Bhattacharya jay
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OMG NIH DIRECTOR // CASEY MULLIGAN RFK2 DEREG CHICU ECON COVID STUDY W/ MOORE FAIL NBER
MERRI OK
SEE SCI SUPPRESS/ SCI JRNLS
trump trans
HERD IMMUNITY COVID FAIL LOCKDOWN
defund covid vax for old BS 5 25
STANFORD REVIEW? NEVER PRACTICED MED, WENT FOR ECON PHD?
HILLSDALE
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reving dr
Abundists haven’t been shy about their support for high level Trump toadies.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum
A billionaire software magnate with a side hustle leasing his land to oil companies, Burgum has become a favorite of the Abundance crowd. When his name was announced, Politicoreported that much of the jubilation came from Burgum’s attention to “one of the abundance agenda’s key fixations, or bogeymen: permitting reform.”
In Open Philanthropy’s announcementof their $120 million Abundance And Growth Fund (funded largely by tech titans Dustin Moskovitz and Patrick Collison), they cite Burgum’s previous calls for zoning reform and infrastructure investment as proof that abundance ideas have been “gaining traction for some time on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum.”
Matthew Yglesias, who Derek Thompson described as the “OG grandfather” of the ideas in Abundanceand is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, reassured his liberal audience that Burgum is “a totally solid pick who’ll do good things.” Yglesias also previously supported Burgum for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Alec Stapp, the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress made his support for Burgum very clear, saying “Excited to see Burgum land a cabinet role in the new administration. He’s a YIMBY abundance guy.” Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, also chimed in, adding “I think it was a really good pick.”
When speaking about Trump’s intent to nominate Burgum to lead the Department of the interior, CEO of theInclusive Abundance Initiative, Derek Kaufman said “We are excited for the abundance community to resume work with the new administration on electricity transmission and permitting reform, which came so close to becoming law at the end of 2024.”
Alex Trembathof the Breakthrough Institute celebrated Burgum’s first day in the Trump administration simply, posting a quote from Burgum that reads simply: “We are entering an era of abundance”
Armand Domalewski, a self-appointed abundance influencer with an increasingly prominent voice in the abundance world, celebrated Burgum’s appointment, posting “BURGUM BROS WE ARE SO BACK.”
Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation has been particularly thrilled with Burgum’s inclusion in the Trump administration, declaring “In Burgum we trust” and celebrating Burgum’s role in exempting companies from the Endangered Species Act and in ensuring further fossil fuel exploitation.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright
Oil and gas magnate Chris Wright is perhaps the single most popular Trump appointee among the Abundance crowd. Politicodescribed his nomination as having brought together “unlikely friends” to support “Chris Wright’s ‘energy abundance’ future” and as being backed by “the loose coalition of analysts and writers pushing for an ‘abundance agenda.’”
Inclusive Abundance’s Derek Kaufmanhas praised Wright’s appointment as a win for abundance and helpfully pointed out that “The word ‘abundance’ appears 11 times in the confirmation hearing transcript for President Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Energy, Chris Wright. It was invoked by Senators across the political spectrum, ranging from Mike Lee (R-UT) to Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to Martin Heinrich (D-NM).”
In their $120 million abundance grant announcement, Open Philanthropycelebrated the conservative embrace of abundist ideas, citing Wright’s appointment as evidence. “On the right, President Trump has issued an executive order focused on reducing energy costs […] and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has argued for the removal of burdensome regulations on nuclear power.”
Institute for Progress’ Aidan Mackenziealso praised Chris Wright’s nomination, saying “Both Burgum and Chris Wright seem committed to an all-of-the-above approach to energy; they’re very pro-oil and gas, but they’re also excited about forms of clean energy, especially nuclear and geothermal.”
The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembatheven defended Wright’s assertion that climate change is not a crisis, saying “Chris Wright’s claim that climate change is not a “crisis” is, while not the last word on the subject, much more scientifically defensible than the claims of his environmentalist critics.” Trembath later posted “Chris Wright: smart choice.”
Thomas Hochman summed up his opinion of the appointment simply: “Wright pursuing an all-of-the-above approach to energy production… pretty ideal”
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya
The Trump administration has utterly dismantled the National Institutes of Health and is currently proposing a 40% cut, which would devastate scientific advancement for generations. But don’t worry, abundists have full confidence in Trump’s NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya. While he does have a medical degree, Bhattacharya has never practiced medicine nor even completed a medical residency.
Open Philanthropy was bullish on Bhattacharya in March, when they said, “There is also cross-partisan interest in improving science policy, from newly nominated NIH director Jay Bhattacharya’s calls for a focus on reproducibility and funding high impact research, to the launch of the new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate at the NSF during the Biden administration.” Tragically, the Trump administration has proved less interested in funding research than cutting it, throwing the NSF that Open Philanthropy was so excited about into complete chaos.
The Foundation for American Innovation’sChief Economist, Samuel Hammond,said Bhattacharya’s appointment was cause for optimism, posting “That said, how many people do you know going into HHS? The folks I know around Jim O’Neill, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Makary are extremely high quality and serious about reform. Doesn’t mean I’ll agree with all their ideas, but there are some genuine reasons for optimism if you know anything at all ahout [sic] the behind the scenes.”
Institute for Progress’co-founder and co-CEO, Caleb Watney, elevated Bhattacharya’s analysis of the “increasing difficulty of funding novel research and younger scholars at the NIH,” a hobbyhorse of the abundance community, and said he was “very glad to see a larger focus on this issue.”
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[### WSJ Opinion Documentary: During the COVID-19 ...
Facebook · Wall Street Journal Opinion
3.4K+ reactions · 2 weeks ago](https://www.facebook.com/WSJOpinion/posts/wsj-opinion-documentary-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-group-of-prominent-scient/1449602823874361/)
The Lockdown Dissidents tells the story of researchers like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Robert Redfield—voices who say they were ...Read more
MARG REVO
by Tyler Cowen November 27, 2024
Trump has announced the appointment, so it is worth thinking through a few matters. While much of the chatter is about the Great Barrington Declaration, I would note that Bhattacharya has a history of focusing on the costs of obesity. So perhaps we can expect more research funding for better weight loss drugs, in addition to other relevant public health measures.
Bhattacharya also has researched the NIH itself (with Packalen), and here is one bit from that paper: “NIH’s propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades. Thus, in this regard NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects.”
I would expect it is a priority of his to switch more NIH funding into riskier bets, and that is all to the good. More broadly, his appointment can be seen as a slap in the face of the Fauci smug, satisfied, “do what I tell you” approach. That will delight many, myself included, but still the question remains of how to turn that into concrete advances in public health policy. Putting aside the possibility of another major pandemic coming around, that is not so easy to do.
My main worry is simply that NIH staff will not trust their new director. The problem is not so much GBD, which can be compartmentalized as a “political” stance, but rather the earlierclaims that many more people had Covid early than we had thought, and that expected fatalities were going to be quite low, with a maximum of 40,000. We all make mistakes, the question is how those mistakes get processed. If you interrogate Perplexity it will report “Bhattacharya has not publicly acknowledged or confessed to these mistakes in his early predictions.” You don’t have to agree with Perplexity (though contrary cites are welcome!), rather it suffices to say that reflects a common perception of the scientific community. He also seemed to be pushing those low fatality estimates for longer than might have been considered appropriate. And that is indeed a problem for his tenure at the NIH.
The danger is simply that NIH staff will double down on risk aversion, and they may not so readily support any attempt to make the grants themselves riskier, or rooted in the greater discretion of program directors, a’la DARPA and the like. They will fear that their director will not sufficiently follow the evidence, or admit when mistakes are being made and reverse course. Even if you fully agree with GBD and the like, I hope you are able to see this as a relevant problem. Every institutional revolution requires supportive troops on the inside, even if they are only a minority.
I very much hope this works out well, but in the meantime that is my reservation.
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How Fox covers for Trump administration malfeasance
Monday night was a perfect case study
Written by Matt Gertz
Published09/23/25 MMA
The job of a Fox News evening host isn’t to cover President Donald Trump and his administration, it’s to give them cover. The network’s stars are shameless propagandists who employ a variety of tactics to hide the president’s misdeeds from their viewers. Their Monday night programs, which followed days of administration chaos and corruption, perfectly encapsulate how this process works.
Trump and his supporters, in just a few short months, have ushered in an unprecedented and radical transformation of American political life. A president who won office in large part by exploiting voter discontent over rising prices has exacerbated that problem through unilateral tariffs while simultaneously consolidating power, crushing dissent, enriching himself and his allies, and dismantling and remaking agencies that secure goals like public health.
The result is that any given day can feature several instances of wildly scandalous behavior, any one of which might have sunk a previous administration.
On Monday night, four such stories were circulating: Trump pushed out a U.S. attorney who had refused to prosecute his political opponent on insufficient evidence and replaced him with a crony; several outlets reported that his Justice Department appointees quashed a probe into a White House adviser who had been recorded taking a cash bribe; there was ongoing fallout from his top media regulator publicly threatening media companies over airing Jimmy Kimmel’s show; and at a White House event the president and his advisers issued a warning over Tylenol usage based on an unproven link to autism.
Any of those stories, explained in context, could prove devastating for the president and his team. But Trump has maintained high approval ratings with his supporters — and thus maintained lock-step backing from congressional Republicans — in no small part because his base gets information through the filter of right-wing media. And much of the right-wing media, fearing a revolt from their audiences, isn’t inclined to provide information that conflicts with their biases.
Here’s how each of those scandals played out Monday night on the panel show The Five and the eponymous programs of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity.
- ### Fox ignored Trump replacing a defiant prosecutor with a crony
What happened:On Friday, ABC News reported that Trump was “expected to fire” U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert because Siebert had refused White House demands to bring mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who previously prosecuted Trump, because investigators did not find incriminating evidence against her. After Siebert left office, Trump publicly called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to “act fast” on prosecutions against James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) in what The New York Times called “an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal.” The president subsequently appointed Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide and longtime Trump legal adviser with no experience as a prosecutor, to replace Siebert; she took office as acting U.S. attorney on Monday.
Fox’s response: Fox’s stars spent the years of Trump’s first term and Joe Biden's presidency complaining of a two-tiered system of justice in which federal law enforcement agencies were persecuting the right while letting the left off the hook. In reality, Republican and Trump-appointed officials kept finding sufficient evidence to prosecute Trump and his allies and didn’t find enough to do the same against his foes. But now that Trump is loudly and publicly demanding politicized prosecutions — and pushing out his own appointed prosecutor when he refused to play along — the same voices have gone silent: The story was not mentioned Monday on The Five or the programs of Ingraham, Watters, and Hannity.
Many such cases: Fox hosts have similarly ignored stories about Trump’s relationship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. killing research into next-generation vaccines; statements by an immigrant the Trump administration sent in error to a notorious foreign prison who says he was beaten and sexually assaulted by guards; reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent information derived from a classified email over an unsecured group chat; and an exodus of top Defense Department staffers over concerns with Hegseth’s management style.
- ### Fox excused Trump regulator threatening media companies
What happened: Two days after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel inaccurately suggested that the alleged killer of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk was part of “the MAGA gang,” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr publicly threatened ABC’s affiliates and its corporate parent, Disney, with regulatory retribution. Nexstar, a large affiliate network which needs Carr’s approval for a corporate merger, subsequently said its affiliates would immediately preempt Kimmel’s show; soon after, ABC announced that the program was suspended indefinitely. On Monday, after widespread criticism of the administration’s effort to curtail speech and ABC’s capitulation, Disney said Kimmel would return to the air on Tuesday.
Fox’s response:Several Fox hosts used the news that Kimmel was returning to the air to claim that his initial removal had been a business decision unrelated to administration pressure. Hannity claimed that while those “on the left” had been “melting down” and falsely blaming Trump for Kimmel’s suspension, it was now proven to have been “a decision by ABC Disney, not the government.” Watters called it a “show-biz decision” and aired a chyron stating “ABC benched Kimmel, not Trump.” Ingraham agreed with guest Raymond Arroyo’s claim that “ABC deciding to put Kimmel back on, it does lay to rest this narrative that somehow the government was orchestrating his removal from the air.” Fox host and former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on The Five, “The government didn't decide it because he’s back tomorrow, so quite clearly the government didn’t force this.” Their talking point aligned with arguments that Republican politicians and Carr himself had offered about the case as they backpedaled away from its free-speech implications.
Many such cases:Fox hosts similarly made excuses when Trump tried to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook over a pretext; when Trump failed to release Epstein documents as he promised; when a Democratic senator was violently removed from a Department of Homeland Security press conference; when a foreign government gifted Trump a plane valued at $400 million; when the administration sent people in error to a notorious foreign prison; and when top Trump aides discussed plans for military strikes in an unsecured text chain — and inadvertently included a journalist in the group.
