#great barrington declaration

[theculturedmarxist]

This original report was produced by Important Context and the OptOut Media Foundation.

Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported roughly 3,900 American deaths from COVID-19 in the week ending on Jan. 11—more than died in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The number, which represented a 44% increase from the previous week and added to a national pandemic death toll already well above one million, hardly made the news. Such was the case in November when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report on long COVID revealing that as many as 23 million Americans were suffering post-viral symptoms.

The country’s media, and to a large extent, policymakers, have moved on from the ongoing crisis—a reality that is, at least in part, a testament to the work of one man: Jeffrey Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute, a shadowy new nonprofit dedicated to waging war on public health measures.

With his receding white hair, comically small circular glasses, and signature bowtie, Tucker looks positively academic. He can almost sound the part too. Tucker once told an interviewer from libertarian think tank the John Locke Foundation that he’d arrived at the name for his institute by looking to history. Brownstone, he explained, was a common building block in the 1800s before the advent of steel. He’d felt it an apt metaphor for the group’s purpose.

“I think going back to that time at the birth of the modern is really important now,” Tucker said. “We need to rediscover the principles of the founding, the principles of the enlightenment, get optimistic about the use of science within the framework of integrity, and deal with crises like pandemics within the framework of freedom and human rights. Those are all things that we discovered in the 19th century that we’ve somehow forgotten in the 21st century.” 

Tucker has long had one foot in the distant past. In 2016, he advocated for the return of child labor. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from 2000 noted that he had written for the white supremacist, neo-Confederate League of the South and was listed on the organization’s website as a founding member. Tucker denied his membership. In the 1980s, he was an assistant to Lew Rockwell, a fellow League of the South founding member and then editor of former Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s infamous racist and homophobic newsletter—Tucker himself is suspected of contributing writing but has declined to comment about it. He and Rockwell worked together for years at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which has “strong neo-Confederate principles,” according to the SPLC, and which Rockwell founded with financial backing from Paul. 

With his Brownstone Institute, a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Tucker has sought to turn the clock back on public health—and perhaps on child labor laws as well. The organization has become a prolific and prominent source of misinformation related to the COVID pandemic, including vaccine misinformation, with connections to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.

Just last month, Mother Jones reported that a majority of the members of DeSantis’ new “Public Health Integrity Committee,” which he established to scrutinize federal public health recommendations, had ties to Brownstone. That same month, DeSantis’ surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, spoke at a conference the group hosted.

Despite Brownstone’s prevalence, however, funding for the institute remains shrouded in secrecy thanks to America’s lax disclosure rules. But, new federal tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and provided to Important Context and the OptOut Media Foundation reveal that the organization has little popular support. Instead, it is bankrolled mostly by large donations of up to $600,000.

‘An Elite Protected Class’

Tucker, who has called for “reparations for the business victims of lockdowns,” fancies himself a populist these days, standing up for the little guy against out-of-touch “elites” imposing unnecessary public health measures that help the powerful at their expense.

“I know of no exceptions: every person I've heard claim that lockdowns are completely normal and much needed is a member of an elite protected class,” Tucker tweeted in November 2020.

But the man behind the Brownstone Institute has made his career in the world of well-financed, big business-aligned libertarian nonprofits. Tucker is a veteran of groups in the political orbit of right-wing billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. As recently as 2017, he worked as a director for the Foundation for Economic Education, which has gotten Koch support for years, including $205,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2021. DonorsTrust, a money conduit that Koch network donors and other conservatives use, also gave the foundation $295,000 that year. The fund is the biggest known donor to white nationalist groups, the Center for Media and Democracy found.

From 2017-21, Tucker worked as the editorial director and vice president of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian think tank that has also received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, including a nominal amount in 2021. The group also received $55,000 that year from DonorsTrust. 

Tucker is currently an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which received $500,000 in 2021 from Stand Together Fellowships (formerly the Charles Koch Institute), $150,000 from the Koch-funded State Policy Network (SPN), and another $150,000 from DonorsTrust. He is a research fellow at the free market think tank Acton Institute. An associate member of SPN, Acton received $250,000 from Stand Together in 2021 and over $1.4 million from DonorsTrust in 2021. Tucker is also listed as a policy adviser to the Heartland Institute, a free market, climate science-denying think tank and SPN affiliate that has received money from Koch in the past. In 2021, Heartland received $26,000 from DonorsTrust. 

Throughout the pandemic, business-aligned groups and the political right have been pushing back against public health measures. Koch-backed organizations have been in the fight since March 2020, messaging against business closures and later, school closures and masking in an effort to minimize economic disruption. The Brownstone Institute arose out of those efforts; specifically, an October 2020 conference Tucker helped organize while at AIER.

