November 27, 2024 - "Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health [NIH], Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a 'quick and devastating published takedown' of Bhattacharya and his fellow 'fringe epidemiologists.'
"Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet.... Bhattacharya promised yesterday to 'reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.'
"As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] bureaucracies under the Biden administration....
"Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but ... the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.
“'For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,' says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. 'Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?' Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he ... joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD], a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
"Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
"As Bhattacharya has recounted, his department chairman blocked his attempt to hold a seminar discussing the Great Barrington Declaration, and the dean of epidemiology at Stanford circulated a petition at the medical school quoting him on Covid and asking the university to censor such speech. A dozen federal agencies successfully pressured social-media platforms to censor his speech, as revealed in the Twitter files and a lawsuit. Facebook removed a video of him discussing Covid policies in Florida; Twitter shadow-banned him by limiting the reach of his tweets, and Google 'deboosted' the [GBD] so that a search for it pointed users to criticism of it rather than the declaration itself.
"So far, the academic and public-health establishments have ignored criticism of their abandonment of scientific principles during the pandemic — and the evidence that their lockdowns and other mandates were largely futile and enormously harmful.... But now Stanford and other universities will be facing new financial pressure from critics. Cost-cutters in the Trump transition team are already contemplating a reduction in the overhead surcharges that universities collect in research grants from the federal government. These surcharges are more than 50 percent at Stanford and nearly 70 percent at Harvard....
"If the NIH and other agencies start considering a school’s dedication to academic freedom when awarding grants, some elite universities could pay a price. Stanford and other universities at the top of the list of NIH beneficiaries don’t look so elite in the free-speech rankings of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Stanford ranks 218th of 257 schools, and others are even lower, including UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Harvard. The campus censors haven’t been swayed by abstract appeals to protect academic freedom, but perhaps they’ll rediscover that principle once they contemplate their budgets."
Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an outspoken opponent of coercive public health measures and controls on scientific speech, has been awarded the 2024 Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.
October 24, 2024 - "Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya was awarded the Zimmer Medal, and Brian Conrad was awarded a 2024 Barry Prize, by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (the Academy). The Zimmer Medal, which honors outstanding courage in the defense of intellectual freedom, was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie last year.... The awards were conferred last night by Academy President Donald W. Landry of Columbia University and Board Chair Sanjeev R. Kulkarni of Princeton University in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C....
"'Last year we were delighted to honor Sir Salman Rushdie alongside other top minds of our time, and this year we are delighted to honor Jay Bhattacharya and a wonderful group of outstanding scholars,' said Academy President Dr. Donald Landry, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Hamilton Southworth Professor of Medicine at Columbia University.
"'Like other academies, we honor intellectual excellence, but our Academy is distinguished by a special accent on intellectual courage. All our new members this year reflect the independence of mind we strive to honor.'
"The Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom is presented annually to a public thinker who displays extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom. The award is named in honor of the late University of Chicago President, who led the creation of the Chicago Principles, the gold standard of academic freedom that has been adopted by 110 colleges and universities.
"In 2023, the inaugural Zimmer Medal was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie, in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in the struggle for human freedom....
"Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. His recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic. His broader research interests encompass the implications of population aging for future population health and medical spending in developed countries, the measurement of physician performance tied to physician payment by insurers, and the role played by biomedical innovation on health. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University....
"The American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes scholarship and honors outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences, and learned professions. It encourages the fruitful exchange of ideas within academia and society at large by sponsoring occasions for scholarly interaction and providing platforms for the presentation and dissemination of scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. An independent 501(c)(3) non-partisan organization, it offers public programming, supports promising young scholars, and promotes traditional liberal arts ideals and standards of intellectual excellence."
After Microsoft affiliate NewsGuard did a 'fact-check' on the American Institute of Economic Research and the Great Barrington Declaration, AIER did one of NewsGuard using its own published standards. NewsGuard failed.
August 11, 2021 - "The advent of fact-checker journalism may be wearing out its welcome. Perhaps the increasing politicization of American life is a contributor to the downward spiral of the fact-checking profession that is primarily run by politically engaged reporters, not expert specialists in the subjects they assess.... Not that any one group of experts should have the authority over the truth either. Self-appointed media gatekeepers are a ticking time bomb of political censorship, waiting to be unleashed when the temptations are too great and the necessity for impartiality is even greater. With White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling for collusion between social media companies and the government to censor 'misinformation', this threat seems to be as close as ever....
"This brings us to a relatively new, but powerful company known as NewsGuard, which claims a partnership with Microsoft and gleaming spotlights in major outlets. Its staff and board boast powerful connections to the government, finance, and the media. According to an Op-ed in Politico written by NewsGuards’ CEO, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites’ trustworthiness. This new strategy is aimed at discrediting the very source that alleged misinformation or disinformation may come from. NewsGuard publishes lengthy 'nutritional labels,' rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance and outlining its reasons for giving certain ratings.... After receiving a recent request for comments on a 'fact-check' article by NewsGuard regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration, we decided to investigate the rise of the fact-checking phenomenon itself, including this strange new company’s own performance in evaluating the content of other websites.