- ### Fox aided Trump advisor caught in bribery scandal
What happened: MSNBC and other news outlets reported over the weekend that the FBI had recorded White House border czar Tom Homan accepting a bag of cash from undercover agents in September 2024 as part of a corruption investigation, and that the probe was subsequently scuttled by Trump law enforcement appointees. Homan, at the time a Fox contributor and a close Trump adviser pegged for a key administration role on immigration if Trump were elected, had reportedly indicated to the agents that he could help them win government contracts. In statements, top officials from the FBI, DOJ, and White House claimed the probe had not uncovered evidence of illegal activity — but notably did not deny that Homan had been recorded taking a bag of cash from undercover agents.
Fox’s response: Fox hosts regularly provide administration officials and other appointees an opportunity to field friendly questions that help them spin damaging stories. Ingraham gave Homan that treatment on Monday. After offering him softball questions about a new California law banning ICE agents from wearing masks and how the administration can “speed up” mass deportations, she asked him to respond to the story from “our always reliable MSNBC” that “you took $50,000 in cash in a bag from an undercover FBI agent to help them win government contracts in Trump's second term.” In his minute-long response, Homan denounced the “hit piece,” claimed that “nothing illegal happened,” and touted his own “sacrifices” and work for the president — but notably did not deny taking the bag of money. For her part, Ingraham let Homan ramble and ended the interview rather than asking a follow-up question to clarify that point.
Many such cases: Fox hosts similarly aided Kennedy after he purged top leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Hegseth after he shared attack plans over an unsecured text chain.
- ### Fox cheered Trump pushing unproven Tylenol-autism link
What happened:Researchers have found that autism is largely a heritable condition and that the increase in cases over the years is due primarily to a broadening of the diagnostic criteria. But at a Monday event at the White House, Trump, Kennedy, and other top health aides “launched a broad offensive against the mainstream understanding of autism, claiming without new evidence that acetaminophen — the active ingredient in the common pain reliever Tylenol — was a cause of the disorder,” as The New York Times put it. Health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, previously called such evidence inconclusive, and the drug is “considered one of the few safe options to treat pain or fever during pregnancy.”
Fox’s response: Ingraham on Monday touted the administration for “sounding the alarm” over a link between Tylenol and autism in response to how “the number of children with autism has spiked unbelievably over the last number of years.” She then hosted Trump health officials Mehmet Oz and Marty Makary to tout the “growing body of evidence” in support of the administration’s position and to denounce contrary findings as “false.” Watters likewise highlighted the White House’s “major medical bombshell” before turning to another Trump health official, Jay Bhattacharya, to praise the administration for supporting “prudent medicine” and providing a “judicious evaluation” of the evidence.
Many such cases: Fox hosts similarly cheered after Bondi reportedly ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury probe into various Obama administration figures on spurious grounds; Trump ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear targets; the president enacted various unilateral tariff shifts; and the Trump administration implemented a mass purge of FBI agents.
MMA //
06/14/23 1:24 PM EDT
09/18/25 12:00 PM EDT
09/22/25
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The Trump administration’s unprecedented $500 million grant for a broadly protective flu shot has confounded vaccine and pandemic preparedness experts, who said the project was in early stages, relied on old technology, and was just one of more than 200 such efforts.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shifted the money from a pandemic preparedness fund to a vaccine development program led by two scientists whom the administration recently named to senior positions at the National Institutes of Health.
While some experts were pleased that Kennedy had supported any vaccine project, they said the May 1 announcement contravened sound scientific policy, appeared arbitrary, and raised the kinds of questions about conflicts of interest that have dogged many of President Donald Trump’s actions.
Focusing vast resources on a single vaccine candidate “is a little like going to the Kentucky Derby and putting all your money on one horse,” said William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University professor and past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “In science we normally put money on a number of different horses because we can’t be entirely sure who’s going to win.”
Others were mystified by the decision, since the candidate vaccine uses technology that was largely abandoned in the 1970s and eschews techniques developed in recent decades through funding from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department.
“This is not a next-generation vaccine,” said Rick Bright, who led HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, in the first Trump administration. “It’s so last-generation, or first-generation, it’s mind-blowing.”
The vaccine is being developed at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases by Jeffery Taubenberger, whom Trump named as acting chief of the institute in late April, and his colleague Matthew Memoli, a critic of U.S. covid-19 policy whom Trump picked to lead the NIH until April 1, when Jay Bhattacharya took office. Bhattacharya named Memoli his principal deputy.
Taubenberger gained fame as an Armed Forces Institute of Pathology scientist in 1997 when his lab sequenced the genome of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, using tissue samples from U.S. troops who died in that plague. He joined the NIH in 2006.
In a May 1 news release, HHS called the Taubenberger-Memoli vaccine initiative “Generation Gold Standard,” saying it represented “a decisive shift toward transparency, effectiveness, and comprehensive preparedness.” Bhattacharya said it represented a “paradigm shift.”
But the NIH vaccine-makers’ goal of creating a shot that protects against multiple or all strains of influenza — currently vaccines must be given each year to account for shifts in the virus — is not new.
Then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci launched a network of academic researchers in pursuit of a broadly protective flu vaccine in 2019. In addition to that NIH-led consortium, more than 200 flu vaccines are under development in the U.S. and other countries.
Many use newer technologies, and some are at more advanced stages of human testing than the Taubenberger vaccine, whose approach appears basically the same as the one used in flu vaccines starting in 1944, Bright said.
In the news release, HHS described the vaccine as “in advanced trials” and said it would induce “robust” responses and “long-lasting protection.” But Taubenberger and his colleagues haven’t published a complete human study of the vaccine yet. A study showing the vaccine protected mice from the flu appeared in 2022.
For Operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of the covid vaccine during Trump’s first term, government scientists reviewed detailed plans and data from academic and commercial laboratories vying for federal money, said Greg Poland, a flu expert and president of the Atria Health Academy of Science and Medicine. “If that’s happening here, it’s opaque to me,” he said.
When asked what data beyond its press release supported the decision, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon pointed to the agency’s one-page statement. Asked whether the decision would curtail funding for the Fauci-created consortium or other universal vaccine approaches, Nixon did not specifically respond. “Generation Gold Standard is the most promising,” he said in an email.
Taubenberger did not respond to a request for comment. Nixon and NIH spokesperson Amanda Fine did not respond to requests for an interview with Taubenberger or Memoli.
The HHS statement stressed that by developing the vaccine in-house, the government “ensures radical transparency, public accountability, and freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.” While any vaccine would eventually have to be made commercially, NIH involvement through more stages of development could give the government greater influence on any vaccine’s eventual price, Schaffner said.
If the mRNA-based covid shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech represented the cutting edge of vaccine technology, applying ultra-sophisticated approaches never before seen in an inoculation, the approach by Taubenberger and Memoli represents a blast from the past.
Their vaccine is made by inactivating influenza viruses with a carcinogenic chemical called beta-propiolactone. Scientists have used the chemical to neutralize viruses since at least the 1950s. This whole-virus inactivation method, mostly using other chemicals, was the standard way to make flu vaccines into the 1970s, when it was modified, partly because whole-virus vaccines caused high fevers or even seizures in children.
The limited published data from the Taubenberger vaccine, from an initial safety trial involving 45 patients, showed no major side effects. The scientists are testing the vaccine as a regular shot and as an intranasal spray with the idea of stopping the virus in the respiratory tract before it causes a broad infection.
“The notion of a universal influenza A pandemic vaccine is a good one,” said Poland, who called Taubenberger an excellent scientist. But he added: “I’m not so sure about the platform, and the dollar amount is a puzzler. This vaccine’s in very early development.”
Paul Friedrichs, a retired Air Force general who led the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in President Joe Biden’s White House, said that “giving $500 million upfront with very little data to support it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
“The technology for developing vaccines has tremendously evolved over many decades,” Friedrichs said. “Why would we go back to an approach historically associated with greater or more frequent adverse events?”
The government appeared to be transferring the money for the Taubenberger vaccine development from an existing $1.3 billion vaccine fund at Project NextGen, a mostly covid-focused program at BARDA, Friedrichs said. Most of that money was earmarked to support advanced research on covid and other viral vaccines, including those protecting against emerging diseases.
It is “very concerning that we’re de-emphasizing covid, which we may live to regret,” Poland said. “It assumes we won’t have a covid variant that escapes the current moderately high levels of covid immunity.”
Nixon said Project NextGen, for which some funds were earmarked for mRNA research, is under review. Kennedy is critical of mRNA vaccines, once claiming, falsely, that they are the deadliest vaccines in history.
Ted Ross, director of global vaccine development at the Cleveland Clinic, said he was “happy to see them investing in respiratory vaccines, including a universal flu vaccine, with all the programs they’ve been cutting.”
“But I don’t think this is the only approach,” Ross said. “Other universal flu vaccines are in progress, and their success and failure are not known yet.”
His team, part of the NIAID-funded flu vaccine consortium, is using artificial intelligence and computer modeling to design vaccines that produce the broadest immunity to influenza, including seasonal and pandemic strains.
As interim director, Memoli oversaw the start of the administration’s massive cuts at the NIH, with the elimination of some 800 agency grants worth over $2 billion. More than 1,200 NIH employees have been fired, and many researchers, including Ross, are in limbo.
His lab is close to testing a candidate vaccine on people, Ross said, while waiting to find out about its NIH funding. “I’m not sure whether my contract is on the chopping block,” he said.
*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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Targeting Medical Journals
On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”
Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.
ref1
no lnx nyt
Edward Martin wears a gray suit and blue tie as he speaks at a desk with a microphone at the Capitol.
Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent letters to science and medical journals, accusing them of bias.Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press
Teddy RosenbluthRebecca Robbins
By Teddy Rosenbluth and Rebecca Robbins
April 18, 2025
A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.
The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.
Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.
One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.
The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.
In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”
He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”
And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”
The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.
It was not clear how many journals had been targeted. Several prominent medical and science publishers said they had not received letters. Others declined requests for comment. News of the letters was earlier reported by MedPage Today, a medical news website.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington also declined to comment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy had any involvement.
Laura DiMasi, a spokeswoman for the American College of Chest Physicians, confirmed that the organization had received the letter but declined an interview request.
Most of what medical journals publish is highly technical, aimed at an audience of specialists. But they and the organizations that publish them have increasingly come under attack. Right-leaning sites like Breitbart have derided them as “woke medical journals.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, has been attacking the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which publishes a journal and runs a variety of reproductive health programs. It has received federal funding for an effort to promote maternal health. The alliance recently urged the Trump administration to cut funding and investigate the group, saying it was pushing liberal ideas about diversity and gender.
Several journals or their publishers have publicly opposed Mr. Trump.
In January, the American Public Health Association, which publishes a journal, was among several groups that sued the Trump administration over a memo freezing federal funding. That policy that has now been rescinded, though the administration has since halted other funds.
In March, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called mass layoffs at H.H.S. an “attack on public health.”
In 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic — the first time the journal had taken a position in an election in its 208-year history. The journal Nature endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in the 2020 election and spoke out against a second Trump term during the 2024 election.
Medical journals are afforded the same First Amendment protections as any other news media outlet.
Kent Anderson, a consultant for scientific publishers who has written about conservative attacks on medical journals, said that Mr. Martin’s inquiry could have a chilling effect among publishers.
“This is a fishing expedition from a U.S. attorney, and that makes people nervous,” Mr. Anderson said. “It may make them think twice about an editorial about treating women who have a spontaneous abortion or about transgender teens dealing with a health issue, because it may make them think that somebody is going to knock on the door.”
Mr. Kennedy had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)
He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.
“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”
As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.
Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”
Before becoming director of the N.I.H., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly chastised the editor in chief of a prominent journal, Science, claiming he had “publicly denigrated scientists” who opposed Covid-era lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya was widely denounced by mainstream scientists during the pandemic for proposing that the virus should allowed to spread naturally through the population.
Dr. Bhattacharya also co-founded a new journal pitched as an alternative to traditional scientific publishing. It has published contrarian views on Covid.
Christina Jewett contributed reporting.
Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
Rebecca Robbins is a reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services Department, Donald Trump
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mojo 3 25
jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor of medicine and economics who President Donald Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health, became prominent during the Covid pandemic as a contrarian. He was a fierce foe of the restrictive measures advocated by public health officials for combatting the deadly virus. As one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank, he recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection instead of fighting the disease with lockdowns, masking, and other countermeasures—a position widely opposed by medical experts as dangerous. And at the outset of Covid, he lowballed the severity of the pandemic, saying it was “likely” that the outbreak would be of a “limited scale” and cause 20,000 to 40,000 deaths, not the million or more predicted by public health officials. (Covid deaths have so far totaled 1.2 million.)