Held at AIER’s headquarters in Great Barrington, Mass., the conference spawned an influential open letter—the “Great Barrington Declaration”—calling on governments and scientists to reject broad public health measures in favor of pursuing herd immunity through mass infection and “focused protection” only of the vulnerable. Similar ideas had been proposed in a reopening plan from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation months earlier.

The declaration and its authors, three scientists from prestigious universities—Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and the Koch-funded Hoover Institution, Martin Kulldorff (then) of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford–were promoted by the political right, including the Trump White House, DeSantis, and Koch-tied groups, to undermine scientific consensus around public health measures.

The mainstream scientific community rejected the declaration. After the document was published, 14 major public health organizations, including the American Public Health Association, denounced it in an open letter, while World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” But the damage was done. The document had provided an academic veneer to a laissez-faire economic agenda: reopening businesses, without protections for workers, despite the circulating virus.

The declaration signaled that public health was the new front in the war over the size and scale of government. 

Tucker left his role at AIER to commit full-time to that war. Brownstone, which he founded in May 2021, would be his primary weapon. Initially billed as the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration,” the group brought on Bhattacharya and Kulldorff as senior scholars and Gupta as a contributor.

The Brownstone founder’s efforts were welcomed by Koch-tied organizations. For example, Tucker was interviewed in October 2021 about his new institute by the John Locke Foundation, which got $150,000 that year from SPN. A year later, Hillsdale College—which gave Bhattacharya and Kulldorff teaching fellowships—brought Tucker in as a lecturer on the economic consequences of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. In 2021, Hillsdale received $55,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, $30,000 from DonorsTrust, and $17,000 from Donors Capital Fund, another funding conduit of the Koch network.

Tucker denies that Koch has played a significant role in supporting the policy agenda articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration and blasted out by Brownstone.

“That’s a hell of a conspiracy theory…Koch orgs have been tragically acquiescent toward lockdowns,” Tucker wrote in October 2020 in response to a tweet pointing out the link between Koch and AIER.

Misinformation Hub

Since its inception, Brownstone has been churning out articles downplaying the seriousness of COVID to portray government mitigation measures—“lockdowns,” masking, travel restrictions, and mandates—as overreach at the expense of the common people. The pieces are generally misleading, rife with misinformation and faulty analysis, and promote a narrative that the institute and its writers are underdog truth-tellers against a powerful establishment.

Experts Important Context spoke to were highly critical of Brownstone. Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves called the organization “a collection of conspiracy theorists, disgraced scientists, radical libertarians, [and] anti-vaxxers, all of whom think they’re half-Galileo, half-Spartacus when it comes to their views on COVID-19 and public health more generally.”

“Despite the fact that their work is incoherent, unmoored from any real scientific evidence, they maintain that it’s a vast conspiracy that has kept them from being heard, even as many leading figures were the darling of the Trump Administration and current politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,” he continued. “We’re in tin-foil hat territory.”

Epidemiologist Eleanor Murray, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, said she hadn’t been paying attention to Brownstone. 

“The initial Great Barrington Declaration was clearly not a scientific document,” Murray said. “I teach and do research and advise students and consult with health departments; I don’t have time for them.”

Brownstone articles have suggested that school closures could be linked to school shootings like the May 2022 attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas; that New York’s spring 2020 COVID wave, which saw New York City hospitals forced to rely on freezer trucks to store human remains, wasn’t actually serious; that ”the children” have been poisoned by exposure to masks, tests, disinfectants, and hand sanitizer.

Unsurprisingly, Brownstone has been a hub for vaccine-related misinformation as well, with multiple pieces questioning the safety and efficacy of the mRNA COVID vaccines. The institute has even featured writing from notorious anti-vaxxer Dr. Robert Malone, who falsely claims to have invented mRNA vaccines.

In September, a Brownstone article declared, “The vaccine narrative is as leaky as the vaccines” and claimed that “the ‘abundance of data’ demonstrates that vaccines do not prevent infection, transmission, hospitalization and deaths for the under-60s.” Earlier this month, the group published a piece titled, “Did National Security Imperatives Compromise COVID-19 Vaccine Safety?”

“We now know [the vaccines] do not prevent infection nor transmission and have not prevented a continuing high incidence of COVID-19,” it falsely stated. “Furthermore they are associated with an unprecedented incidence of serious adverse events and deaths compared to any other drugs in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.”

To substantiate the claim of “unprecedented incidence of serious adverse events and death,” the authors relied on VAERS data, which numerous fact-checkers have noted is unreliable. 

The COVID vaccines have saved millions of lives. While breakthrough infections are not rare, studies have found that vaccination reduces transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the jabs, including the bivalent dose, for everyone ages six months and older. Major medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Pediatrics backed the recommendation.

As Mother Jones noted, Brownstone has promoted quack COVID cures like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and celebrated anti-vaccine demonstrations. The group has tacitly encouraged radicalism from its supporters. Tucker himself authored an article that ran with an image of a guillotine about holding public health officials and policymakers “accountable” for trying to save lives from a deadly, airborne pathogen. Tucker suggested that “consequences” would “set a fabulous precedent for the future.”

