continue to stay home rather than be part of President Bleach-Injector’s deadly science experiment.

For pro-choice activists and reproductive health experts, Trump’s embrace of a quack in a lab coat is feeling all too familiar. This strategy of putting lies and misinformation in the mouths of people who have an “MD” after their name has been standard practice for the anti-choice movement for decades. This has allowed anti-choice activists to push for policies that harmed public health, especially women’s health, while pretending they were doing it in the name of science. The George W. Bush administration, in particular, was fond of using doctors who shamelessly used their medical authority as cover to advocate for harmful ideas with little or no scientific basis.

This strategy, as well as those employed to push misinformation about climate science, helped train Republican politicians and conservative voters in the skills being currently used to muddy the waters around the science of the coronavirus pandemic. The result is that more than 6 million Americans are infected and nearly 185,000 have died, and that number is likely to continue growing at an alarming rate, especially as Trump now has a doctor to hide behind when justifying his hostility to public health.

Bush had a nasty habit of hiring doctors who were eager to use their credentials to justify their promotion of anti-choice propaganda. One of his FDA appointees, Dr. David Hager, was a gynecologist but more importantly a Christian conservative who rarely hesitated to make false claims that depicted both abortion and contraception, which have robust safety records, as medically dangerous.Hager advocated against making emergency contraception available over the counter, falsely implying that doing so posed a threat to the health of teenage girls. Even though the majority of FDA experts disagreed with Hager, the Bush administration blocked the policy based on his opinion.

It later emerged that Hager’s ex-wife, Linda Davis, had accused him of abusive behavior during their marriage, alleging that he withheld money unless she had sex with him and giving her sleeping pills so he could sodomize her without consent. Hager is still a popular talking head on the religious right, advocating for using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to forcibly cancel women’s abortions.

Under the Obama administration, emergency contraception became legal over the counter, without age restrictions. And there has been no measurable effect on the health of women or teenage girls, unless you count the record low rates of teen pregnancy, which are directly attributable to expanded contraception access under Obama.

Another precursor to Atlas is Dr. Eric Keroack, a Bush appointee to oversee a contraception program in Health and Human Services, who was hired because he opposed contraception use. Like Hager, Keroack was happy to leverage his medical degree to put a scientific gloss on misogynist misinformation. He went so far as to claim that women who have premarital sex become physically incapable of experiencing love and bonding in marriage.

Even Trump’s reported manipulation of CDC recommendations to reflect his hostility to virus testing has a precursor with the Bush-era war on sexual health care. Under Bush, the CDC altered information on its website about condom use to mislead readers into believing that condoms weren’t effective at preventing sexually transmitted infection transmission.

Beyond just the Bush years, the anti-choice movement in general has a long-standing habit of promoting doctors who will shamefully ignore medical science in order to present their anti-choice and anti-woman views as “science.” They even form organizations, like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that will use the auspices of medical science to create the illusion that there’s merit to anti-choice myths such as the claim that abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn’t), that abortion causes mental illness (it doesn’t) or that abortion is more dangerous than childbirth (it’s about 14 times safer).

Trump’s coronavirus denialism is spreading past the White House and into the Senate. Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa echoed a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory accusing doctors and hospitals of exaggerating the number of coronavirus cases and deaths, claiming that clinics profit from falsifying that data.

“These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” Ernst said.

In reality, medical researchers believe that coronavirus cases are being undercounted, due to lack of testing.

This conspiracy theory also has a precursor in the anti-choice movement: The false claim doctors lie about the effectiveness of contraception in order to trick women into having sex and getting pregnant, so they can get that sweet, sweet abortion money.

This conspiracy theory was endorsed by Bush’s HHS appointee Keroack, who ran a “crisis pregnancy center” that claimed birth control “actually increases (rather than decreases) out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion.” That myth has since become hardened into common wisdom in the anti-choice world. Abby Johnson, the anti-choice speaker at the Republican National Convention, has repeatedly claimed that contraception access increases the abortion rate by lulling women into believing we “could separate sex from procreation.”

It’s no surprise that Republican voters so readily sign onto Trump’s obvious attempts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus by dressing it up as “science.” They’ve had decades of practice of choosing to believe fake medical science, which is all too often peddled by doctors who should know better. As the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” astutely observed, the trick in learning to believing impossible things is simply practice.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/white-house-cover-up-new-report-show-trump-and-pence-withheld-truth-about-19-as-they-spread-lies/

knew big problem in June

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-new-adviser-calls-himself-the-anti-dr-fauci-and-is-pushing-a-controversial-herd-immunity-approach-and-medical-experts-are-worried-report/

proponents of the “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus pandemic have been arguing that if enough Americans are infected with COVID-19 and survive, the disease will be largely neutralized in the United States — an approach that many medical experts vehemently disagree with, including expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. But according to Washington Post sources, this is an approach that is being aggressively pushed by one of President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus advisers: Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the president’s team earlier this month.

Atlas, journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Post,“is urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.”

Atlas’ approach, Abutaleb and Dawsey explain, “relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.”

The “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic has been used in Sweden, but it has been rejected and sharply criticized by medical experts in many other European countries — which, in contrast to Sweden, embraced comprehensive social distancing policies. Abutaleb and Dawsey note that “Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’sliberties.”

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Paul Romer, a professor at New York University, told the Post that the Trump Administration “faces some pretty serious hurdles in making” a herd immunity argument — noting, “One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes. Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”

One of the Post’s sources, described by Abutaleb and Dawsey as a “senior administration official,” told the Post that Atlas considers himself the “anti-Dr. Fauci” and strongly disagrees with the social distancing recommendations of Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both of whom are part of Trump’s coronavirus task force in the White House. Fauci has warned that easing social distancing restrictions prematurely will have deadly results, and the summer surges of COVID-19 in Florida, Texas, Georgia and other Sun Belt states with Republican governors bear that out.

Eric Topol, the cardiologist who heads the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, slammed Topol as a source of “misinformation” — telling the Post, “This is really unfortunate to have this fellow Scott Atlas, who was basically recruited to crowd out Tony Fauci and the voice of reason. Not only do we not embrace the science, but we repudiate the science by our president — and that has extended by bringing in another unreliable misinformation vector.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-martha-maccallum-having-differences-opinion-science-surrounding-covid-19-something-we

wrongshow?

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trumps-new-coronavirus-adviser-right-wing-media-talking-head-who-consistently

Donald Trump announced this week thatDr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit and frequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.

Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.

But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.

Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas’ false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.