#the 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.

[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…

[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.

[landrysg]

With novel scientific problems, and unprecedented responses, you need to have a series of public debates. I didn't sign the Great Barrington declaration, but I can read it today and know that no one was closer to the truth about schools than the authors. At the same time they were demonized by Fauci and Collins, who called them Fringe epidemiologists. This was inappropriate. In times of crisis, we need to have big debates in academic institutions. We should not silence or censor people. We need to foster disagreement, not stifle it.

[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.

[thepoetoaster]

DID I DO IT?

DID I DO IT?

By Katherine O’Reilly

           I was only publicly humiliated once but once was more than enough. I was Jesus then and I was attending Monument High School in Great Barrington, MA where they would torture children who acted disobedient against authority. I specifically remember walking in the woods and seeing a wooden bench like device they would use to torture children with.

         Children were regularly publicly whipped in front of the whole school – it was practically a rite of passage. When it happened to me however, it felt like I was the only person who it had ever experienced it. It was the near the top of the list of the worst experiences my soul has ever endured. The pain wounded my soul deeply, but looking back I see the huge reason for it.

         Apparently I had written something on the chalkboard about how awful the education system was, and speaking freely then was a crime punishable by whipping. After that I dropped out like Holden Caulfield. I attribute that one decision to the massive success I experienced in my past life.

         I started reading and self-educating myself and learned about things like business, real estate and investing. I got a head start in the race ahead of everyone else. I started building houses and selling them and eventually earned enough to hire a team to help build the houses for me. I was extremely hard working. The first house I built came from the cash I earned from delivering mail and being a bell ringer.

         This experience of being whipped made me extremely angry and defiant. I started organizing plots to overthrow the British in the attic of the Blue House of Great Barrington. I certainly wasn’t the only one helping with the cause.

         Sarah was my sister; she reincarnated as my brother Elliot now. She was very angry with her mother Queen Natalie for being in favor of public execution and was avidly against it and in favor of free speech. She was a huge hero, one of Jesus’s closest confidants, who always inspired him with her brave and original spirit. She left the castle and moved into the Blue House with Jesus, Columbia and their baby I’ll call Molly, who reincarnated as my mother Mary now. They loved reading stories together back when stories weren’t censored and they would pull you in by the soul.

         Columbia, Molly and Sarah certainly weren’t the only ones helping Jesus with the cause. Jesus had an invisible friend we’ll call…. Katelynn.

         There was only one battle in the Revolutionary War to secure America’s Freedom from the British. Jesus wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was very young, I want to say late teens – early twenties.

         There was only battle in the Revolutionary War – or rather, there SHOULD have only been one. They should have learned their lesson when all of the soldiers dropped dead like flies the first time, but it actually happened twice.

         This led to HUGE hysteria and a massive witch hunt to find the person who did it. Frank Lewis was a witch trial lawyer at the time. He reincarnated as the lawyer who defended OJ Simpson, Robert Kardashian.    

         The first one they targeted was Columbia. Jesus organized a huge rebellion, shot the executioner and a massive riot ensued. Again, the British people who tried to stop it just dropped dead like flies.

         They were getting desperate to find the witch who was responsible for this. They blamed Jesus and Columbia and him were both about to be publicly executed but Jesus knew what was coming… wait for it. Again, they just dropped dead like flies.

         Frank was completely panicking and the next people he targeted were Molly and Sarah. This will go down in history as possibly the worst mistake a human being has ever made.

         Frank was found crucified in Salamanca, NY with a chalkboard next to him. This was actually the first time anyone had actually been crucified.

         A huge crowd gathered around in horror and shock to witness what had happened. The chalk started writing by itself like in Matilda and wrote out something along the lines of, “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO HURT JESUS’S FAMILY.” The cross and the skeleton still rests in Salamanca to this day.

         That and the mysterious murders that happened in succession right afterwards deterred anyone with half a brain from trying to hurt Jesus.

         Someone, a popular influencer or trendsetter perhaps, must have started the trend of wearing a cross as a symbol of loyalty to Jesus’s cause. A symbol of standing up for the underdog. A symbol of protecting the vulnerable.