Brownstone fellow Paul Alexander, a former Trump administration HHS science adviser who famously advocated for mass infection, published an error-ridden, semi-coherent tirade on his blog calling for violent retribution against public health officials who sought to limit the spread of COVID. 

“You beasts, you Fauci and Birx and Walensky and Hotez and Francis Collins and Howard Njoo and Tam, all of you, you know you had zero science to back up your lockdown lunacy, but you were power-drunk and IMO malfeasant, you illogical, irrational, absurd, inept and incompetent malfeasant untermensche, you beelzebubs,” Alexander raved. 

“This must be Nuremberg 2.0, you must swing from gallows for what you did!” he concluded.

Nine Donations

Brownstone’s 2021 IRS Form 990 belies its populist appeals. Based on the group’s tax filings, a handful of large donations accounted for more than 83% of its total revenue. 

Brownstone brought in nearly $1.2 million in 2021 in contributions and grants, with $1 million, or 85%, coming from just nine donations ranging from $25,000 to $600,000. Donation amounts for the remaining $179,000 were not disclosed.

Details surrounding the large contributions remain a mystery. Important Context/OptOut Media Foundation was unable to identify any grants to the institute from other tax-exempt organizations. It is possible that more information will be revealed over the summer when the tax filings of donor-advised fund managers—charities that manage individual donation accounts for their clients—come due. It is also possible that individual donors or corporations gave directly, meaning their identities will likely remain secret, barring transparency from Brownstone.

The group notably pledges on its website, “We do not and will not share donor names.” Tucker did not respond to our request for basic details about Brownstone’s funding.

[fishelfe]

Considering what happened/is happening re: COVID, all those apocalyptic films portay humanity correctly.

hate how all these apocalyptic films show society breaking down the hot minute the grid goes down, with all the survivors banding off into tiny violent gangs that prey on each other.

bitch you are a member of one of the most social species in existence! it is actually insane the extent to which humans have evolved to use cooperation as our main survival tool. humans have been building and then rebuilding societies for as long as disasters have been bringing them down. an apocalypse would be fucking awful, but the survivors would end up building communities and networks and pooling resources and knowledge, because that's what humans do. that's what they DO!!!

[wat3rm370n]

Ron Desantis sure seems anti-vax, since he chose Joe Ladapo.

Ron Desantis doesn’t have to keep Joe Ladapo as the Florida surgeon general.

I realize people think back to when Ron Desantis wasn’t so vocally against the covid vaccines and think that somehow because he’s not actually been in the media seen out hiking with RFK Jr., that must mean he’s not really anti-vax himself. But there’s no other way to describe what’s going on here.

Ron Desantis didn’t have to hire Joe Ladapo, and he doesn’t have to keep him. Joe Ladapo was in with the Great Barrington Declaration crowd from the get go, and was in the meeting at the White House — named by the U.S. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis as having been invited by Dr. Scott Atlas in August 2020 along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Cody Meissner. They were backing Scott Atlas who supported a strategy of “facilitating disease-acquired herd immunity” and the anti-mask policy he was advocating for was found by the Select Subcommittee to be consistent with the pursuit of that aim.

Joe Ladapo’s Wikipedia page is quite a read, saying that when he was later appointed as the Florida Surgeon General in 2021 because Desantis had liked his op-eds — “He repealed quarantine rules for schoolchildren exposed to COVID-19 as his first executive action.”

In 2022, Ron Desantis assembled a panel of scientists to serve under Joe Ladapo, to evaluate federal public health advice to make sure it’s “tailored” to Florida, and most of the panel members are connected to the Brownstone Institute — the panel included Bret Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Tracy Beth Høeg, and when I tried to find out what connections these people had to Florida at the time to be able to tailor public health advice to that particular state, I couldn’t find the connection, these people were mostly all in other states.

Joseph Ladapo made an unwarranted and unreal assertion that there was a study that backed up anti-vax claims of risk from covid vaccines, and some months later it was revealed that the original eight-page study, provided by the Florida Department of Health, “initially stated that there was no significant risk associated with the Covid-19 vaccines for young men” and that it was Ladapo who did edits to replace that language to claim there was. Joseph Ladapo in 2024, was still using his platform as Florida’s State Surgeon General to instruct doctors to stop recommending covid vaccines, and citing anti-vax misinformation. Ladapo also refrained from recommending measles vaccination or even isolation, during a measles outbreak in Florida

Joseph Ladapo also had gone on the podcast of former Trump official Steve Bannon, saying that the vaccines are ‘the Antichrist of all products’ associating them with the devil, and saying the vaccines are “showing “disrespect” to the human genome” — which seems to be an evocation of the “gene altering” conspiracy theories promoted by anti-vaxxers, but which have no basis in reality.