During the Covid crisis, Bhattacharya’s controversial and much-criticized views became well-known. Not as public was his role advising a group in South Africa that has claimed there was no Covid pandemic and that has pushed the conspiracy theory that Covid and climate change are “fabricated global crises” orchestrated to implement “centralized control.”
Weeks into the Covid pandemic, a South African named Nick Hudson, who describes himself as an actuary, private equity investor, and amateur ornithologist, created an outfit called PANDA (short for Pandemics Data and Analytics) to advance the notion that the global reaction to Covid—lockdowns and mandates—was “overwrought and damaging.”
In June 2020, when South African government advisers estimated that Covid could result in 40,000 fatalities in that country, Hudson, through PANDA, released an open letter calling that figure “outlandish”—that is, far too high. He told a South African publication that this estimate “would put us in line with the very worst experiences in the world. That makes no sense.” He added, “We have a younger population, which is associated with a lighter [disease] experience.” He insisted a reasonable forecast would not top 10,000 deaths.
But Hudson had been wrong before. In May 2020, he contended that because no nation “we have noticed” had seen “peak daily deaths” occur outside the range of 30-to-50 days from first death, “poor and middle-income nations would not have significant epidemics.” By the next month—after that 30-to-50-day window had passed—South Africa was still registering record-setting deaths. And greater peaks of daily deaths would continue to occur.
By early August, Covid deaths in South Africa reached 10,000—the number that Hudson and PANDA had maintained would be the high end—and they kept coming. Still, PANDA stuck with downplaying the seriousness of the disease. “There is no health crisis,” the group’s website said. “Well, actually, there is. But it isn’t caused by COVID-19. It is caused by the lockdown and other miserable” measures. The following month, PANDA suggested there was no reason to fear a “second wave” of Covid deaths. Yet a second wave would come and claim tens of thousands of more South African lives. Eventually, the death toll would be over 102,000.
On October 6, 2020, PANDA announced the formation of its “scientific advisory board.” The four members included Bhattacharya, as well as the two other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Also on the new PANDA board was Michael Levitt, a professor of biophysics at Stanford University. In July 2020, he had tweeted, “US COVID19 will be done in 4 weeks with a total reported death below 170,000… Reported COVID19 deaths may continue after 25 Aug. & reported cases will, but it will be over.” By the time he and Bhattacharya joined Hudson’s board, US deaths were nearly 225,000 and rising. Both had wildly underestimated the Covid death count.
While announcing the alliance with Bhattacharya and the other Covid skeptics, PANDA decried “the corrupt and the inept among scientists and politicians alike” who were “embarking upon a great intrusion against civil liberties and pursuing health policies that…would clearly harm more than help.” It called Bhattacharya and this fellow board members “courageous voices” and asserted Covid “presents negligible risk” to “the vast majority.” The group suggested the Covid response advocated by governments and public health officials was designed to establish a “dystopian ‘new normal.'” PANDA was leaning into paranoia.
When Hudson publicly assailed what he called the “false Covid Narrative,” which he claimed was being advanced by elites to create a “dystopian fantasy,” and argued that the “headlong rush for a vaccine is as unnecessary as it is dangerous,” he cited Bhattacharya’s presence on PANDA’s board to boost his credibility.
In early January 2021, Bhattacharya joined Hudson [vid] to
He nodded approvingly as Hudson accused the World Health Organization of fear-mongering about Covid and making sure “everyone was terrified.” Bhattacharya charged the scientific community with “ginning up panic.” They each shared their opposition to lockdowns, and both expressed their support for herd immunity.
In the video, Hudson expressed deep skepticism about the recently developed vaccines and opposed universal mandatory vaccination. Bhattacharya took a slightly different stance, asserting that the public health community had lost the credibility it needed to advocate for vaccine mandates. Still, he maintained that infection for non-elderly people was the best protection. The vaccine, he remarked, “certainly is going to be less well-tested [than infection]. The range of uncertainty around that will be much greater than the protectiveness of Covid infection.”
Hudson thanked Bhattacharya for joining PANDA’s board. Neither acknowledged that they had greatly underestimated the Covid death toll. By this point, nearly 400,000 Americans had died (10 to 20 times what Bhattacharya had characterized as “likely”) and more than 31,000 South Africans had perished (three times what Hudson had said was the highest possible death count).
In the years ahead, Hudson and PANDA would campaign against vaccine mandates and become more invested in conspiracy theories. During a 2023 interview, Hudson claimed there was a a “deeply disturbing” pattern of fabricated global crises, like Covid-19 and the climate “emergency,” which were being pushed to allow globalists to implement “centralized control.” On its web site, PANDA currently states, “There was no pandemic.” It adds, vaccines “were simply not required.”
Levitt broke his ties with PANDA due to its anti-vaccine stance. But there’s no public sign of Bhattacharya saying goodbye to Hudson and PANDA. The group noted in April 2021 that “overnight” several of its scientific advisory board members resigned due to its position on vaccines. It did not specify who had resigned. Its website no longer lists such a board.
Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Neither did Hudson nor PANDA.
On Wednesday, Bhattacharya appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for his committee. He paid lip service to the idea of following the science. But he also said he was open to more research to determine if there is a link between autism and vaccines, though plenty of science has already determined no connection exists. He ducked questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to cut NIH funding. No major Republican opposition has emerged to his nomination. Soon the preeminent government agency in charge of medical research could be under the control of a fellow who legitimized a Covid denialist and conspiracy theory-pusher who, like Bhattacharya, got it wrong.
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AN 1 25
If I have to pick only one from the list of nepotistic freaks, ghouls, B-list celebs, lost souls, Hitlerian zealots, and bunglers that will comprise U.S. President Donald Trump's inner circle of appointees, satellite charlatans, and court jesters, I am going to go with the one with the highest body count. There are plenty of zombies in Trump's starting lineup that would give you goosebumps—people who would cause you to choke on a sip of coffee and double check the pistol under your suit jacket if you met them in a diner to talk about internment camps and environmental deregulation. Picking the most terrible of these dregs is no easy task.
We have a serial pet murderer, a dumpy bald version of Reinhard Heydrich, and a bevy of cheerleaders for ecocide. Among Trump's cabinet picks there is a guy with a fetish for bear meat and whale carcasses and a viable plan to bring back smallpox and polio, but it takes more than a nostalgic and wistful longing for diseases of long ago to excite me. There is a certain irony to choose the most upright, clean-cut, impressively credentialed, and soft spoken of this hall of Hell hounds to be my best of the worst. Few things inspire cold sweat beads of fear like a murderer masquerading as a nice guy. Think of Ted Bundy as a Trump appointee.
I have to select Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's nominee to take over Francis Collins' former niche as director of The National Institutes of Health) as my absolute favorite monster from among the whole entourage of moral mutants and groveling sycophants. Bhattacharya would not raise your suspicions if he knocked on your door to deliver pamphlets—I would happily take a copy of The Watchtower and Awake from this reassuring man. He would bring a glow of satisfaction to most parents if their daughter brought him home. Hell, he even has ardent fans on the so-called left—the Tucker Carlson fan club comprised of Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and Matt Taibbi. You can toss Russell Brand in there too. In a game of free association, we casually link Bhattacharya with the issue of free speech—recall that Twitter once censored this honest doctor. Jacobin, in 2020, did a softball interview with one of Bhattacharya's ideological partners, Martin Kulldorff. On the left we sometimes worry more about a killer's rights to free speech than we do about his raised dagger.
Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit.
Free speech has been a distracting shibboleth for many sincere people, even though free speech has little meaning in a media system dominated by cash. The narrative promoted by both fascists and assorted enablers holds that Bhattacharya challenged the powerful forces of the “deep state” and was censored for his courage.
You might recall that the Stanford Professor of medicine coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) along with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. The rightwing Covid-19 gambit enjoyed unlimited oil industry funding and a mandate to assemble tenured prostitutes from academia to bamboozle the public. Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research—a Koch Network outpost in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a plump endowment from stock trading—must have had great confidence in the public tendency to skip the fine print. Leading up to, and following the pandemic, Bhattacharya has held fellowships and professional associations with The Hoover Institute, The Epoch Times, Hillsdale College, and The Brownstone Institute. The Brownstone is an Astroturfed organization with a Brooklyn visual motif and an Austin, Texas mailing address.
This Great Barrington Declaration spinoff—yet another brain child of the restlessly promiscuous, Koch affiliated, Jeffrey Tucker—specializes in Covid-19 minimizing, and anti-vax propaganda while dabbling in climate change denial. Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch revealed that the Brownstone is largely funded by dark money. To appreciate Bhattacharya’s mastery of absurdity, consider his statement in this 2022 interview posted at The Hoover Institute's Website:
It's a disaster that it's become a partisan thing. Public health, when it is partisan, is a failed public health.
If there is one essential talent that a fascist henchman needs, it is an utter immunity to self scrutiny, irony, and hypocrisy. I recall that Rudolf Hoss—the infamous commandant at Auschwitz—remarked in his dutifully composed autobiography (requisitioned by his British Jailers, postwar, prior to hanging), that his administration succeeded (I am paraphrasing) due to the cooperation of staff and prisoners alike. He could not wrap his head around the concept of victims and perpetrators having different agendas. They all worked together in a common purpose in Hoss' broken brain. Likewise, Bhattacharya has a Hoss-like inability to imagine that his narrative might be transparently nonsensical—how can a man affiliated with nearly every institution in the Koch Network not be self conscious when complaining of partisan medical narratives?
Bhattacharya's GBD is little more than libertarian rhetoric shaped to the contours of public health. Libertarian public health is a flagrant oxymoron—the task that Bhattacharya will be handed in a fascist oligarchy will be one that he has already done quite brilliantly—get the fuck out of the way and pretend that the mountain of bodies is an offering to the god of freedom.
Libertarian metaphor is wonderfully adaptable, like an elastic pair of stretch pants—one size fits all. Inaction is always in the service of human well-being. The climate regulates itself—"drill baby, drill." Guns need no regulations either, the "good guy with a gun" provides a natural balance. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff figured out the libertarian essence of the Covid-19 story—the pandemic would fizzle out via the designs of nature (herd immunity!). The mandate for the government public health agencies was to use magic and disappear. And that is what Bhattacharya will do, make healthcare as ephemeral as a slight-of-hand handkerchief. His role is one of absence, abdication, retreat—but ultimately one of corporate fidelity, privatization, and the empowering of insurance companies and other profit-seeking medical companies to feed upon a sickly public.
Herd immunity was the whole tale in the GBD—the entire document can be read by a second grader in 20 seconds, but I can condense it into a three second sentence: Let everyone walk into the pandemic like it was a fourth of July stroll in the park, and, bingo—herd immunity!
There was a tiny bit about "focused protection" for the old and the sick. There was even a suggestion that old folks ought to have their groceries delivered, but not a whisper about who would pay for it. Of course we all know that some 40% of U.S. residents are afflicted with obesity, an enormous risk factor for Covid-19 mortality. We might add in all the smokers, lead- and mercury-poisoned masses, and the generally compromised health of a nation long on high fructose corn syrup and short on medical coverage. What you won't find in the GBD is a word about contact tracing, isolation, support for workers, mask wearing, and equipment for afflicted individuals—you know, the stuff that South Korea did to reduce Covid-19 harms by a factor of five compared to the U.S. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya belatedly renounced “herd immunity” in a *Salon* interview. WTF? It was all about focused protection he explained.
The deep state censored Bhattacharya, the truth teller, and now he will lead the very agency that suppressed him. The truth is a little more nuanced. Bhattacharya and his fellow medically credentialed whores had a bigger platform than former Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci ever had. With Trump's appointment of Scott Atlas to his Covid-19 Task Force, the GBD nearly became the de facto inspiration for U.S. policy.
According to *The Lancet*, some 40% of US Covid-19 deaths were preventable—about a half a million deaths could be loosely traced to public recalcitrance regarding pandemic protocol. How many of these victims can be directly traced to the influence of Bhattacharya and the GBD? I can't venture an exact figure, but if you line up all the wicked, unqualified, strange, and misshapen beings who will guide Trump's administration into the stormy seas of fascism, not a single one—not Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Kari Lake, Jared Kushner, Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone else can be linked to the incalculable measures of suffering that Jay Bhattacharya shepherded into history.
This is how Benjamin Mateus, writing for the *World Socialist Web Site* described the GBD:
The AIER, a libertarian think-tank, which posits as their aim “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is engaged in a highly reactionary, anti-working-class, and anti-socialist enterprise. The declaration has been partly funded by the right-wing billionaire, Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists, and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.