         A symbol of ending public execution for good.

[8dpromo]

Grant Dell - Wicked People (Worship Recordings)

8DPromo · Grant Dell - Wicked People (Worship Recordings)

Twenty years after his first appearance on Worship Recordings, dub-tech vibes abound on "Wicked People," the latest release by Grant Dell. First joining the Worship Recordings roster in 2003 with his Touch Dub EP, London producer Grant Dell has had over 50 releases under various monikers, including Uhuru Beats, Croydon Punks Ltd, Masonic Noodles, and the Chicago Transit Authority. His first release as Tribalation on Loaded Records was licensed to Strictly Rhythm, and the rest is dance music history. As well as the obvious Chicago House and Detroit Techno influences, Grant's eclectic tastes range from Basic Channel to Barrington Levy, and it's the latter lineage that runs most potently through "Wicked People." The potent rhythm track was originally sent to Jamaica, where DJ Tennant vibed strongly with Grant's foundation. Tennant's distinctive chants and spoken declarations organically took root over the cut's slinky groove transforming it into something mightier. After the results were in hand, Grant added more rhythm parts and effects as well as the snaking, wobbly acid line. Now ready for global sound systems, this track's flawless sonics and powerful vocal performance fit perfectly alongside the moody dub-house sounds that Worship Recordings has pioneered and developed over the past two decades. Says Worship's Rob Paine, "The universe brought us together at the right time, and I think this one is going to rank high in the underground."

Tyler Stadius (Deepsite) – “Love both mixes. Grand & Worship are a great match.” Shane Johnson (Fish Go Deep) – “Love it! A big, bassy groove perfectly executed. Will feature on the show.” Adam Collins (Omni A.M.) – “Wicked dubby afterhours goodness. Grand and Worship are a solid match, bravo!” Lee Jones (Country Gents) – “This is amazing! Can’t wait to play it on a rig.” Velanche (Urban Landscapes Show) – “Really solid grooves. Good to hear from Worship Records again.” Hober Mallow (Mighty Reel, Sydney) – “Killer deep dubby sounds, thank you. It’s a really nice sound for the radio show here in the afternoon.”

Available Now From: Beatport, Bandcamp, Traxsource, And Spotify.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Column: With a conference on the pandemic, Stanford gives purveyors of misinformation and disinformation a platform - Published Aug 29, 2024

We’re living in an upside-down world, aren’t we?

It’s a world in which scientists whose research findings that COVID probably originated as a spillover from wildlife have been validated by dozens of scientific studies, but got them hauled before a Republican-dominated House committee to be brayed at by the likes of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and accused of academic fraud.

Meanwhile, the purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid. — Vaccine expert and pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez

The event is a symposium on the topic “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” scheduled to take place on campus Oct. 4.

No one can doubt that a sober examination of the policies of the recent past with an eye toward doing better in the next pandemic is warranted. This symposium is nothing like that.

Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

The event is shaping up as a major embarrassment for an institution that prides itself on its academic standards. It comes with Stanford’s official imprimatur; the opening remarks will be delivered by its freshly appointed president, Jonathan Levin, an economist who took office Aug. 1.

The problem with the symposium starts with its main organizer. He’s Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy. Bhattacharya is one of the original signers of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020. The university didn’t respond to my question about Bhattacharya’s role. He didn’t respond to my request for comment.

The core of the declaration is what its drafters call “focused protection,” which means 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, who would be quarantined.

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

The quest for herd immunity from COVID has several problems. One is that infection with one variant of this ever-evolving virus doesn’t necessarily confer immunity from other variants. Another problem is that COVID can be a devastating disease for victims of any age. Allowing anyone of any age to become infected can expose them to serious health problems.

Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement, but he has identified himself on X as its “main organizer.” Among the announced speakers is epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, another of the declaration’s original signers.

Several other speakers advocated fewer restrictions on schools and businesses while predicting that COVID would be manageably mild, like the flu — predictions that were consistently and catastrophically wrong.

The date of the symposium, by the way, is the anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s also Rosh Hashana, one of the High Holy Days of the Jewish calendar. Stanford says the “overlap” with the holiday is regrettable, but it hasn’t offered to reschedule.