"We soon discovered that NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate. NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary – particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic – reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content. Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites....
"A revealing example may be found in NewsGuard’s treatment of the 'lab leak' hypothesis for Covid-19’s origins. Media coverage of the lab leak theory – which posits that the pandemic originated through the accidental infection of workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were studying coronaviruses in bat populations – has changed dramatically in recent months after a closer examination of evidence led several scientists to lend it credence.... For over a year prior to these recent developments however, NewsGuard aggressively 'fact checked' and penalized other websites for even raising the possibility of a lab leak. Some of the most aggressive attacks came from John Gregory, NewsGuard’s 'Deputy Editor for Health' policy and also the primary correspondent in AIER’s exchanges with the company.... According to a statement that the company sent to AIER:
NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory,” or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false. NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels....
"AIER’s own experience with NewsGuard revealed a similar pattern of carelessness and misrepresentation by Gregory and other writers for the company. Gregory contacted us on behalf of NewsGuard in early June 2021 requesting comments on several articles relating to Covid-19 pandemic policy and the Great Barrington Declaration. AIER’s Phil Magness obliged the request by offering to answer his questions in good faith, but quickly discovered that they carried heavy political biases arising from Gregory’s own personal beliefs about Covid-19, healthcare policy, American politics, and related subjects.
"In one such example, Gregory asked a prejudicial question that attempted to implicate AIER with showing partisan political biases in our publications: 'We also note that AIER.org refers to itself as nonpartisan. Why then do its articles routinely criticize Democrats'.... Gregory’s question, however, selectively cherry-picked only two articles on our site where we criticized Democratic politicians. It made no mention of the many examples where AIER has similarly criticized Republicans.... Gregory’s questions displayed a similar pattern of conflating normative policy positions taken by individual authors on AIER’s website – essentially opinion articles, and all properly identified as such – for positive or empirical claims, which could then be 'fact checked.'.... When Magness replied to Gregory by calling attention to the difference between normative and positive arguments as well as the editorial diversity of external contributors to our daily publications, he ignored the distinction....
"Even more problematic was NewsGuard’s portrayal of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), signed at AIER in October 2020. Gregory’s synopsis of the GBD contained numerous false and misleading claims that were brought to the attention of his company almost immediately after their publication. Repeating a charge from another website, Gregory wrote that 'none of the three [GBD authors] had published peer-reviewed research about the COVID-19 pandemic at the time they authored the declaration.” This claim is false. GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was part of a team of scientists from Stanford University that conducted one of the first wide-scale seroprevalence studies of Covid-19 at the outset of the pandemic [published] in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2020. When contacted by AIER about this error in his article, Gregory ... appended it with a snide denigration of Bhattacharya for being 'listed as the seventh author” on the study (Bhattacharya was in fact a principal co-author but was listed last, as per a convention with how some medical journal articles identify senior ranked investigators. Bhattacharya was also a primary media contact about his study’s findings at the time of its release).
"NewsGuard’s depiction of the GBD contained other clear misrepresentations of its contents and positions. For example, Gregory wrote that the GBD 'argued that restrictions meant to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, such as face masks … should be eliminated for people considered to be at lower risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.' The text of the GBD makes no mention of face mask policy though – only lockdowns and similar restrictions on schools and businesses. NewsGuard did not respond to multiple requests from AIER to correct this erroneous characterization...
"In an email to AIER, NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill stated 'when we make judgments about health care sites…we rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts.' This is not the case with their assessment of the GBD. Rather than quoting scientific experts, NewsGuard’s review of the GBD relies primarily on a statement by former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock – a politician who has no formal scientific or medical training. In a passage quoted by Gregory, Hancock stated that 'the Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get covid, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true…we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covid, even if everyone caught it.' Hancock’s statement, however, is at direct odds with mainstream science on immunology. The World Health Organization specifically defines herd immunity as the combined total of immunity acquired by vaccination and by natural infection and recovery. Although it differs from the GBD authors on how to most effectively reach this point, the WHO does not dispute the existence or attainment of herd immunity itself....
"Hancock’s statement, cited as authoritative by NewsGuard, further contended, “The second central claim [of the GBD] is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That is simply not possible.' This is not a scientific statement, but rather Hancock’s own political opinion. A detailed plan arguing for the feasibility of focused protection measures was published by the GBD authors to accompany the Declaration itself. More importantly, the scientific literature on Covid-19 mitigation documents clear evidence that the success (or failure) of a country to 'shield' its nursing homes through a focused protection strategy is a primary factor in its overall mortality rate. A study by John P.A. Ioannidis in the journal BMJ-Global Health compared the nursing home shielding ratios of several countries, concluding that they 'varied markedly in the extent to which they protected high-risk groups.' Contrary to Hancock’s political claims, Ioannidis concluded: 'Both effective precision shielding and detrimental inverse protection can happen in real-life circumstances. COVID-19 interventions should seek to achieve maximal precision shielding.”