Ron Desantis has been anti-mandate. If you are anti mandate — that’s anti-vax because vaccination is a community level public health measure and a security concern. This has been the case, there have been mandates since the early days of vaccines. There have been mandatory vaccinations in the military — for what should be obvious reasons. There have been vaccine mandates in healthcare jobs — for what should be obvious reasons. There have been vaccine requirements for schools — for what should be obvious reasons. Being against vaccine mandates is anti-vax.

I’m not falling for disingenuous arguments around Ron Desantis hedging anything. Ron Desantis sometimes tries to “both-sides” climate denial too. He was quoted in the news equating people who recognize fossil fuel as having a role in climate change claiming they are just the same as the people claiming the government is manufacturing hurricanes. He said that just 5 months after he signed some bill in Florida that was full of climate denial junk. This is all both preposterous and dangerous.

[sheilamurrey]

Health Freedom continues to win!

I’m sooo excited today, regarding several different wins for the #healthfreedom movement! Why is this important? Because at my core FREEDOM and PEACE are foundational tenants, and without such, I feel we’re doomed to fall for tyrants. Between my Native American and American Revolution patriot ancestors, suffering and slavery are felt deep in my bones. I pray daily for “all captives to be set…

[theculturedmarxist]

The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection.[3][4][5] The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.[1][2][4]

Signed by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a conservative think tank, and drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.[2][6] At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability.[4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[7] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[8][9]

The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[10][11] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[12][13] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[11][14] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[11][14] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[13] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".[10] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[15][16][17]

Something about the fact Covid is being talked about like a common cold now is horrifying to me.

"Oh yeah I got covid again, gonna be resting for a week or so"

"Coworkers came in sick again, now I've got covid. Oh well, whatcha gonna do"

Its normal now. The new strains, the repeated catching, the fact its no longer a pandemic and is now a part of our daily lives.

A deadly disease that can and does permanently disable people who catch it is being treated like an inconvenient stomach bug.

And it was avoidable.

People are dying and being disabled in fucking droves and all anyone can say is "whelp, that's how it goes!" As if there wasn't/aren't vaccines, as if there wasn't/aren't methods that can help (masking, social distancing, etc), as if other places who took it more seriously didn't have better survival rates.

This outcome wasn't a guarantee. Selfish, ableist, racist, conspiracy loving ass-hats made sure it happened.

Looking at the numbers and then talking to people who didn't want to mildly inconvenience themselves to save lives is horrific.

Millions died.

Millions more will follow.

Thousands were disabled by it.

Thousands will follow.

And it. Was all. AVOIDABLE.

[beardedmrbean]

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked  Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.” 

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

[covid-safer-hotties]

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID - Published Dec 22, 2021

Almost 3 years out from publication, and we can see the very real effects conservative dark money has played on public health in general, even for the liberal. (They never shift left for some strange reason.) Might be something to show your vote-blue-no-matter-who unmaskers in your life.

As Omicron surges, a shadowy institute filled with fringe doctors appears to be part of big business’ two-year strategy to legitimize attacks on pandemic interventions.

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 also pocketed nearly $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 Global dedicated 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.”

[blindedbythedarkness]

Man everything just feels so shit. I mean it IS so shit. Life is an utter dystopia and I'd like to say I can't imagine it getting any worse, but I'm sure it'll find a way.

This is just statewide eugenics and mass murder now. It's not even safe to seek healthcare. It's so incredible to me how we got to this point- I honestly half expect people to point out the hidden cameras any moment because surely so many people can't be this stupid?

That's what they are. Stupid. I'm not supposed to say that outloud or on any of the social media where I'm even halfway identifiable. It wouldn't be "nice" or "professional". But these people are stupid, selfish, inhumane, single brain-celled, murderous cunts. And that only goes about halfway to describing them. I never thought I could hold so much sustained hate for so many people, but it just keeps growing. I fantasize about hurting every one of them, to be quite honest- they have no qualms with actually hurting me.

Unlike most mass murdering-type scenarios I've heard about, in this case I can't even fantasize about moving away from it. Where would I go? More or less the whole western world has become like this (thank you Great Barrington Declaration etc etc) and I have no idea how I'd even begin to learn the language in the few good places left.

The only way out of this is through, if I'm lucky enough to survive that long. Time is the only parameter that might offer any kind of relief, since location seems off the table. Small steps are being made, I'm pushing some of them myself (though I can't really talk about them publicly), but its slow progress. It feels like one step forwards, two steps back. Maybe there'll be a better vaccine? Maybe places will properly clean the air? Maybe enough people will realise they hate getting sick enough to wear a mask? Maybe a whole new pandemic will arise and it'll be so bad that the protections from that will wipe out SARS2 in the process? Either way, more people are gonna die and worse in the meantime.