Stanford responded to my request for comment about the event by simply reproducing language from the event announcement.

“The conference was organized to highlight some of the many important topics that public health officials and policymakers will need to address in preparing for future pandemics,” the university said. “The speakers, including those already listed and others who will be added over the next several weeks, represent a wide range of views on this issue. We look forward to a civil, informed, and robust debate.”

That won’t do. Stanford’s argument that it’s merely providing a platform for “robust debate” among speakers with a “wide range of views” is belied by the roster of speakers, in which members of a discredited fringe of pandemic policy advocates are heavily overrepresented.

The event announcement has elicited skepticism and dismay among scientists seriously concerned about pandemic policy.

“Knowing who the speakers and panelists are,” wrote the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, “I know that ‘assessing the past’ will likely consist of highly revisionist history ... claiming that public health interventions didn’t work.”

The description of some of the daylong symposium’s sessions should give one pause. The precis of a panel titled “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom” states as fact that “governments censored information contrary to public health pronouncements in social media settings.” It asks rhetorically, “Does the suspension of free speech rights during a pandemic help keep the population better informed or does it permit the perpetuation of false ideas by governments?”

Yet who among these speakers lost their “free speech rights”? On the contrary, several, including Bhattacharya, rode their discredited claims to regular appearances on Fox News, op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and appointments to blue-ribbon government committees in red states.

A look at the speakers list should tell you where this event is heading. On a panel on “Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic” is Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s pandemic policy. Sweden has been held up by critics of school closings and lockdowns and advocates of herd immunity as a success story, the theme being that by keeping schools and restaurants open, the country beat the pandemic.

The truth is just the opposite. As I’ve reported, the Tegnell record is disastrous. Sweden’s laissez-faire approach sacrificed its seniors to the pandemic and used its schoolchildren as guinea pigs. Swedish researchers concluded in retrospect that its policies were “morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable.” The death toll rose so high that the government was eventually forced to tighten up the rules.

Sweden’s death rate from COVID was much worse than that of its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all took a tougher approach. If Sweden’s death rate had only matched Norway’s, it would have suffered only about 4,400 COVID deaths, rather than its toll of 18,500.

Then there’s Scott Atlas, a radiologist and former professor at Stanford medical school, who is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the right-wing think tank housed on the Stanford campus. Atlas was recruited to join the Trump White House as a COVID advisor in July 2020 after having volunteered to Medicare Administrator Seema Verma that the government’s pandemic policies were “a massive overreaction” that was “inciting irrational fear” in Americans.

Atlas estimated that the coronavirus “would cause about 10,000 deaths,” which “would be unnoticed” in a normal flu season. By the end of 2020, as it happens, COVID deaths in the U.S. exceeded 350,000. As of today, the toll is more than 1.2 million.

At the White House, Atlas promoted scientifically dubious prescriptions for the pandemic. He pushed for reduced testing for COVID and dismissed masking as a countermeasure. Most damaging, he called for a herd immunity policy.

Atlas’ prescriptions disturbed his Stanford colleagues, about 110 of whom wrote an open letter in September 2020 alerting the public to “the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that Atlas was preaching.

“Encouraging herd immunity through unchecked community transmission is not a safe public health strategy,” they wrote. “In fact, this approach would do the opposite, causing a significant increase in preventable cases, suffering and deaths, especially among vulnerable populations, such as older individuals and essential workers.”

The Stanford administration also formally disavowed Atlas’ statements and prescriptions. “Dr. Atlas has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic,” the university said. “We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing.”

Yet now Atlas appears to be back in the university’s good graces, judging from his presence on the roster. Stanford didn’t respond to my questions about Atlas’ role, and he didn’t reply to my request for comment.

Allowing this symposium to proceed along the lines laid out in the announcement will be a black mark for Stanford in the scientific community.

“What’s happening at Stanford?” asked vaccine expert and disinformation debunker Peter Hotez on X. “This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid.”

Stanford’s claim to be a neutral host of a scientific symposium falls short as a fair description of its duties as an academic institution.