Derrick Z. Jackson described the GBD as a plan for "herding people to slaughter." If any of you take issue with my favoring Jay Bhattacharya as Trump's most evil selection, when did Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tulsi Gabbard ever herd people to slaughter?
I am not denying that there are other abominable sociopaths who will be vying for crumbs at the master's table. Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary of the Interior respectively, might someday cause more deaths than the piddling few hundred thousand that I have speculatively traced to Bhattacharya. In fact, the wholesale, escalating assassination of the natural world will act in tandem with our disassembled, privatized medical system. You will get to live downstream from an industrial pig slaughterhouse, with no medical insurance, and no funding for public health.
Zeldin, Burgum, and Bhattacharya might be thought of as crossing guards for the grim reaper, or maybe you might prefer to picture them as scare crows, mannequins, or plastic fuck dolls—things that have no inner lives and serve as extensions of our fantasies.
Bhattacharya was never about free speech, he was about giving a thunderous voice to the corporate aspiration to kill you for profit. Bhattacharya whined about school closings but never acknowledged the 6 million U.S. children now potentially ruined by long Covid.
As you read about the fires turning LA into an ash heap, and Trump's plans to drill and frack until the entire globe achieves end-Permian parity, be aware that the styrofoam inhabitants of Trump's administration will do no more to alleviate your misery than so many cardboard boxes sitting in the storage rooms of Amazon. If we want relief we'll have to plan unprecedented acts of resistance.
One last thought—look at the Rorschach blot below and ask yourself...
Is this an image that summons worries about free speech denied, or does this picture remind you that the oil industry owns our future?
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mma
Fox guests and medical contributors encouraged Trump's worst COVID impulses. Now they're running the show.
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 11/26/24 mma
Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy.
Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.
Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (Bhattacharya has not been formally announced but is reportedly the top pick for the position.)
These picks, to an extent, show Trump aligning his health policy hires with his own Fox-molded views.
As president during the pandemic, he clashed with his official advisers when they contradicted what he was hearing from Fox personalities. The result was often chaos in decision-making, implementation, and public messaging.
Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and Nesheiwat received regular Fox airtime because on issues like the use of untested drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or nonpharmaceutical interventions like office and school closures, they tended to hew close to the Fox line — which also became the Trump line. If another pandemic hits, it is possible that they will be able to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses; they have real medical credentials, and Trump is likely to have greater confidence in them due to their shared past views.
But while Trump’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed was an unalloyed triumph in his first term, Kennedy is a crank who was openly hostile to the drugs. And other members of the second-term team regularly went on Fox to warn about the purported health impacts of the vaccines and criticize mandates to ensure their use. That does not bode well for the prospect of a successful response should another pandemic hit during the next four years.
RFK Jr. at HHS is a Fox-fueled disaster for health policy
Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson spent 18 months irresponsibly championing Kennedy as part of a strategy to return Trump to the White House. The network regularly promoted him as a Democratic candidate, then showered him with praise and vouched for his health views after Carlson ensured that he endorsed Trump.
The result is that Kennedy — who has pushed debunked claims about childhood vaccination causing autism, questioned the well-established science over whether HIV actually causes AIDS, and promoted kooky conspiracy theories about 5G cellular towers and chemtrails — is Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy was among the biggest U.S. sources of anti-vaccine misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, terming the COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Other noted anti-vaccine figures and fringe crackpots claim to be advising him on the transition.
He also suggested that the pandemic may have been “planned,” that public health efforts taken in response constituted “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare,” and that the virus itself had been “ethnically targeted” to afflict “Caucasians and Black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
- ### Trump picked other people he saw on Fox to run health agencies
Several other Trump picks for top health posts were heavily featured during the Fox’s coronavirus coverage.
Oz, the television personality and grifter Trump selected to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, became a Fox regular in 2020. He made scores of network appearances at the start of the pandemic, particularly championing hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that right-wing media figures promoted as a treatment for or preventative to COVID.
Oz’s commentary attracted the attention of Trump, who reportedly urged aides to consult with the TV doctor about the outbreak. Oz subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate with the support of Fox star and Trump adviser Sean Hannity, but he came up short in the 2022 midterms.
Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya also seemingly became Fox regulars because of their willingness to contradict COVID-19 guidance from federal public health agencies on its airwaves.
FDA selection Makary — who argued in a February 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. would reach “herd Immunity by April” — used his Fox platform in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta variant to criticize public health officials for warning of new strains of the virus. He also criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the vaccine’s purported health risks.
Reported NIH pick Bhattacharya — a signatory of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which called for building up herd immunity through “natural infection” — likewise used his time in Fox’s spotlight to criticize vaccine mandates. He agreed with Fox host Laura Ingraham during an August 2021 segment that the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines “too fast,” saying, “The FDA approval does not change the fact that we don't have long-term safety data with the vaccine."
And Nesheiwat, the Fox medical contributor Trump selected as surgeon general, promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination for children and young men.
Their commentary was part of a massive and effective effort by Fox to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination program. Now, if confirmed, they will be running major federal health bureaucracies.
- ### The last pandemic — and the next one
Trump regularly leaned on Fox’s programming and personalities for advice, and the network shaped both his worldview and his administration’s actions. No event demonstrated the extent of the network’s influence more than his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump didn’t treat COVID’s initial spread as an emergency because Fox was telling him that the media and Democrats were deliberately exaggerating the danger it posed.
He propped up hydroxychloroquine because the network told him it could be a miracle cure, refused to wear masks or socially distance because its hosts said those interventions didn’t work, and then urged the swift reopening of the economy they demanded.
He cut off support to the World Health Organization because one of Fox's stars suggested it and selected a White House adviser from the network’s green room to implement a “herd immunity” strategy.
The result was mass death.
The saving grace of the Trump pandemic response was Operation Warp Speed, an innovative program that sped the development of safe, effective vaccines against the virus. But Trump was out of office by the time the vaccines were deployed, and Fox responded with a yearslong campaign against the drugs. Fox regulars like Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya pitched in by criticizing the safety of the vaccines or mandates for their use.
The four doctors Trump picked from Fox’s airwaves do have real medical credentials, and their selections have received some praise from public health experts.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, said Nesheiwat is “a good appointment,” describing her as “very smart, thoughtful, interested in learning.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, who served in President Joe Biden’s White House, called the appointments of Makary, Oz, and Bhattacharya “pretty reasonable,” adding: “I have plenty of policy disagreements with them. They are smart and experienced. We will need them to do well.”
Indeed, they may take office as H5N1 bird flu spreads in American livestock and from livestock to people. If that virus makes the jump to human-to-human transmission, the U.S. health bureaucracy will be forced to grapple with another deadly pandemic.
Focusing specifically on Bhattacharya, Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias offered the best-case scenario for how Trump’s health appointees could impact a pandemic response:
Bhattacharya’s criticisms of nonpharmaceutical intervetions during 2020 went further than I would have, and I don’t agree with him per se. That said, he is well-credentialed and smart and also aligned with Trump on the substantive question.
Four years ago, Trump had a lot of people in place who he didn’t have confidence in and didn’t listen to, and then he had a lot of unqualified people articulating his views.
Bhattacharya can do what an executive branch official is supposed to do and channel Trump-style views in a professional way.
What’s more, precisely because his anti-NPI credentials are unimpeachable, if a much deadlier virus comes around that shifts Trump’s sense of the cost-benefit balance, he would be the right person to deliver that message.
But as he further notes, “the most effective weapon against Covid was pharmaceutical interventions” — and in Kennedy, Trump has selected “an anti-vaccine crank” as Bhattacharya’s boss.
That means things could get bad fast.
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PhD, Economics, Stanford University, 2000
MD, Stanford University, 1997 SO NEVER PRACTICED?
see NBER writes as econ?
the lever CMD
earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”
The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.
But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.
Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.
The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.
The academy is the newest initiative designed to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.
That campaign’s most recent success came earlier this month when Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined together to pass a symbolic measure to repeal a Biden administration rule requiring large corporations to mandate vaccines or regular COVID tests for workers.
This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign originally started, and how it has continued to supplant public health experts and hijack the governmental response to the pandemic.
The War On Public Health
When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.
Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.
One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.
Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.
The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.
A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.
To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.
Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.
Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.
“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection”
On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.
The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration’s website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.”
But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren’t verified.
AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly$1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.
AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network alsopocketednearly$3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.
In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER’s trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops.
Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch’s foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs.
Bhattacharya, Gupta, and representatives of AIER did not respond to requests for comment. Kulldorff insisted that he has never received money from the Koch network.
“Koch-affiliated foundations funded pro-lockdown COVID research by Dr. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, but they have never funded me, either directly or indirectly,” said Kulldorff. “Lockdowns have generated huge profits for Koch and other big businesses while throwing children and the working class under the bus.”
“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government”
The Great Barrington Declaration and its natural immunity strategy were widely derided by scientists around the world. The strategy was condemned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association while World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” Thousands of medical professionals called on governments to disregard strategies that rely on natural infection.
“Never in the history of public health has anyone suggested infecting the entire population with a pathogen with which we have no long term experience as a strategy for managing a pandemic,” said epidemiologist and physician Robert Morris, who has advised several federal agencies.
Nevertheless, the declaration and its authors were embraced by a number of political leaders, since their arguments provided their laissez-faire approaches to the pandemic with scholarly validity.
This list included President Trump. Two months before the release of the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump welcomed the document’s authors to a White House meeting, even though the administration’s COVID-19 advisor, Deborah Birx, warned colleagues that the doctors were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience.”
Trump’s COVID-19 adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, appeared to be one of several staff who supported the declaration’s strategy. While Atlas has denied urging the natural immunity approach, he publicly claimed that masks do not help curb the virus and called the idea of mandating vaccines for young people a “denial of science,” a claim that has been thoroughly disproved.
The president became enamored with herd immunity and the quick fix it promised for his reelection campaign. In mid-September 2020, Trump began trotting out the concepts that would soon be codified in the Great Barrington Declaration. He declared at an ABC News town hall, “And you’ll develop…a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.”
Following Trump’s lead, a number of Republican-led states adopted hands-off pandemic strategies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the resumption of most commerce in November 2020, including indoor dining, and barred localities from enforcing mask mandates and social distancing.
Declaration co-author Bhattacharya advised DeSantis on his approach and called the governor “extraordinary” for his handling of the pandemic. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation banning vaccine mandates statewide.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Recently, Abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates, which a federal judge recently ruled unenforceable because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Great Barrington Declaration’s central arguments also found support overseas. In September 2020, co-author Gupta met in London with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been slow to impose lockdowns and implement testing after the coronavirus was first identified in his country. A month after this meeting, Johnson sent a series of texts echoing talking points from the declaration, including that the virus wasn’t a real risk to people under 60.
The London meeting was also attended by Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist for Sweden, a country that became well known for its rejection of lockdowns. In April 2020, Sweden’s public health director asserted, “There is no clear correlation between the lockdown measures taken in countries and the effect on the pandemic.”
“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”
A Devastating Toll
Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to COVID-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced a COVID massacre.
At the time of the declaration’s publication, roughly 200,000 Americans had died from the virus. Since then, that number has quadrupled, the highest known number of any country.
Florida has become a COVID-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths at the time.
Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved. Last week, University of Texas researchers warned that the Omicron variant could lead to the largest surge to date in the state.
International efforts to reach natural herd immunity haven’t fared much better. A scathing report released in October by British lawmakers — many from Prime Minister Johnson’s own party — found that the country’s failure to respond to the virus quickly and aggressively was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” and led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”
And in Sweden, where roughly 11 out every 100 people had been diagnosed with the virus, COVID-19 fatalities stand at 1,476 deaths per million, many times that of its closest neighbors.
“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School”
Despite the costs, right-wing messaging against public health measures continues.
At first glance, lockdowns may appear beneficial to some big businesses, especially those that were deemed essential businesses and boasted robust online marketplaces. But social epidemiologist Justin Feldman, of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, noted that “some regulations directly cost businesses money.”
Feldman explained that “paid quarantine and isolation means workers will be paid to stay home instead of working,” vaccine mandates could “make hiring difficult during a labor shortage,” and mask mandates “signal to the public that there is danger and they will then not patronize businesses.”
That’s likely why in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions. In May, DonorsTrust issued a press release claiming lockdowns hurt workers.
In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.
And earlier this month, the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.
Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.
President Joe Biden hasn’t embraced herd immunity through infection the way Trump did, and he instituted a vaccine mandate for large companies that has faced court challenges and pushback from Republican and conservative Democratic lawmakers.