I really am so deep in depression now. It's not even depression, it's survival mode. It's just constant stress from constant threats to my existence, sometimes even without stepping out the front door. It feels like PTSD waiting to happen, only I wish it would happen because then at least we'd be "Post". I just feel totally numb and lonely and just in total despair. The pain and lumb in my chest never goes away. I'd say I don't know how much longer I can go on like this, but what choice do I have?

I'm so ready for this to be over. Properly, really, truly over. I'll never forget what people did and likely never forgive. But to be able to live a life feeling actually truly safe would be a dream. I long to be able to have the emotional capacity again to actually just feel happy.

I saw a post on here not long ago that said something like "'this too shall pass' but I really wish it'd pass a bit quicker". That is entirely the mood right now.

[darkmaga-returns]

By Tom Woods

November 19, 2024

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been named the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, speculation has turned to who might be appointed director of the National Institutes of Health.

Before we get into that, here’s a related story.

I’ve several times featured Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, on the Tom Woods Show, and I’ve mentioned him a number of times in this newsletter. Jay and I became friends in the course of opposing the Covid madness.

You may recall that Jay was one of three authors — with Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta — of the Great Barrington Declaration, which decried lockdown hysteria as a catastrophically bad policy decision.

Jay’s view was that measures as extreme as society-wide lockdowns demanded an overwhelmingly strong consensus — and such a consensus did not exist. How could it? Nothing like that had ever even been recommended, much less tried.

A left-wing student group condemned him on posters splashed all over campus kiosks. “On a progressive-dominated campus,” Jay said, “these posters were clearly an incitement to violence. The group placed them on kiosks all over campus, including near a campus coffee shop that I frequent.”

Then in August 2021, Stanford’s chair of epidemiology, Melissa Bondy, had a hand in a secret petition circulated around the medical school urging Bhattacharya to be censured for saying, at a Ron DeSantis roundtable, that there were no randomized controlled trials demonstrating that masks on children did anything to stop the spread of Covid.

That statement happened to be true, but no matter — he wasn’t supposed to say it. Junior faculty worried about tenure knew they were expected to sign the petition.

[wat3rm370n]

Vaccine uptake is really low, so why are the anti-vaxxers still so riled up?

To really be effective public health, and to have any chance at quelling transmission, most people should be vaccinated, and really there should be a better campaign to get uptake much higher than to have as of October 25th, 2024, just 13.5% of U.S. adults up-to-date as of the 2024─25 COVID-19 vaccine, which came out in August 2024. 

But there are very few covid vaccine mandates nowadays in the U.S., and yet there are these stories of people with grudges willing to join raids, make shit lists, and making outrageous fictional claims about the vaccines - from claiming they’re gonna be in lettuce or the food supply generally, that they’ll implant eggs, or actually claiming that they’re products of the antichrist. This hysteria about vaccines is really out of proportion, to say the least. 

There are some jobs, for example in healthcare, that might require vaccinations, and actually always have. People in the military are required to get all kinds of vaccines and most are grateful because at any time they might be deployed somewhere that there's stuff in circulation that isn’t at home. If this were anyone else complaining about work mandates, conservatives would say “you signed up for it” or “just find another job” and be told to quit whining. So it’s very difficult to understand this enthusiasm for gripes.

The minimizers and anti-vaxxers are enthusiastically aggressive which is peculiar since their Great Barrington Declaration, minus the protection of the vulnerable of course which we always knew was a lie, has been enacted pretty much everywhere anyway! It’s like the trucker convoy people protesting public health mitigations that had no longer existed for quite awhile. 

So why do they have to persist in a culture war against health & safety? I wonder if it’s because it was never about the particulars, it’s just about being against public health in general and finding targets to blame to distract from real problems with real solutions that some people with a lot of money and power don’t like.

Because it’s like Anne Nelson said on the Bucks County Beacon podcast The Signal: “follow the money. Because the greatest beneficiaries of their operations are the plutocrats that don’t want to pay any taxes and they don’t want any public services to the rest of us that cost them taxes, such as public schools, public roads, public libraries, public health. So they want to hold on to as much money as they can.”

[p4557]

Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya emerges as a top candidate to lead NIH - The Washington Post

"

Stanford University physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya, whose views on the coronavirus pandemic response proved controversial, could be poised for a major health agency role in the Trump administration. (Anthony Behar/Sipa USA/AP)

By Dan Diamond

November 16, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EST

When three academics in October 2020 insisted it was time to roll back coronavirus lockdowns — writing an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures — public health leaders rebuked their proposal as premature. Francis S. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, privately dismissed the authors as “fringe” experts and called for a “take down” of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses, according to emails subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Now, one of the authors of that declaration — Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist — appears poised for a top government health role, perhaps as head of NIH itself. Bhattacharya is a strong candidate to lead the nearly $50 billion agency in the coming Trump administration, with his name on an internal list of contenders being compiled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Kennedy was selected Thursday by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH.