No university claims to be open to the expression of any or all views, no matter how unorthodox or counterfactual; they make judgments about the propriety of viewpoints all the time; the level of discernment they practice is one way we judge them as serious educational establishments.

By that standard, Stanford deserves an “F.” On the evidence, neither the university nor its medical school, which is a sponsor of the symposium, exercised any judgment at all before greenlighting an embarrassing gala for the pandemic fringe.

[ironymous]

A Blueprint for a Serious Investigation — Brownstone Institute

A Blueprint for a Serious Investigation — Brownstone Institute On 4 October 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration was signed by a number of scholars willing to ask questions about the pandemic management approach which was fostered around the world, the one based upon real-time mass testing, contact tracing, lockdowns, and waiting for vaccination for all.  As infectious disease epidemiologists…

[xtruss]

How Stanford Failed The Academic Freedom Test! For America’s New Clerisy, Scientific Debate Is A Danger To Be Suppressed

— By Jay Bhattacharya | January 11, 2023 | TabletMag.Com

Stanford ‘created an environment in which slander, threats, and abuse aimed at lockdown critics could flourish’. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.

The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.

I should note here that my Stanford roots go way back. I earned two degrees in economics there in 1990. In the ’90s, I earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. I’ve been a fully tenured professor at Stanford’s world-renowned medical school for nearly 15 years, happily teaching and researching many topics, including infectious disease epidemiology and health policy. If you had asked me in March 2020 whether Stanford had an academic freedom problem in medicine or the sciences, I would have scoffed at the idea. Stanford’s motto (in German) is “the winds of freedom blow,” and I would have told you at the time that Stanford lives up to that motto. I was naive then, but not now.

Academic freedom matters most in the edge cases when a faculty member or student is pursuing an idea that others at the university find inconvenient or objectionable. If Stanford cannot protect academic freedom in these cases, it cannot protect academic freedom at all.

To justify this depressing claim, I would like to relate the story of my experience during the pandemic regarding a prominent policy proposal I co-authored called the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). I could relate many additional incidents that illustrate Stanford’s stunning failure to protect academic freedom, but this one suffices to make my point.

On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.

The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did.

Even by October 2020, it was clear that the Chinese-inspired lockdowns had done tremendous harm to the physical and psychological well-being of vast populations, especially children, the poor, and the working class. Closed schools consigned a generation of children worldwide to live shorter, less healthy lives. In July 2020, the Centers for Disease Control released an estimate that 1 in 4 young adults in the United States had seriously considered suicide during the previous month. The U.N. estimated that an additional 130 million people would be thrown into dire food insecurity—starvation—by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The primary beneficiaries of the lockdown—if there were in fact any beneficiaries of these drastic anti-social measures—were among a narrow class of well-off people who could work from home via Zoom without risk of losing their jobs.

It was amply clear by October 2020 that the lockdown policy adopted by many Western governments, with the exception of a few holdouts like Sweden, had failed to stop the spread of COVID. It was in fact too late to adopt a policy goal of eradicating the virus. We did not have the technological means to achieve this goal, then or now. By the fall of 2020, it was abundantly clear that COVID-19 was here to stay and that many future waves would occur.

Governments had imposed lockdowns on the premise that there was nearly unanimous scientific consensus in support of them. Yet an extraordinary policy like a lockdown requires, or should require, an extraordinary scientific justification. Only near unanimity among scientists, backed by solid empirical data, suffices.

Like Gupta and Kulldorf, I knew that such unanimity did not exist. Many scientists worldwide had contacted us to tell us about their qualms with the lockdowns—their destructiveness and the poor evidence of their effectiveness. Many epidemiologists and health policy scholars favored an alternative approach, though many were scared to say so. It seemed clear to the three of us that as the next inevitable wave appeared, there was a risk that the lockdowns might return, and that scientific evidence against such steps would be ignored and smothered, at tremendous social cost.