But Biden, whose COVID-19 response team is headed by former investment firm CEO and so-called “businessman’s businessman” Jeffrey Zients, has continued his predecessor’s push to keep the country open, even prematurely declaring “independence” from COVID-19 on Fourth of July last summer.
Earlier this month, Biden assured reporters that lockdowns would not be returning, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and continued spread of Delta. According to a recent scientific simulation, an eight-week stay-at-home order in response to the new surge could save 300,000 lives.
Last Friday, the White House’s coronavirus response team put out a statement reaffirming its limited approach, a stance Biden reiterated in his remarks on Omicron on Tuesday: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work & school for the vaccinated.”
The defeat of lockdowns is only part of big business’ takeover of the country’s COVID-19 response.
The country’s eviction moratorium was allowed to lapse after it faced multiple legal challenges funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation — at the same time as Charles Koch began making new investments in real estate. A subsequent moratorium put in place by the Biden administration was also struck down by the Supreme Court.
And while one of Biden’s first presidential promises was to clarify COVID-19 workplace safety standards, the resulting guidelines ended up limited to a small subsection of workers, following months of lobbying by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber and other corporate interests have also pushed for a corporate liability shield to protect employers from COVID-19-related lawsuits and have also been fighting against ongoing efforts to release the vaccine intellectual property at the World Trade Organization to speed up global vaccination.
The right-wing push against public health measures shows signs of success. Support for pandemic lockdown measures dropped significantly over nine months from the start of the pandemic. A Gallup poll from November 2020 found that a plurality of 49 percent of Americans said they would shelter in place in response to a serious outbreak, down from 67 percent in March. The decline was mostly due to a “sharp drop” among Republicans.
“A Shining City On A Hill”
The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors continue to push herd immunity through COVID-19 infections. Gupta co-founded a U.K. nonprofit called Collateral Globaldedicated to exposing alleged negative impacts of COVID mitigation measures, which has Bhattacharya on staff.
Bhattacharya, meanwhile, published an op-ed last January claiming that vaccinating people in his native India was “unethical” because most had “natural immunity” and the risk of adverse reactions outweighed the benefits of inoculation. A month later, the country experienced its worst-ever surge.
All three co-authors are also now affiliated with the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit founded by former AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker in May 2021 to prevent “the recurrence of lockdowns.” Bhattacharya serves as the organization's senior scholar, Kulldorff is a senior scientific director, and Gupta is an author.
According to Yamey at Duke University, the institute has been actively promoting vaccine disinformation.
“Time and time again, they have peddled dreadful misinformation and disinformation about vaccines,” he said. “They are, for example, vehemently opposed to vaccinating children, even though we know that unvaccinated children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. They very sadly went on television to say that health workers don't need to be vaccinated because they falsely claimed vaccination has no effect on transmission.”
Now declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, as well as former Trump advisor Scott Atlas have surfaced yet again, as the first three “fellows” at the new Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale, a private non-sectarian Christian school, has long been a factory for conservative thought. In 2016, during a Hillsdale commencement speech, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called it a “shining city on a hill.” Statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adorn a section of its campus known as “Liberty Walk.” Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.
Hillsdale refuses to accept public funds so it can be free from government mandates. Instead, it accepts large sums from the foundations and donor conduits of right-wing corporate executives and their families. The Charles Koch Foundation has donated over $300,000 to Hillsdale since 2015, and DonorsTrust gave over $3.6 million since 2014, including $2.5 million in 2020. The school has also found generous benefactors in the DeVos family, known for their Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos’ parents, the Princes.
According to the academy’s recently launched website, the new academy will work “to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.” To do so, the academy plans to host scientific workshops and conferences, publish academic papers, and engage in “media and government outreach.”
But Feldman isn’t buying it.
“They have no interest in science,” he said. “They have been wrong about the pandemic time and time again. They use their stature as 'experts' to push for policies that are indifferent to ongoing mass death.”
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Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an Indian American[2] professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.[3][4][5]
In 2021, Bhattacharya was opposed to lockdowns and mask mandates as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6][7] With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.[8][9][10] The declaration was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.[11]
Education
Bhattacharya earned both his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Stanford in 1990 with membership in Phi Beta Kappa, then received a Doctor of Medicine from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997. In 2000, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford.[5][1]
Career
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, a professor by courtesy of economics at Stanford, a professor by courtesy in Stanford's Department of Health Research and Policy, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, a senior fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, a research associate at Acumen LLC, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.[4][1]
He researches the health and well-being of populations, with emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.[4][5]
From 2006 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 1998 to 2001, he was an economist at the RAND Corporation and a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Department of Economics.[4][6]
COVID-19 pandemic
Main article: Great Barrington Declaration
Bhattacharya was an early opponent of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and questioned the severity of the virus.[6]
:{:{On March 24, 2020, Bhattacharya co-wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?", which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.[12]}:
Bhattacharya was a lead author of a serology study released in April which suggested that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California might have already been infected with COVID-19.[13] The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism for statistical and methodological errors and apparent lack of disclosure of conflicts.[14][15] The study was later revealed to have received undisclosed funding from JetBlue founder David Neeleman, according to an anonymous whistle blower.[16][17]}:
He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through "focused protection" of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. This would let the virus spread in low-risk groups, with the aim of achieving "herd immunity", which would result in enough of the population becoming resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic.[7] The authors conceded that it was hard to protect older people in the community, but suggested individuals could shield themselves and that efforts to keep infections low "merely dragged matters out". Bhattacharya wrote the declaration with Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University. It was published on 5 October 2020.[18][19]
In October 2020, the World Health Organization's Director General stated that pursuing herd immunity before vaccination would be "scientifically and ethically problematic", and "allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical."[20][21] Writing at Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski, Professor of Surgery at Wayne State University, argued that Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff had either been "politically very naïve" in working on the declaration with the American Institute for Economic Research, or that the doctors were "motivated as much by ideology as their interpretation of COVID-19 public health science". Regardless, Gorski opined, the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes.[22] In an interview, Bhattacharya said he hoped the declaration would prompt a dialogue about the benefits and harms of public health interventions.[23][24][25] In October 2020, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta met with then-U.S. President Donald Trump's health officials about the declaration.[26]
:{:{In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the "biggest public health mistake we've ever made" and argued that "The harm to people is catastrophic}:".[27] In May 2021, Bhattacharya was called as an expert witness for ten applicants who filed a constitutional challenge against Manitoba's COVID-19 public health orders.[28] The judge determined that the public health restrictions did not violate charter rights, noting that Bhattacharya's views were not supported by most scientific and medical experts.[29] In April, Bhattacharya participated in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' roundtable about "Big Tech censorship and the COVID-19 pandemic."[30]
In August, Bhattacharya provided testimony in defense of Florida's ban on mask mandates.[31] He publicly opposed COVID-19 vaccine passports and mandates, although he called the vaccines successful.[32][33] The judge ruled against the Florida ban and said that the state's medical experts "are in a distinct minority among doctors and scientists".[34] In December, with Kulldorff and Scott Atlas, Bhattacharya helped found a program called Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts school.[35]}:
In a 2021 case about masks in Tennessee schools, the judge criticized Bhattacharya's testimony as "troubling and problematic", said Bhattacharya had oversimplified conclusions of a study, and said he "offered opinions regarding the pediatric effects of masks on children, a discipline on which he admitted he was not qualified to speak".[36] He was also named a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a new think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that published articles opposing various measures against COVID-19; Kulldorff and Gupta, his co-authors on the Great Barrington Declaration, have also had roles there.[37]
:{:{In April 2022, Bhattacharya wrote that he experienced racist attacks and death threats during the pandemic. He alleged that "Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google" suppressed "our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation'". He wrote that "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip,' when I had proposed nothing of the sort."[38]}:
Also in April, in response to California proposing a bill that would discipline physicians for promoting or spreading false information about COVID-19, Bhattacharya said that the bill could turn "doctors into agents of state public health rather than advocates for their patients".[39] In December 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis named Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and several others to his newly formed Public Health Integrity Committee to "offer critical assessments" of recommendations from federal health agencies.[40]}:
According to a December 2022 release of the Twitter Files, Bhattacharya was placed on a Twitter "Trends blacklist" in August 2021 that prevented his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches. It appeared to coincide with his first tweet on the service, which advocated for the Great Barrington Declaration's herd immunity proposal.[41][42]
Selected publications
- Bendavid, Eran; Oh, Christopher; Bhattacharya, Jay; Ioannidis, John P.A. (April 2021). "Assessing Mandatory Stay-at-Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID-19". European Journal of Clinical Investigation. 51 (4): e13484. doi:10.1111/eci.13484. ISSN 0014-2972. PMC 7883103. PMID 33400268.
- Alsan, Marcella; Atella, Vincenzo; Bhattacharya, Jay; et al. (February 2019). "Technological Progress and Health Convergence: The Case of Penicillin in Post-War Italy". Working Paper. Working Paper Series (25541). National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w25541. S2CID 4903383. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
- Goldhaber-Fiebert, Jeremy D.; Studdert, David M.; Farid, Monica S.; Bhattacharya, Jay (2015). "Will Divestment From Employment-Based Health Insurance Save Employers Money? The Case of State and Local Governments". Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. 12 (3): 343–394. doi:10.1111/jels.12076. S2CID 154837009. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
- Bhattacharya, Jay; Gathmann, Christina; Miller, Grant (2013). "The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia's Mortality Crisis". American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 5 (2): 232–260. doi:10.1257/app.5.2.232. PMC 3818525. PMID 24224067.
- :{:{Yoo, Byung-Kwang; Kasajima, Megumi; Bhattacharya, Jay (February 2010).}:
- "Public Avoidance and the Epidemiology of novel H1N1 Influenza A". Working Paper. Working Paper Series (15752). National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w15752. S2CID 128860977. Retrieved 13 June 2021.}:
- Bhattacharya, Jay; Bundorf, Kate; Pace, Noemi; Sood, Neeraj (April 2009). "Does Health Insurance Make You Fat?" (PDF). Working Paper. Working Paper Series (15163). National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w15163.
- Bhattacharya, Jay; Choudhry, Kavita; Lakdawalla, Darius (January 2008). "Chronic disease and severe disability among working-age populations". Medical Care. 46 (1): 92–100. doi:10.1097/MLR.0b013e3181484335. PMID 18162861. S2CID 45230256. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
- Bhattacharya, Jay; Bundorf, M. Kate (May 2009). "The Incidence of the Healthcare Costs of Obesity". Journal of Health Economics. 28 (3): 649–658. doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2009.02.009. PMC 4224588. PMID 19433210.
References
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The dishonest doctors who were Fox News’ most frequent medical guests in 2021
These 10 guests made nearly 700 combined appearances on Fox this year – and often spread medical misinformation on-air
WRITTEN BY REBECCA MARTIN
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALICIA SADOWSKI
PUBLISHED 12/30/21
Politico recently admonished Dr. Anthony Fauci for his choice not to appear on Fox News, saying it deprived Fox viewers of “the Biden administration’s most public-facing figure in the effort to contain Covid-19.” But an appearance by one credible public health communicator wouldn’t be able to correct the imbalance of the network’s concerted effort to serially misinform its viewers about the pandemic.
Fox has repeatedly villainized Fauci, instead hosting a parade of dubious medical guests to justify the network’s skewed political narrative by spreading false or misleading statements to viewers. And because many in Fox’s guest lineup hold an advanced degree in public health or medicine, their willingness to lend credibility to the spread of misinformation is even more dangerous.
With the help of its rotating roster of supposed medical experts, Fox News turned vaccine passports and mandates into culture war battles because it’s “great for ratings.” According to a Media Matters study, Fox News undermined vaccines nearly every day over a six-month period. (Ironically, Fox’s own vaccine and testing policies are more stringent than those put forward by the Biden administration.)
Guests and hosts on Fox also spread many questionable “miracle cures” for COVID-19, including bear bile, vaping, and sunlight. Notably, Fox helped fan the flames of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin misinformation, leading to shortages of these medications which are crucial for treating other ailments.
These kinds of public health misinformation are deadly, especially when it comes from people who should know better. The frequent bad actors listed below each have a history of spreading misleading and false medical advice on Fox News, which gives these medical misinformers a huge platform to spread that bad advice to its viewers.
Here are the top 10 most frequent medical guests on Fox News in 2021:
- ## 1. Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel (193 appearances)
CitationMolly Butler / Media Matters
- Siegel holds a medical degree and teaches clinical medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where he is also a practicing internist. Siegel has an extensive record of downplaying epidemics and pandemics like swine flu, SARS, avian influenza, and COVID-19. His 2005 book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear blamed government, media, and pharmaceutical companies for “artificially” producing a panic from threats of disease. A Harvard study on misinformation found that Siegel contributed to false theories about COVID-19 early on the pandemic because he compared the virus to influenza. In 2020, Siegel declared the “worst case scenario” for COVID-19 was that “it could be the flu” and claimed that “it’s almost impossible you are going to die” from the disease if you’re “under 70.”