The rise of Bhattacharya — from being scorned by the nation’s NIH director to possibly occupying his office four years later — reflects how the backlash to coronavirus policies has helped reshape conservative politics and elevate new voices. While Collins and other public health experts maintain that the Great Barrington Declaration’s ideas were rash and would have put vulnerable people at risk, many Americans have come to believe that school shutdowns and other pandemic-related policies lasted too long.

Bhattacharya, who has said he was a victim of what felt like a “propaganda attack” led by public health experts after the Great Barrington Declaration, has testified in Congress, met with lawmakers in both parties and offered advice to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other leaders navigating the pandemic. Republicans have hailed him as a truth-teller, contrasting the Stanford physician with government officials whom they blame for an overly stringent response to the health crisis.

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“He is respected within the medical community and would ensure that public health returns to science-based solutions — not bureaucratic failed practices,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the House panel investigating the coronavirus response, said in a statement about Bhattacharya’s candidacy for a government role.

Bhattacharya has also won support from Trump allies and power brokers such as Kennedy, who has called for major changes to federal health agencies in the coming administration; Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who has helped shape GOP politics during the past decade; and Elon Musk, who has said Bhattacharya was wrongly suppressed by Twitter executives before Musk bought the social media service and overhauled it. His academic mentors include Alan Garber, now president of Harvard University. His media cheerleaders include popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

But his stances — and alliances — have also alienated him from many public health professionals, including on Bhattacharya’s own college campus.

“We need to have an honest conversation about how a handful of prominent contrarian academics backed by corporate interests continue to tank evidence-backed policy, including COVID-19 protections,” Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who received her PhD in biology from Stanford this year, wrote last month in the Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper.

Harris, who led a Stanford student group focused on combating scientific misinformation, said in an interview that she believed Bhattacharya’s supporters, who include libertarian and conservative think tanks, were pushing policies that favored business interests rather than public health — one reason she is opposed to his candidacy for a government role.

“I think his decision-making can be called into question,” she said.

The Trump transition team declined to comment on Bhattacharya and his possible appointment.

“President-Elect Trump is making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration. Those decisions will be announced when they are made,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Bhattacharya, who holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. While that might have stymied his candidacy in prior administrations, Kennedy and his allies view his inexperience as a positive, saying they are seeking reformers willing to battle the bureaucracy.

Jay Bhattacharya

@DrJBhattacharya

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RFK Jr. and @NicoleShanahan had the causes of free speech & non-authoritarian public health as the center of their campaign.

I will always be grateful to them for that.

I'm disgusted by the establishment figures who attacked them for their integrity and courage.

9:26 PM · Aug 23, 2024

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Bhattacharya has long called for changes to NIH and other government agencies in critiques that began before the pandemic. In a 2018 working paper, Bhattacharya and co-author Mikko Packalen, an economist at the University of Waterloo, wrote that NIH could “do more to promote innovative science,” arguing that scientific and political considerations may have led the agency to inadequately fund exploration into new ideas. Two years later, Bhattacharya and Packalen concluded in another working paper that scientific breakthroughs had stagnated because scientists were wrongly focused on being cited by other researchers.

Now, Bhattacharya’s criticism possesses a sharper edge, saying his covid-era experience taught him the agency is wrongly stifling dissent. He argues that NIH officials have amassed too much power, pointing to Anthony S. Fauci, who led one of the agency’s centers — the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — for 38 years.

“I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time,” Bhattacharya said in a January 2024 interview with The Washington Post.

He also maintains that his critics should engage in self-reflection, pointing to declining trust in public health experts and their agencies. “Personally, I’ve lost almost all confidence in the American public health establishment,” Bhattacharya told Reason Magazine in June. He declined to comment for this article.

Rise to prominence

Before the pandemic, Bhattacharya was best known as a researcher who led Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, writing papers on Medicare policy and behavioral economics, and serving on NIH review panels. Colleagues and trainees who studied under him describe him as warm and intellectually curious, supportive of their personal pursuits and apolitical, according to six people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe personal interactions.

Then came a virus that reshaped daily life — and minted a new generation of telegenic physicians and academics, as nervous Americans sought answers.

Some of those pundits, such as Brown University’s Ashish Jha, urged measures such as social distancing and vaccinations, gaining influence in the Biden administration. Others such as Bhattacharya pushed an alternative approach — less government control, more individual decision-making — that won fans on the right.

And while many public health experts issued dire warnings about the need to shutter schools and businesses, Bhattacharya coauthored an April 2020 study that drew a different conclusion: The coronavirus was far more widespread than previously assumed, suggesting its risks were overstated.