We wrote the GBD to tell the public that there was no scientific unanimity about the lockdown. Instead, the GBD proposed a focused strategy to protect the elderly and other vulnerable populations. There is more than a thousandfold difference in mortality risk from COVID-19 infection between the old and the young, with healthy children at negligible risk of dying. The humane thing is to devote resources and ingenuity to protect the most vulnerable. The GBD and its accompanying FAQ provided many suggestions about how to do that and invited local public health communities, which know best the varied local living circumstances of the vulnerable, to devise local solutions. At the same time, the GBD advocated lifting lockdowns and opening schools to alleviate harms to children. We put the GBD on the internet, and invited other members of the public to sign it.

The GBD was published on Oct, 4, 2020. Almost immediately, tens of thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, and physicians signed the document, including many from top universities. Simultaneously, people started sending us translations of the GBD—ultimately into 40 languages—and to date, nearly a million people have signed from almost every country on Earth.

The plan received the attention of the American press, at first curious and fair, but soon thereafter hostile and tendentious. I started getting calls from reporters, including outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post, asking me why I wanted to “let the virus rip” through the population, even though that was the very opposite of what we were proposing, and questioning my credentials and motives.

It was at first quite perplexing to be the target of what turned out to be a well-organized, government-sponsored campaign of smears and suppression of scientific argument and evidence. I had taken no money for writing the declaration. Yet press outlets somehow turned Gupta, Kulldorf, and me into tools of a nefarious plot to destroy the world by spreading “disinformation” that would cause mass death. I started receiving death threats and racist hate mail.

About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until the end of 2022. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.

But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.

Collins and Fauci sit atop tens of billions of dollars that the NIH uses to fund the work of nearly every biomedical scientist of note in the United States. Stanford University receives hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from the NIH, without which researchers would not have the resources to conduct many worthwhile experiments and studies. NIH funding also confers prestige and status within the scientific community. At Stanford, it is very difficult for a biomedical researcher in her department to earn tenure without landing a major NIH grant. The attack by Collins and Fauci sent a clear signal to other scientists that the GBD was a heretical document.

Among Stanford faculty, the reaction to GBD was mixed. Some members, including Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, signed on enthusiastically. I received encouragement from many others throughout the university. Junior medical school faculty wrote telling me they secretly supported the GBD but were reticent to sign officially for fear of reprisal from their department heads and Stanford administrators. Others were hostile. One faculty member and former friend wrote that he was defriending me on Facebook, perhaps the mildest form of retaliation I received during the pandemic.

There is a distinction in philosophy between negative and positive rights. A negative right is a constraint placed on the authorities not to take action that would violate that right. For example, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting a law limiting the free exercise of religion or speech. A positive right entails an obligation on authorities to actively promote some desirable state of the world, for instance, the right to protection in the face of dire threats to bodily harm.

The same distinction pertains to academic freedom at a university. Stanford did not fire me or break my tenure for writing the GBD. Therefore, it met the bare minimum standard of negative academic freedom. But Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.

The most egregious violation of academic freedom was an implicit decision by the university to deplatform me. Though I have given dozens of talks in seminars at Stanford over the past decades, in December 2020, my department chair blocked an attempt to organize a seminar where I would publicly present the ideas of the GBD. Stanford’s former president, John Hennessey, tried to set up a discussion between me and others on COVID policy, but he was unable to, owing to the absence of support from the university.

I never received an invitation from the medical school to present a “Grand Rounds,” a high-profile presentation by a faculty member on a topic of importance to the entire medical school. Instead, Grand Rounds and other seminars and webinars at Stanford univocally promoted positions which it is now obvious were devastatingly wrong, but which no one on campus was allowed to debate or challenge. Around the world in 2020 and early 2021, the GBD was a central topic of discussion—but not officially at Stanford.

More than a year later, in early 2022, I asked the dean of the medical school, Lloyd Minor, why I and other prominent lockdown-skeptic members of the Stanford faculty never received an invitation to present. He told me that the experience of caring for COVID patients in March 2020 had scared some Stanford clinical faculty and that it was still too early for a dispassionate “academic” discussion on COVID policy. Had I been given the opportunity, I would have told my colleagues that the focused protection ideas contained in the GBD could have prevented many of those hospitalizations.