In 2021, Siegel routinely contributed to persistent anti-science propaganda on Fox:
- In September on America Reports, Siegel fearmongered that migrants and asylum-seekers would be vectors for disease. Siegel said, “they are going to leak into the neighboring communities,” and that Haitians are “clearly spreading COVID.” (Blaming migrants for disease spread is a longtime racist myth.)
- On Fox & Friends in October, he worried that vaccine effectiveness is waning and blamed the public health policies for “causing great depression and anxiety” rather than the pandemic itself.
- In November on America's Newsroom, Siegel criticized public health policies, like COVID-19 vaccinations for children ages 5-11, that “are not factoring in natural immunity at all.” “Two million kids in that age group have already had COVID, and I want that factored in,” Siegel declared. “I want them to say maybe wait a while, or maybe you get one mRNA shot that cements immunity at the lower dose.”
- In November on Fox & Friends, Siegel declared “I don’t believe in mandates, period” because they are “counterproductive” and will “lead to a divisive political battle.”
- ## 2. Fox News contributor Dr. Martin “Marty” Makary (142 appearances)
*
CitationFrom the November 8, 2021, edition of Fox News' Primetime
- Makary holds a masters degree in public health and specializes in abdominal laparoscopic surgery. He is a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University. Makary has been described as “a darling of the anti-vaxxers” for contradicting current vaccine consensus among medical professionals. Makary has also written that there is “no compelling case” for vaccinating “healthy” children and claimed that he is “not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date” – discounting all cases that involved disabled children with underlying health conditions.
Despite Makary making numerous false predictions (saying, for example, that the United States would reach herd immunity by April) and being called out by other public experts for downplaying the risk of infectious disease, Fox regularly invited him back on-air in 2021 to undermine public healthefforts:
- In March on The Story with Martha MacCallum, Makary predicted there was low risk of new variants causing COVID-19 surges, and on Your World with Neil Cavuto, he accused public health experts of “cry[ing] wolf” over the threat of new variants.
- In June on America Reports, Makary went so far as to complain that discussion of new variants is “fearmongering” to “manipulate people to get vaccinated,” saying, “I’m for vaccines, but this has turned into a tool to try to coax people into it.”
- In June on Special Report, Makary claimed it's time to “move on and live a normal life” comparing COVID-19 cases to influenza: “right now we’re about at 150th the daily cases of a regular seasonal flu in the middle of that flu season. So people have a distorted perception of risk.” According to Makary’s own employer, Johns Hopkins, COVID-19 has a mortality rate 10 times higher that of the flu.
- On Your World with Neil Cavuto in November, Makary undermined efforts to vaccinate children, saying kids with natural immunity should not be vaccinated. He went on to fearmonger about potential side effects of vaccinations.
- On Fox News Primetime in November, Makary claimed to be pro-vaccine but said he stands against “obsolete” vaccine mandates, especially for children. Makary falsely asserted that “public health officials have brushed under the rug the fact that kids have died from the vaccine, it's rare” citing myocarditis occurrences in young boys. (However the real risk of myocarditis is from COVID-19, not vaccines, and most people who develop myocarditis recover quickly.)
- ## 3. Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier (113 appearances)
CitationFrom the November 29, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
- Saphier holds a medical degree and practices radiology, a medical discipline that uses imaging like X-rays to diagnose and treat diseases. She has also long advocated against government intervention in public health. Saphier’s foundational views of medicine and health, outlined in her many books, blame individual people for “bad behaviors” and big government for causing health crises. She has also argued against vaccinating “young” or “healthy” people, including children, based on incredibly rare vaccine side effects. Saphier is still comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu and recently came out in support of allowing new variants to “circulate.” (This pro-infection strategy runs counter to the consensus of infectious disease experts).
Saphier has routinely undermined public health measures and downplayed the pandemic on Fox in 2021:
- In July on America Reports, Saphier minimized children’s risk from COVID-19, stating: “We have ample data that shows us that children really are at a very, very low risk of a severe outcome from COVID-19” and insisted that children should not be masked in schools.
- In July on Hannity, Saphier discussed dangerous side effects of vaccines but omitted informing viewers of the low chances of these side effects.
- In July on America Reports, Saphier advocated against mask and vaccine mandates, claiming these policies cause hesitancy: “We have to stop with the fearmongering, and if you keep telling people to wear masks after they are vaccinated and while transmission is low, people are not going to go and get vaccinated.”
- In November on America’s Newsroom, Saphier declared vaccine mandates for children were unnecessary and that “parents should be rest assured that their children are going to be safe either way, whether to vaccinate or not.”
- ## 4. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) (51 appearances)
CitationFrom the November 29, 2021 edition of Fox News' Primetime
- In addition to his career as a politician, Paul holds a medical degree and specializes in ophthalmology, a branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of disorders in the eye. Paul has been accused by other physicians of spreading false and misleading medical information, and his YouTube account was temporarily suspended after some of his comments about masks infringed on the platform’s policy prohibiting medical misinformation. Paul was the first senator to test positive for COVID-19 in March 2020 and he has claimed that his natural immunity to COVID-19 is better than vaccinated immunity, which is counter to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Paul is also still promoting the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite insufficient evidence for its effectiveness.
In his appearances on Fox to discuss the pandemic in 2021, Paul has habitually echoed right-wing media narratives and spread misinformation:
- On Your World with Neil Cavuto in April, Paul claimed that talking about COVID-19 variants is “fearmongering.”
- In July on The Ingraham Angle, Fox host Laura Ingraham interviewed Paul to dismiss fears of the delta variant, asking, “Is it really a disease if you don’t get any symptoms?” Paul went on to repeat misleading this talking point, asking, “What kind of disease is it that has no symptoms?”
- In August on Fox & Friends, Paul likened potential vaccine passports for air travel to terrorist no-fly lists calling the suggestion “authoritarian” because vaccinations are “personal medical decisions.”
- In November, Paul declared masks and mask mandates to be useless, and went on to assert that COVID-19 vaccines are “not working very well” on Fox & Friends.
- ## 5. Dr. Brett Giroir (45 appearances)
*
CitationFrom the November 29, 2021, edition of Fox News' Special Report
- Giroir is a former four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who holds a medical degree and specializes in pediatrics. Giroir also served as assistant secretary for health in the Trump administration and was on the White House coronavirus task force. Giroir defended the Trump administration response to the early pandemic, though he qualified that they “could have done better.” Giroir also defended the slow rollout of testing early in the pandemic, as he was testing czar.
In his appearances on Fox to discuss the pandemic in 2021, Giroir has often spread misinformation:
- Also in May on America’s Newsroom, he claimed business’ vaccine passports “makes no public health sense” and predicted influenza deaths will outpace COVID-19 deaths by the end of the year, musing that people may “have to show an influenza passport[.]… This is a very slippery slope.”
- In June on America’s Newsroom, Giroir said Fauci’s statements about the virus’ origins were “obvious[ly] to be antagonistic” to then-President Donald Trump, because Trump had amplified the lab leak theory. Giroir has also promoted the lab leak theory.
- In August on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Giroir stated he does not support state or school mask mandates and prioritized the economy over public health measures.
- In September on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Girior called vaccine mandates “the result of a failure of leadership,” continuing that “the federal government has decided to coerce” people into getting vaccinated, despite the fact that mandates have a long legal precedent.
- Girior has spoken in supportof COVID-19 booster shots, but claimed in October on Fox News Primetime that natural immunity “should be taken as equivalent to a vaccine” while talking to notorious anti-vax Fox host Will Cain.
- In November 2021 on Special Report, Giroir attacked Fauci, claiming “He’s become much more political.”
- ## 6. Fox News contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat (37 appearances)
*
CitationFrom the November 29, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
- Nesheiwat holds a medical degree and specializes in family and emergency medicine. In the early days of the pandemic, Nesheiwat repeatedly promoted supplemental zinc as a treatment for COVID-19 or to be taken to prevent the disease. The National Institute of Health found there is insufficient evidence “to recommend either for or against the use of zinc for the treatment of COVID-19.”
In her appearances on Fox to discuss COVID-19 in 2021, Nesheiwat attempted to justify criticism of public health measures and made misleading statements:
- In June on The Story with Martha MacCallum, Nesheiwat cautioned “the young male population” against being vaccinated due to potentially rare myocarditis side effects.
- In July on Fox & Friends, Nesheiwat said that CDC guidance calling for vaccinated people to wear masks indoors under some circumstances is “confusing and frustrating” and complained about school mask mandates: “I don’t like the fact that we’re putting the burden on our children. We don’t have data and evidence that tells us there is an overall net benefit to putting a mask on a young child.”
- In July on Fox & Friends, she dismissed the serious risks for children contracting COVID-19 as “extremely low” and emphasized that vaccinations should be a “personal choice.”
- In September on America Reports, Nesheiwat has cautioned against booster shots for children due to possible side effects of myocarditis, but did not mention that myocarditis is also a negative outcome from COVID-19 infection itself.
- ## 7. Dr. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya (33 appearances)
CitationFrom the November 29, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
- Bhattacharya holds a medical degree and is a professor of health policy at Stanford University specializing in health economics. He is also associated with the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank at Stanford. Bhattacharya received widespread backlash in 2020 for supporting the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which called for building up herd immunity through “natural infection” -- a strategy that would have risked millions of lives. Bhattacharya has also promoted ivermectin to treat COVID-19 despite FDA warnings. He also informally advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about lockdowns and school reopenings. In April, YouTube removed a video of a roundtable discussion hosted by DeSantis for violating its policy prohibiting medical misinformation, due in part to Bhattacharya’s claim that it is “developmentally inappropriate” for children to wear masks.
In his appearances on Fox to discuss the pandemic in 2021, Bhattacharya has habitually spread misinformation:
- In April on The Ingraham Angle, Bhattacharya called Fauci “the No. 1 anti-vaxxer in the country” for endorsing continued masking in addition to vaccines for COVID-19.
- In July on The Ingraham Angle, Bhattacharya undermined vaccine efficacy and promoted natural immunity instead, claiming the mandate “is bad for public health and it ignores the science” because it “discriminates against all of the working class people who’ve come down with COVID, recover from it, because we deem them essential, didn’t protect them while protecting the laptop class. Now we say, OK, that natural immunity doesn’t count for anything.”
- In August on The Ingraham Angle, he declared that “vaccine passports make absolutely no sense.”
- In August on The Ingraham Angle, after the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine, Bhattacharya was asked by host Laura Ingraham, “Did they not push this FDA approval too fast, especially when you compare it to the normal approval process?” Bhattacharya responded: “They did. Normally it would take years to get a vaccine tested and approved through the FDA approval process.” He later added that “the FDA approval does not change the fact that we don't have long-term safety data with the vaccine.”
- In September on The Ingraham Angle, Bhattacharya claimed that vaccine mandates are “actually very, very harmful to public health,” but went on to admit “there may be vaccines where it makes some sense,” insisting, “in the context of COVID, this is going to create some enormous vaccine hesitancy.”
- ## 8. Dr. Harvey Risch (32 appearances)
CitationFrom the November 24, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
- Risch is a professor of epidemiology at Yale University who holds a medical degree and specializes in cancer and chronic disease. Risch’s place of employment, the Yale School of Medicine, wrote a statement pushing back on his misleading claims about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19, and 24 other Yale faculty spoke out against Risch’s serial misinformation: “He is not an expert in infectious disease epidemiology and he has not been swayed by the body of scientific evidence from rigorously conducted clinical trials, which refute the plausibility of his belief and arguments.” Risch has also undermined the COVID-19 vaccine and railed against vaccine mandates.
In his appearances on Fox to discuss COVID-19 in 2021, Risch has often spread misinformation:
- In February on The Ingraham Angle, Risch speculated that COVID-19 vaccines were a conspiracy by Big Pharma, claiming that “to call them a lifesaving measure is totally beyond the pale of anything that is scientific and knowable. I think they’re selling vaccines basically.”
- In August on The Ingraham Angle, he declared vaccine passports are “a useless idea” because vaccinated people can still be infected and transmit COVID-19.
- In September on Fox News Primetime, Risch claimed “natural immunity” rather than vaccination is “the only way we will get out of this whole COVID pandemic” and claimed that “the vaccinated people create the variants.” Advocating for uncontrolled infection of a deadly virus is against every public health and epidemiology teaching, and The Lancet medical journal calls this approach “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”
- In October on Life, Liberty & Levin, Risch undermined the effort to vaccinate children stating “your child’s life is on the line” and he would rather homeschool his child than comply with school vaccine mandates because vaccines are “a risk.”