The findings drew criticism from academics who challenged the study’s methods and data. Harris, the Stanford PhD, said she volunteered to help with Bhattacharya’s study by providing information to participants after they donated their blood — and felt “betrayed” by the authors’ messages to the public.

“They interpreted the results to mean that COVID was not going to be a big deal … not very deadly,” Harris said.

But the study’s key contention — that many Americans were unknowingly infected and showing no symptoms — was hailed by some conservative leaders eager to end lockdowns. Scott Atlas, a Stanford colleague who had become a White House adviser, helped arrange an August 2020 Oval Office conversation in which Bhattacharya and similarly minded academics met with Trump, who initially imposed coronavirus lockdowns at the urging of officials such as Fauci but had come to regret the decision.

Bhattacharya and his co-author on the April 2020 paper, Stanford infectious-disease specialist Eran Bendavid, provided consulting services drawing from their findings, maintaining children could safely return to school and young adults to work.

“The argument that easing restrictions is prioritizing the economy at the expense of killing people from COVID-19 is a false choice,” according to a September 2020 presentation by Bendavid and Bhattacharya obtained by The Post."

https://archive.is/2024.11.16-131650/https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/11/16/nih-director-jay-bhattacharya-covid-great-barrington-declaration/#:~:text=Stanford%20University%20physician,by%20The%20Post.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.11 (before 1940)

3114 BC – The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Maya, begins. 2492 BC – Traditional date of the defeat of Bel by Hayk, progenitor and founder of the Armenian nation. 106 – The south-western part of Dacia (modern Romania) becomes a Roman province: Roman Dacia. 117 – Hadrian is proclaimed Roman emperor, two days after Trajan's death. 355 – Claudius Silvanus, accused of treason, proclaims himself Roman Emperor against Constantius II. 490 – Battle of Adda: The Goths under Theodoric the Great and his ally Alaric II defeat the forces of Odoacer on the Adda River, near Milan. 923 – The Qarmatians of Bahrayn capture and pillage the city of Basra. 1315 – The Great Famine of Europe becomes so dire that even the king of England has difficulties buying bread for himself and his entourage. 1332 – Wars of Scottish Independence: Battle of Dupplin Moor: Scots under Domhnall II, Earl of Mar are routed by Edward Balliol. 1473 – The Battle of Otlukbeli: Mehmed the Conqueror of the Ottoman Empire decisively defeats Uzun Hassan of Aq Qoyunlu. 1492 – Rodrigo de Borja is elected as Head of the Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Alexander VI. 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: Forces of the Holy Roman Empire defeat the French in the Battle of Konzer Brücke. 1685 – Morean War: The 49-day Siege of Coron ends with the surrender and massacre of its garrison by the Venetians. 1786 – Captain Francis Light establishes the British colony of Penang in Malaysia. 1804 – Francis II assumes the title of first Emperor of Austria. 1812 – Peninsular War: French troops engage British-Portuguese forces in the Battle of Majadahonda. 1813 – In Colombia, Juan del Corral declares the independence of Antioquia. 1858 – The Eiger in the Bernese Alps is ascended for the first time by Charles Barrington accompanied by Christian Almer and Peter Bohren. 1871 – An explosion of guncotton occurs in Stowmarket, England, killing 28. 1898 – Spanish–American War: American troops enter the city of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. 1918 – World War I: The Battle of Amiens ends. 1919 – Germany's Weimar Constitution is signed into law. 1920 – The 1920 Cork hunger strike begins which eventually results in the deaths of three Irish Republicans including the Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney. 1920 – The Latvian–Soviet Peace Treaty, which relinquished Russia's authority and pretenses to Latvia, is signed, ending the Latvian War of Independence. 1929 – Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 500 home runs in his career with a home run at League Park in Cleveland, Ohio. 1934 – The first civilian prisoners arrive at the Federal prison on Alcatraz Island.

[lenbryant]

Long Post....Oops. LOL. "Fatuous claptrap" for the win! Thanks, Hiltzik.

(Hiltzik in the LA Times)

Elon Musk hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Twitter for DeSantis’ announcement of his presidential candidacy.

It went about as well as the April 20 launch of a rocket by Musk’s SpaceX, which ended in an explosion that destroyed the spacecraft.(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

- - - - - - -

I was taking my customary siesta Wednesday afternoon when I was jolted awake by the sound of a truck straining to go uphill. Come to discover that I had my computer tuned to Elon Musk’s Twitter, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was struggling to get out the official announcement of his candidacy for president.

The noise turned out to be Musk trying to get the thing to work in real time, amid feedback, weird musical interludes and long stretches of silence. Scheduled to start at 3 p.m. Pacific time, it finally got going on Twitter Spaces, an audio-only application on the platform, about 18 minutes late. I listened, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

As he struggled to resolve repeated glitches in Twitter Spaces, Musk and the moderator, a Musk acolyte named David Sacks, kept trying to assert that the technical screw-up was, in fact, a triumph brought about by the large audience. (Sacks claimed that more than 300,000 users had logged in.) “We are melting the servers, which is a good sign,” Sacks said early on. 

