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wat3rm370n · 3 days ago

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Marty Makary is a covid contrarian, cozy with anti-vaxxers.

Marty Makary has been making the rounds for ages on everything from CSPAN and CBS to The Ralph Nader Radio Hour. But make no mistake, there's good reason he’s welcomed into the seedy MAGA ranks of Trumpy Trumpworld. He’s just another doctor in the infect-everyone club with people along the lines of Scott Atlas.

He was part of the symposium of covid contrarians celebrating the anniversary of The Great Barrington Declaration. In 2020 he was a Fox News contributor. A while back Makary was quoted in a far-right media outlet that sells supplements, an industry some say fuels the right-wing political world, in an article that was attacking Paxlovid, dangerously and wrongly telling people not to use it for covid, for reasons that didn’t make sense. Sure, many doctors sometimes get these things very wrong. But the strange part was that Marty Makary was confusing Paxlovid with Molnupiravir, an entirely different drug, and attributing the way Molnupiravir works to Paxlovid, which is not accurate. That’s a troubling mistake to make.

But then Makary is also a surgeon who actually mocked hand washing in a Congressional hearing, where he was brought in to testify by Republicans along with other Great Barrington Declaration natural herd immunity infect-everyone proponents. It’s odd how Trump has a reputation for germaphobia and yet two cabinet picks are actually notoriously known for anti handwashing. The other being Pete Hegseth who has such a laundry list of other things wrong with him you may have missed the handwashing thing - but that’s something that certainly stuck with me.

Marty Makary is apparently famous for the off-base factoid that medical errors are a leading cause of death even though his math doesn’t add up at all.

In August 2021 he co-authored an anti-mask op-ed with Trumpy doctor Cody Meissner who now chants anti-vax herd immunity crap at FDA vaccine meetings. In September 2021 he was pushing natural herd immunity, even after vaccines were available - which was essentially promoting needlessly letting babies get sick unvaccinated, a view shared with the notorious and sad Vinay Prasad, and Tracy Hoeg, someone with behaviour so unsettlingly right-wing that people only talk about some of it in private whispers.

So at some point you have to let go of the hopium that he’s some kind of moderate centrist who and both-sides things. This doctor shouldn't be normalized at all. He is NOT normal, no matter how much the media tries to manufacture mild on various and sundry Trumpy cabinet picks, or people wish-cast that nothing’s as bad as feared. Marty Markary is very much a Trumpy weirdo. And I wish people with platforms would stop being fooled, or somehow incentivized, into this truth-teller type nonsense when his math was all built on exaggerated fictions. And his opinions seem built on contrarianism.

I really wouldn’t trust this person for medical information, and I certainly don’t trust his politics.

Important Context - Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s FDA Pick Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary has spent years promoting fringe pandemic views and attacking the U.S. government. Walker Bragman Nov 20, 2024 He has authored multiple books on the subject including 2019’s “The Price We Pay,” which argued that costs were simply too high. With the pandemic, he has emerged as a popular figure on the political right for his particular brand of contrarianism, which has included falsely asserting in a February 2021 op-ed that the U.S. would achieve COVID herd immunity by April of that year. Even before COVID, Makary was controversial. In 2016, he was behind a widely rebuked study in the British Medical Journal purporting to find that medical error was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Shortly after publication, the editors-in chief of BMJ Quality and Safety debunked the findings.

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