- In October on The Ingraham Angle, Risch fearmongered about the COVID-19 vaccine’s adverse effects and misled viewers that vaccines caused “12,000 deaths,” citing the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database. (The VAERS database’s self-reported entries are not confirmed to be linked to vaccination, and the CDC lists this disclaimer: “The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.”)
- In November on The Ingraham Angle, Risch claimed “there isn’t any justification” for children being vaccinated against COVID-19 and warned that “there will be way more deaths caused by the vaccines than the number of deaths in healthy kids that are occurring.”
- ## 9. Dr. Scott Atlas (30 appearances)
- Atlas holds a medical degree and specializes in neuroradiology, a specialty which focuses on diagnosing abnormalities of the brain, spine, head and neck. Like Bhattacharya, Atlas is affiliated with the Hoover Institution. After spreading medical misinformation on Fox News at the onset of the pandemic, Atlas was tapped to join the Trump administration as a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force, which exemplifies the feedback loop between Fox propaganda and federal policy. Other members of the task force have accused Atlas of downplaying the pandemic, while Stanford faculty voted to condemn Atlas’s misinformation. He has repeatedly pushed a controversial strategy of returning to life as normal with little to no mitigation policies.
In his appearances on Fox to discuss COVID-19 during 2021, Atlas consistently spread misinformation:
- In May on The Ingraham Angle, Atlas undermined faith in elected public health experts: “The American people have been harmed tremendously by the policies and now what we are seeing is people don’t know who to turn to, because the trust in experts is essentially gone. And honestly rightfully so. It’s a disgrace.”
- In June on The Ingraham Angle, Atlas declared it’s “irrational” to “go for a zero-COVID world or a zero-risk world.”
- In September on The Ingraham Angle, he asserted masks were “worthless” and have “very minimal impact” in decreasing symptomatic cases according to the study discussed.
- In September on The Ingraham Angle, Atlas fearmongered about vaccinating children against COVID-19: “It’s almost surreal to think that we have devolved into a society where we’re injecting experimental drugs into young children.”
- In November on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Atlas attacked public health officials for focusing on “stopping an infection” using mitigation strategies rather than allowing infections to occur and also railed against vaccine mandates. This follows regular pro-infection praise from Atlas, which infectious disease experts have called “pseudoscience.”
- ## 10. Dr. Peter McCullough (23 appearances)
CitationFrom the November 30, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
- McCullough holds a medical degree and specializes in cardiology. He also holds a masters degree in public health. McCullough has been discredited by most in the scientific and media communities for claims that the COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe and for his continual praise for debunked treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He has shared that he maylose his medical certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine based on his continual misinformation. His former place of employment, Baylor health, filed a lawsuit against him, citing “irreparable reputational and business harm” for claiming to be affiliated with the institution.
In his appearances on Fox in 2021 to discuss COVID-19, McCullough has repeatedly spread misinformation that undermines the public vaccination effort:
- In July on The Ingraham Angle, McCullough stated “no one under age of 30” should be vaccinated against COVID-19.
- In July on The Ingraham Angle, McCullough said “we can’t vaccinate our way out of this” and promoted pseudo-cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
- In October on The Ingraham Angle, McCullough promoted a conspiracy theory paper that claimed vaccines are more deadly than COVID-19 for children, which is counter to all known evidence.
- In October on The Ingraham Angle, he railed against vaccine mandates, stating that COVID-19 vaccines “are certainly not good enough to be mandated in any way, shape, or form” and fearmongering about potential vaccine side effects like myocarditis.
- In October on The Ingraham Angle, he stated that “natural immunity is really the backstop of us getting out of the pandemic” while undermining vaccinations as causing “excess harm.”
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Buck Sexton and RealClearFoundation president David DesRosiers discuss censorship, the First Amendment, and RCP's new Samizdat Prize, whose inaugural winners, Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and journalists Matt Taibbi and Miranda Devine, will join Dave Rubin for a live interview at a March 7 awards gala in Palm Beach, Florida.
DAVID DESROISERS: "Samizdat" is Russian for "underground publishing."
We're going to do this on the eve of the State of the Union. This is going to be our own State of the Union. We really think that we're moving in a bad direction with regard to one of the founding cornerstones of the way we should conduct our lives and our politics -- the First Amendment.
We really think that the First Amendment is not trending well, and we want to praise those intrepid souls who stand up for the rest of us so we can remain free.
...
"The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, the lie-killer that was that book, had to be smuggled into their own country. Some of the greatest dissident thinkers we have come to know, who challenged the lie that was Soviet communism -- and any type of regime suffering from a tyranny of the mind -- like Vaclav Havel, went underground to get above ground.
We see our country, a country committed to the First Amendment, has made a dangerous turn away from it. We want to call attention to that turn and show people the trajectory of where it is going if we don't stand up to it now. It's not going to get better, it is going to get worse.
What we want to do on Thursday, March 7, is to highlight three intrepid people who we think show what a real, clear presentation of First Amendment courage is.
...
The three folks we have singled out to get these awards capture that.
We have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, he was the guy who stood up to Fauci and said, "Hey, the scientific method can withstand a crisis." And everything in his experience, in terms of science, says that we are going the wrong way. He was treated very poorly -- and not just by the press and the politicians but by his own profession. And what did we see? History vindicated him. He was put up as a monkish superstition, but it turns out that Fauci was the pope and Dr. Jay was Galileo.
The same goes for the other two we picked. The New York Post's Miranda Devine is another recipient. If someone gave you [Hunter Biden's] laptop, if you don't jump into that with the responsibility that comes with being a representative of the First Amendment, you'd be a hack.
And the same goes for Matt Taibbi, the other gentleman who is receiving it. If you get invited into Elon Musk's [Twitter Files] to look behind the veil, and you see this alphabet soup of violations of the First Amendment -- the government is not supposed to do that, regardless of whether a private company wants them to.
I think you see in the journalists we picked, the differences between them are of degree and not kind, which is what healthy journalism should be. Matt and Miranda share a profession, ethics, and a sense of fearless reporting. And sadly, that type of reporting is being attacked at scale.
...
There's going to be a room full of people who deserve the award. We live in a society where we actually get more of what we praise. We have to praise the First Amendment and the people who have the courage for it. The Pulitzer Prize bent the arc of journalism, and I don't think it bent it the right way. We want to start something this week, stand it up, and reward and praise the people who keep us free so maybe we won't have to go underground and live in a Samizdat world.
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Governor DeSantis Closes the Curtain on COVID Theater
*On March 7, 2022, in News Releases, by Staff
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. –Today, Governor Ron DeSantis was joined by Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and world-renowned physicians and epidemiologists to discuss the failures of lockdowns and mandates in response to COVID-19. Lockdown politicians and the medical establishment have continually ignored data, instead choosing to stoke fear and push for lockdowns and mask mandates in their fruitless attempts to “stop the spread.”
“Over the past two years, the data has shown us what works and what doesn’t work. It is long past time to stop the COVID Theater,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “In Florida, we told the truth, we let the data drive our response, and we let Floridians make decisions for themselves and their children. As a result, Florida is in a better spot than states who used fear mongering and mandates.”
“Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, Florida has continued to stay ahead of the federal government by following sound science – not coercion,” said Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo.“Today, we were able to bring doctors from around the world to discuss COVID-19 and the lack of data to support mandates. Scientific debate takes place in a public forum – it is not hidden in federal bureaucracy. We need to get back to living – not hiding in fear.”
“It was Governor DeSantis who led the nation prioritizing seniors, followed the data for businesses to remain open, and children to attend school in person, recognizing how little their risk was,” said Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez. “While the Biden Administration criticizes our response to COVID-19, Florida remains to be the envy of the nation.”
“The lockdowns were an enormous catastrophic mistake that should never be repeated,” saidDr. Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Health Policy, Stanford University Medical School. “When we think about lockdowns, we should recoil with horror because the policies we followed have violated not just medical ethics, but also crushed the ability for scientists to discuss openly with each other facts and evidence. It’s taken a great amount of effort and willingness to face abuse in order for scientists to speak up and many have been silenced. I think [we need] the restoration of the freedom for scientists to discuss with one another openly what the evidence actually says without fear of repression that we’ve seen during the pandemic in order to support the lockdowns. I think that the proper place of science in society needs to be restored so that scientists can advise, but not dictate policy.”
“There is no justification for mandating vaccines for children, full stop,” said Dr. Robert Malone, M.D. “We’re of the strong opinion that if there is risk, there must be choice. As far as we’re concerned, there is no medical emergency now, and there is therefore no justification for the declaration of medical emergency and the suspension of rights that has occurred with that reupping of the medical emergency by the executive branch. Another thing that the state of Florida has led on that we are very grateful for is enabling physicians [and providing] the latitude to provide early treatment to patients. We have really tried to advocate for the ability of physicians to just practice medicine.”
“I come at it, not from the public health perspective, but from the individual patient doctor perspective,” said Dr. Shveta Raju, M.D., MBA, Primary Care/Internal Medicine Department, Gwinnett Clinic. “It is very difficult when you are talking to a patient and between you there’s a mandate. It definitely has affected the relationship in so many ways. I would really hope that going forward we can refocus on meeting the patient where they are, understanding their concerns, answering their questions, focusing on their overall health, metabolic health, making sure that they’re getting routine preventive care that’s appropriate for their age, and their mental health. There’s definitely been good, better media attention on the mental health of children, but the mental health of adults has been greatly affected as well.”
“We’ve really had an inversion of the precautionary principle,” said Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., Board Certified Interventional Sports and Spine Medicine Specialist, Northern California Orthopedic Associates. “I think that’s a great theme because it relates to school closures, lockdowns and masks. We know that masks interfere with communication, and children do not like wearing them. The children with hearing impairments and other impairments have difficulty wearing masks. And, we’re forcing them to do this just because we have this idea that they’re going to be doing something good. We have actually no high-quality evidence showing that they are.”
“At most 5%, based on a lot of the published data of COVID, was actually spread in schools,” said Dr. Christopher D’Adamo, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Maryland School of Medicine. “So what we do know is the collateral damage was real with this, for both physical health and mental health. On the physical side we’ve seen, when you’re out of school, you’re not getting recess, you’re not getting physical education, you’re not getting sports, dance, just general movement from class to class. We have seen this likely contributed to the increases in BMI and obesity, a doubling of the increased rate of BMI during COVID. We’ve seen a doubling in some places of the incidents of new type two diabetes cases. When you have social isolation, when you’re away from friends, especially at such a formative age like that with even more screen time, we’ve seen increases in anxiety, depression, stress, which is one of the ultimate ways to impair the immune system is to be stressed. This has resulted in emergency department admissions for mental health related conditions.”
“In contrast to actually a lot, what a lot of the voices here [are saying], my perspective throughout the early parts of this pandemic were very different than theirs,” said Dr. Joseph Fraiman, M.D., Emergency Medicine Physician, Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, Slidell Memorial Hospital, and Lallie Kemp Regional Medical Center. “My views were wrong at that time because the states and nations that didn’t take aggressive COVID policies, they didn’t do obviously worse. It took me about a year into the pandemic before it became really clear that it wasn’t obvious at all that there was any policy that was strongly effective at reducing COVID. The scientist in me had to take this emerging data that I was seeing and acknowledge my hypothesis had been falsified.”
“If you have had immunity, you don’t need vaccines, and that by itself sort of reduces any argument for having a vaccine mandate or vaccine passports,” said Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Brownstone Institute; Fellow, Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science & Freedom. “But for children who haven’t had COVID, the question was, we don’t know to what extent it helps, up against death and serious disease. Right now in the U.S., the Omicron wave is going down. Right now I think the benefits of vaccinating children are very small. We know that there’s a risk of myocarditis for young boys and young men, but also for girls. There might be other adverse reactions that we don’t know about yet. So for children, the benefits we know are at best, very small and we don’t know what the risk benefit ratio is. I think under those circumstances, it’s unethical to mandate vaccinations for children.”
“It seems to me that there’s been a sort of inversion of the schedule of uncertainty as I call it,” said Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Department of Zoology,University of Oxford.“Right from the start, everyone, all the powers that be were saying that these measures, lockdowns and other restrictions, will work. But the truth is we didn’t know whether they would work or indeed what the purpose would be, even if they did work, where was that taking us? The one thing we did know was that the measures we were proposing to implement lockdowns and other restrictions would have enormous cost. That was the one thing we were certain about. And yet that’s what we went ahead and did. So we inverted the precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm by doing the one thing that we knew would cause harm. Now we can say the benefit of hindsight is that the measures, in fact, didn’t do very much to slow down the spread and what we do see very sadly is that what we knew right at the start that these measures would cause harm that has in fact unfolded in front of us.”