You can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.

— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been trying to punish Walt Disney Co. for speaking out against his education law

This reminded many listeners of the claim by SpaceX, another Musk venture, that its April 20 launch of a prototype rocket, which ended with the vehicle exploding in flight four minutes after lift-off, was a success. Never mind that the launch destroyed the launchpad, showered a neighboring community with debris and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to mount a major investigation.

Once it got underway, the Twitter event unfolded as a love fest between DeSantis and Musk. The general theme was what my mother used to describe as “I like me, who do you like?” 

Musk and DeSantis praised each other for their dedication to free speech, and Sacks brought on several right-wing sophists to add their voices. They included Jay Bhattacharya, one of the drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, as I reported this week, advocated letting the COVID virus run rampant through the population in quest of the elusive goal of “herd immunity” — at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. 

Another was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whose claim to fame on a national scale was issuing a Christmas tweet in 2021 showing himself, his wife and their five kids brandishing assault weapons. “Santa, pls bring ammo,” the tweet read. (In December 2021, there were 39 mass shootings in the U.S., taking 36 lives and wounding 160.)

DeSantis said Florida was safer than blue-state cities, where “you got kids more likely to get shot than to receive a first-class education.” A reminder: One of the worst school shootings in American history took place in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018, when 17 people were killed and 17 injured. In April, DeSantis signed a law allowing Floridians to carry guns without a permit.

It would be wrong to say there weren’t some lighthearted moments during the Twitter event. Unfortunately for DeSantis, the best joke came from President Biden: While Musk was struggling to get the event launched, Biden posted a tweet that read, “This link works,” pointing to a fund-raising site for the Biden-Harris campaign.

If you were looking for policy prescriptions from the freshly minted candidate, you didn’t hear anything new. Put it this way: If you were at a party where you had to down a shot of whiskey every time DeSantis uttered the word “woke,” you were reduced to insensibility within ten or twenty minutes. If the drinking game included a shot when DeSantis took a shot at “the legacy media,” you may have needed to get your stomach pumped.

Other than that, it was a festival of cynical lies and rank hypocrisies uttered by DeSantis. 

He spoke up for free speech and open debate, for instance. “People should be exposed to different viewpoints,” he said. “You can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.” 

This is the guy who has waged a ferocious battle with Walt Disney Co. because Disney had spoken out against his “Don’t Say Gay” law, which stifles the teaching of gender issues in the schools.

When Sacks primed him with a question about the fight with Disney, DeSantis replied, “We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong; Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology in elementary school.” He added that Disney’s “corporate culture had really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex into the programming for the youth.” One doesn’t have to be a fan of Disney to see that as fatuous claptrap.

DeSantis also dismissed accusations that Florida is a hotbed of book-banning as “a hoax.” All his administration has done, he said, has been “to empower parents with the ability to review the curriculum, to know what books are being used in school.” That’s one way of looking at it. 

The right way is to observe that he’s empowered a tiny cadre of reactionary activists to force books they don’t like off the shelves of Florida schools. As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, a majority of the complaints about schoolbooks nationwide have come from just 11 complainants. Florida ranks second among the states in the number of schoolbook challenges, after Texas.

By the way, one of the Republican toadies DeSantis appointed to the board created to oversee Disney’s development district (as part of his retaliation against the company) is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the right-wing censorship-happy organization Moms for Liberty.

When Bhattacharya came online, DeSantis took the opportunity to boast about his success against the COVID pandemic. The truth is that Florida’s record is one of abject, lethal failure. Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 population is the 10th worst in the nation. DeSantis has appointed Bhattacharya to a state panel investigating federal COVID policy.

DeSantis claimed to have based his COVID policies on his determination to “look at the data.... There was a concerted effort to try to stifle dissent.” This can only be interpreted as some kind of gag. DeSantis installed a COVID crackpot, Joseph Ladapo, as Florida’s surgeon general. 

Ladapo has promoted useless anti-COVID nostrums such as ivermectin, and counseled against the COVID vaccines. “Looking at the data”? As the Tampa Bay Times has reported, based on official state documents, Ladapo deliberately removed data from an official state report on the vaccines that contradicted his claim that the vaccines were unsafe for young men; in fact, studies show that the vaccines are far safer for them than being infected by the virus.

The event ended with a paean by Musk and DeSantis to cryptocurrency, which is tantamount to enticing innocent small investors into immolating their nest eggs in a scam. 

“We should do it again,” DeSantis said in closing the feed. “We’ll make sure that we come back and do it again. This is a great platform.”

We shall see. The next DeSantis appearance on Twitter could be just as buggy, or worse. All that we can be sure of is that whatever happens, Elon Musk will deem it a great success.