Stanford failed to create a work environment where these discussions could happen. And I was not the only one to suffer—Stanford deplatformed other lockdown-skeptic academics, including John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most highly cited scientists and the most prolific and influential Stanford faculty on peer-reviewed COVID-19 publications; Michael Levitt, a Nobel Prize winner who made fundamental original contributions to modeling; and Scott Atlas, a former chair of neuroradiology at Stanford, widely acknowledged health policy expert and a key adviser to former President Donald Trump on COVID policy.

Faculty at Stanford should rightly worry whether their professional work will lead to deplatforming, excommunication, and political targeting.

The university’s refusal to defend dissenting voices created an environment in which slander, threats, and abuse aimed at lockdown critics could flourish. In August 2020, when President Trump chose Dr. Atlas as a White House adviser on the pandemic, around 100 Stanford faculty members signed an open letter accusing Atlas of “falsehoods and misrepresentations,” without giving any specific examples. Instead, the faculty letter falsely implied that Atlas opposed handwashing. When Martin Kulldorff challenged the signatories to a debate on the topic, none accepted. Instead, the Stanford Faculty Senate voted to censure Atlas formally, though no one voting had his expertise in public health policy.

In August 2021, Melissa Bondy, the chair of epidemiology at Stanford, helped circulate a secret petition around the medical school asking the university president to censor me for accurate testimony that I had given to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a publicly televised policy roundtable. I testified that no randomized trials yet demonstrate the efficacy of masks on children to contain COVID. Though the secret petition did not name me specifically, it quoted me and asked the university to suppress such speech by faculty members. This petition imposed unethical pressure on faculty members—especially junior faculty members worried about tenure votes—to sign on.

When I finally read a copy of the petition, it felt like a gut punch. Was I preaching heresy? To date, no one at any level of the university leadership has expressed their support for me voicing my ideas. My efforts to engender discussion were met with silence. My colleagues John Ioannidis and Michael Levitt both report similar treatment.

The undisguised aim of this petition was to expel dissenting Stanford faculty like me from public academic life, making a mockery of the idea of academic freedom at exactly the time when we needed it the most. Ironically, if Stanford had defended my right to speak, there would have been no need for such a petition, as there would have been no confusion about the fact that my opinions were my own and not that of my colleagues.

The faculty’s excommunication motion yielded dividends in its goal of suppressing speech. An anonymous group on campus organized a campaign to intimidate me in response to a tweet by DeSantis, which included a picture of me from the policy roundtable and an (accurate) quote: “By vaccinating the old, we have protected the vulnerable.” The group glued posters all over campus with a picture of my face, the tweet from DeSantis, and a graph of COVID cases in Florida, which at the time were high. (Florida’s age-adjusted COVID mortality throughout the pandemic is lower than the average American state and on a par with California’s.) The implication was that I was a thought-criminal whose work was somehow responsible for the inevitable spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus.

On a progressive-dominated campus, 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. For a few days, I feared for my physical safety. I reported this harassment to Stanford, but the university minimized my concerns, referring me to a counselor who advised me to engage with a firm that would help reduce the personal information about me available online. At that point, I decided to return to campus despite the threat—after 36 years, Stanford remains my home. But those posters stayed up for months. While I refused to be intimated, I can certainly understand those who are bullied into silence—which is, after all, the point.

Academic freedom at Stanford is clearly dying. It cannot survive if the administration fails to create an environment where good-faith discussions can occur outside of a framework of ideological rigidity and the false certainties that ideologues—and governments—wish to impose on us. Stanford missed the opportunity to sponsor COVID policy forums and it deplatformed dissenting voices. Several prominent faculty exploited this environment, engaging in actions that directly violated basic academic norms.

A precedent has now been established. Faculty at Stanford should rightly worry whether their professional work will lead to deplatforming, excommunication, and political targeting. In this environment, professors and students alike would be wise to look over their shoulders at all times, in the knowledge that the university no longer has your back. And members of the public should understand that many of those urging them to “trust the science” on complicated matters of public concern are also those working to ensure that “the science” never turns up answers that they don’t like.

— Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University.

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The Great Barrington Declaration

The Great Barrington Declaration

  Home Video About FAQ Focused Protection Signatures Read the Declaration   Great Barrington Declaration As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Read The Declaration Sign the Declaration 935,000+…