“It’s interesting that there’s been a lot of misdirection from what we’ve seen,” said Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Medicine. “We put out our scientific understandings and evidence, and then we get criticized on things that we didn’t say. I think part of the problem has been that what’s been purveyed to our society is plausibility, but not science. There’s a big difference between things that seem plausible and things that are scientific. And so lockdowns are plausible, but they’re not scientific. The scientific evidence as we’ve seen is how harmful they’ve been.”
“I’m just pleased to see the shift that we could now acknowledge that perhaps our children are not as resilient as we most often heard that they were,” said Dr. Jill Ackerman, M.D., Advent Health Shawnee Mission.“I hope that [with] this recognition we can move forward and prevent this from occurring in the future and recognize schools are essential. We really left that core principle in the dust over the past two years.”
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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 and
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.
Column: RFK Jr.’s town hall showed the folly of trying to fact-check quackery in real time
June 29, 2023
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.
Column: Sorry, Joe Rogan: Scientists should never ‘debate’ anti-vaccine quacks. Here’s why
June 22, 2023
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.
May 23, 2023
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)
- ### Column: How the GOP — with Democratic Party connivance — has undermined a crucial effort to avert the next pandemic
- ### Column: Calling the police on campus protests shows that college presidents haven’t learned a thing since the 1960s
- ### Column: After a years-long pause, the FCC resurrects ‘network neutrality,’ a boon for consumers
- ### Editorial: Florida shows how to bungle a measles outbreak
Feb. 28, 2024
Column: As measles spreads, ‘herd stupidity’ grips Florida’s government
Feb. 27, 2024
===
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.
Nov. 30, 2022
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.
Nov. 30, 2022
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.”
Column: Did Sweden beat the pandemic by refusing to lock down? No, its record is disastrous
March 31, 2022
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.
---
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html
update, March 2024:}:
Tuberculosis Cases Are Surging in California, Newsweek
Chicago Evicts Migrants as Measles Cases Spread, Fox News
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations
December 27, 2023
Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.
AP
Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America's chaotic 2021 withdrawal.
AP
Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.
Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.
RCP
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.”
RCP
“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.
And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.
Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations. Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.
“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.
AP
"Operation Allies Welcome" in Idaho: some of the 90,000 Afghan arrivals from a polio-afflicted land.
AP
The reticence of federal agencies has not stopped some local officials, however, from raising public health alarms over massive immigration. New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned in April that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city had not been vaccinated against polio. The potentially paralyzing and life-threatening virus remains endemic in two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization. Since President Biden ordered what proved to be a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 90,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. under the terms of Operation Allies Welcome.
publichealth.columbia.edu
Ashwin Vasan, New York City Health Commissioner: Half of migrants are not vaccinated against polio.
publichealth.columbia.edu
It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.
Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.
“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”
Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the U.S.
The New York City Health Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations or to a request to speak with Dr. Vasan, but the numbers have only grown since he sent his letter. Since spring 2022, more than 100,000 migrants had arrived in the city, and more than 67,200 were living in taxpayer-funded housing at the end of November, according to the New York Times.
March of Dimes Foundation
Poster girl, 1957: The poliovirus, long extinct in the U.S, is again being monitored by federal health authorities, via wastewater testing.
March of Dimes Foundation
Last year, the first recorded polio case in the U.S. since 2013 was diagnosed in New York State, with the victim described only as an “unvaccinated man.” Also in 2022, poliovirus was found in the water supply of four New York counties, including Long Island, and New York City. Another positive test result was recorded in Rockland County this year, according to the state.
In the U.S., polio vaccinations remain part of “the routine childhood immunization process” under which the CDC recommends four doses. Adults who grew up in the U.S. are vaccinated, the agency said.
The last occurrence prior to the New York diagnosis had been in 1979. Since November 2022, the CDC has begun wastewater testing for the poliovirus, so long extinct in the U.S., in selected areas, but the agency did not respond to questions about those investigations. It does provide information on COVID and monkeypox, the latter a disease that primarily afflicts the gay population.
A thorough investigation, exploring all avenues of transmission and trying to source a virus to its root, is common among virus hunters, and the idea that millions of people coming to the U.S. could inadvertently carry with them some infectious disease is but one possibility. For example, thus far researchers have been unable to pinpoint where the infamous Ebola virus originates in equatorial Africa.
'Historically Atypical Countries'
The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million migrants who’ve arrived since Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates are years in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning even if the U.S. launched some kind of vaccination program it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.
In addition, the historic flood of illegal immigration during the Biden administration has also featured a much more global population. DHS uses the term “historically atypical countries” to describe the panoply of countries outside of Mexico and Central America from which illegal immigration has soared. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of annual encounters involving immigrants from historically atypical countries soared from fewer than 8,000 to almost 1 million. The first six months of 2023 saw more than half of official encounters – these numbers do not include what Border Patrol calls “gotaways” for whom little information is available – from historically atypical countries. But infectious diseases largely forgotten in the U.S. remain public health issues in both hemispheres, and many of those nations have much less robust vaccination programs than most modern Western nations.
Pierre Arents/Wikimedia
Ancient scourge: Leprosy victim, 24, in a medical monograph, circa 1886.
Pierre Arents/Wikimedia
In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, wild poliovirus was evident in 125 countries, but the zone where it remains endemic has shrunk to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with most recent cases occurring along the countries’ nearly 1,600-mile border, according to the CDC. Vaccination campaigns have proved problematic under the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, according to the CDC. Oral vaccines in “parts of the south and northeast regions” are “allowed only at health facilities, mosques, and polio vaccination sites.”
In March, Al Jazeera reported that the Taliban would allow a polio vaccination program for children, but precise figures on the country’s overall vaccination rate remain unclear. The World Health Organization estimates that 76% of Afghanistan’s children have received a polio vaccine.
But some countries have even lower vaccination rates. On Nov. 30, for instance, some 700 people, including many from Senegal and Nigeria, walked into the U.S. at the Texas border. Only 63% of Senegal’s children have been vaccinated for polio, and various fevers, hepatitis, and malaria are endemic there. Measles, which the U.S. declared eliminated here in 2000, are an issue, too. The WHO estimates 22 million children missed their first measles vaccine last year and more than half of them live in just 10 countries, all of which fall in the “historically atypical” immigration list.
X
Ashley St. Clair, conservative commentator: “All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?”
X
Measles cases have risen in the U.S., from 13 individual cases in 2020 to 121 in 2022, according to the CDC. Recent outbreaks in Ohio and Illinois have all occurred among unvaccinated children, according to state health officials. The age and nationality of victims is not made public, but the measles vaccination rate is below 70% in many countries that have sent immigrants to the U.S. recently.
While few are publicly pushing the panic button, some public health officials worry that a creeping mistrust of vaccines in the wake of the pandemic may make more Americans vulnerable to dangerous and even deadly scourges. Syphilis, for example, has been on the rise for many years but rose sharply during the pandemic.
COVID-19 has drawn the lion’s share of attention from the public health bureaucracy since 2020, leading to shortfalls in other areas, some experts said.
“All of these diseases are more prevalent in part because of lockdown policies which diverted public health resources and attention worldwide away from its traditional priorities of controlling the spread of these deadly infectious conditions,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, referring to measles and other maladies.
And just as there is no cure for polio, there is no vaccine for some infectious diseases. Malaria, for example, the mosquito-borne fever that killed more workers than yellow fever did when the Panama Canal was built, remains endemic in tropical zones, and its path to rare outbreaks in the U.S. usually follows either a trip made abroad or someone moving here, according to health officials in Florida.
Department spokesman Jae Williams told RCI the exact sources of many infectious disease outbreaks in the Sunshine State remain unknown, but the huge increase in illegal immigrants could be a clue.
“It’s always a possibility, and our most recent malaria cases appeared to be a strain from Central America,” he said. In other words, the malaria could have been brought by a newcomer or picked up by someone who traveled there and returned.
Central Florida this summer saw leprosy return, although the exact source remains a mystery, Williams said. Information about the age, sex, and nationality of victims is not public, and most of those who contracted the infectious, skin-disfiguring disease were described only as “landscapers.” Various accounts have speculated armadillos are to blame, but armadillos are not newcomers to the region. The theory holds that somehow the leprosy bacteria, which generally requires prolonged contact and against which most humans have developed immunity over millennia, is in the dirt armadillos wallow in, and the cases that broke out among landscapers then would be linked to the animals they encounter.
But leprosy is not endemic in Florida. It is most common in parts of southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and Brazil.
“The influx of people, sure it’s a problem and it’s always a possibility,” Williams said. “But we don’t really know.”
Nevertheless, the questions are being asked with more frequency. On Dec. 19, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative commentator, set off a firestorm on X, formerly Twitter, that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was filled with people who had recently been processed, released, and brought to the airport by Border Patrol.
“All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?” she wrote.
Delta did not respond to questions from RCI about what knowledge it had been provided about its passengers.
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===
Jay Bhattacharya
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:{:{Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID, including the lethality of COVID infection and the effects of lockdown policies. Dr. Bhattacharya studies the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, emphasizing the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and health policy. He has published many articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health, among other fields.}:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID, including the lethality of COVID infection and the effects of lockdown policies. Dr. Bhattacharya studies the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, emphasizing the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and health policy. He has published many articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health, among other fields. …see more}:
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I am honored to be the first recipient of the Samizdat prize, awarded by the Real Clear Foundation. To mark the occasion, I gave a speech on the importance of free speech in science. Please take a look!
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Accepts RealClear's Samizdat Prize: Government Should Not Censor And Smear Scientists
realclearpolitics.com • 15 min read
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Jay Bhattacharya reposted this • 6mo6mo
The Stanford Master's program in Translational Research & Applied Medicine is a great training for students interested in learning the practice of bringing new innovations in health care into practice. My friends in charge of the program at Stanford tell me that an informational session will be offered on the program on Dec. 8, 2023, at 10 a.m. Pacific.…show more
M-TRAM program at Stanford University
Are you interested in translational medicine? You are invited to hear about Stanford's Master's in Translational Research and Applied Medicine program on Friday, December 8th at 10 a.m. Details here: https://lnkd.in/gRrWfPmN
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Jay Bhattacharya reposted this • 7mo7mo
M-TRAM program at Stanford University
Are you interested in translational medicine? You are invited to hear about Stanford's Master's in Translational Research and Applied Medicine program on Friday, December 8th at 10 a.m. Details here: https://lnkd.in/gRrWfPmN
Jay Bhattacharya reposted this • 7mo7mo
"When there is scientific disagreement or uncertainty, the government must never pretend there is consensus and certainty."
- my op-ed with Jay Bhattacharya in The Spectator…show more
We’re fighting the Covid censors
thespectator.com • 5 min read
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A method and system of providing comparative cost information for health insurance plans. Claims files are generated for the reference population of real historical patients for each the plans. Information is presented to users on the distribution of out-of-pocket costs for health care that users are likely to incur in the coming year, based on the parameters of health plans, information on the user and his/her household, and the actual health care use and costs for a reference population comparable to the users. Information is presented to users on optimal contributions to their flexible spending account for health care in the coming year and solving a dynamic numerical model based on users' objective function; solutions are based on the parameters of health plans, information on the user and his/her household, and the actual health care use and costs for a reference population comparable to the user. A method and system of providing comparative cost information for health insurance plans. Claims files are generated for the reference population of real historical patients for each the plans. Information is presented to users on the distribution of out-of-pocket costs for health care that users are likely to incur in the coming year, based on the parameters of health plans, information on the user and his/her household, and the actual health care use and costs for a reference population comparable to the users. Information is presented to users on optimal contributions to their flexible spending account for health care in the coming year and solving a dynamic numerical model based on users' objective function; solutions are based on the parameters of health plans, information on the user and his/her household, and the actual health care use and costs for a reference population comparable to the user. …see more
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Stanford Profiles
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Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at ...
[### Jayanta Bhattacharya - Stanford Medicine
Stanford Medicine
https://med.stanford.edu › profiles › jay-bhattacharya](https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/jay-bhattacharya)
Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at ...
[### Jay Bhattacharya | FSI - Stanford Health Policy
Stanford Health Policy
http://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu › people › jay_bhatt...](http://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jay_bhattacharya)
Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.
[### Jayanta Bhattacharya | Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
Stanford University
https://college.stanford.edu › people › jayanta-bhattach...](https://college.stanford.edu/people/jayanta-bhattacharya)
Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow ...
[### Jay Bhattacharya
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jay_Bhattacharya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya)
Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an Indian American professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University.
Twitter Results
### Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) · X
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