"When asked by AIER about their continued reliance on Hancock as a source despite the scientific misinformation contained in his assessment of herd immunity as well as his overall lack of scientific qualifications, Gregory responded that it 'was and is relevant to explaining the views of those who criticized the Declaration.' Neither Gregory nor NewsGuard responded to follow-up questions about how they reconciled this position, the political nature of Hancock’s comments, or Hancock’s lack of scientific credentials with Brill’s assertion that they 'rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts' in the subject matters they evaluate.
"In addition ... Gregory included links to further readings about the Declaration from an extremely dubious source: 9/11 Truther and conspiracy theory blogger Nafeez Ahmed of the Byline Times website. Between October 2020 and the present, Ahmed has promoted a flurry of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about the GBD, including a false allegation that it was secretly financed by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch in apparent coordination with the British Ministry of Defence and – strangest of all – the proprietor of a resort hotel located in Wales.... When asked about NewsGuard’s promotion of links to Ahmed’s blog, Gregory ... stated that Ahmed’s claims were not used to calculate NewsGuard’s ratings and were only included to provide a 'history' of the GBD. It did not appear to concern Gregory that Ahmed’s 'history' was an unreliable conspiracy theory of his own imagination.... NewsGuard has not altered or removed the links to Ahmed’s allegations despite its promotion of documented falsehoods about the origins and funding of the GBD. Even more astounding, NewsGuard currently rates Ahmed’s blog with a score of 82.5/100, giving it full credit for “gathering and presenting information responsibly.” This pattern evinces a clear double standard in which NewsGuard promotes sources that do not appear to meet their own published minimum standards for reliability and uses them to denigrate the credibility of AIER and the GBD.
"In sharp contrast to the generally disparaging approach he took to covering the GBD, Gregory holds other websites that attack the GBD in high esteem. In one example, Gregory extended a score of 87.5/100 to CovidFAQ.co, a website set up by a group of pro-lockdown activists in the United Kingdom. CovidFAQ is a joint project of conservative member of Parliament Neil O’Brien, 'neoliberal' activist Sam Bowman, and academic Stuart Ritchie. Pro-lockdown UK political strategist Dominic Cummings recently referenced their work as part of a 'decentralised' political campaign to discredit the anti-lockdown movement and the GBD, which he proposed while serving as an advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In his article for NewsGuard, Gregory credits CovidFAQ for “not repeatedly publish[ing] false content.” The website’s track record is at clear odds with Gregory’s assessment.
"In January 2021, CovidFAQ published a lengthy attack on the GBD that contained multiple errors and misrepresentations of the Declaration’s contents. In one example, the authors of CovidFAQ claimed, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given an answer' to how they would implement a focused protection strategy in place of lockdowns. In reality, the GBD website contains a detailed 1,800 word plan for implementing focused protection. When AIER’s Phil Magness alerted CovidFAQ co-owners Stuart Ritchie and Sam Bowman to this error in January 2021, the website’s editors modified the text to read, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given anything approaching an adequate answer' to how they would implement focused protection (emphasis added). Rather than a factual correction, CovidFAQ’s change inserted their own editorial commentary expressing disagreement with the GBD’s published focus protection strategy as a way of disguising CovidFAQ’s earlier misrepresentation.... Gregory’s NewsGuard rating of the CovidFAQ website specifically linked to CovidFAQ’s deceptive edit about the GBD, and described it as having met 'NewsGuard’s standards for regularly issuing corrections.'
"NewsGuard concluded its assessment by repeating a false story from October 2020, claiming that the GBD’s signature list contained fake names such as 'Dr. Johnny Bananas” to inflate its signature count. This story misrepresents the products of an intentional hoax by pro-lockdown journalists including the aforementioned Nafeez Ahmed to flood the website with false signatures. In reality, 'Dr. Johnny Bananas' and similar hoax submissions were removed from the GBD website within a few hours of their discovery. An audit of signatures conducted by AIER found that false names amounted to only 0.1% of total signatures on the GBD prior to their removal, with the largest cluster of false names deriving from Ahmed’s hoax campaign on October 9th. NewsGuard did not include any of this context in its article, nor did Gregory permit AIER an opportunity to comment on the misinformation contained in its account of the false signatures.
"To briefly summarize, NewsGuard’s coverage of Covid-19 policy and the GBD in particular suffers from a recurring pattern of frequent errors that warrant correction, reliance on fact checkers and other figures who lack qualifications to make scientific assessments, biased depictions designed to disparage or undermine the scientific credibility of the petition, and the promotion of false information from dubious secondary sources.... NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as 'experts' on the subject in question. Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word. As their liberal use of Hancock to evaluate the GBD illustrated, many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods....
"If we’re going to be on this topic, we might as well check to see if NewsGuard is a reliable website by its own standards. Indeed, with its partnership with Microsoft and its roster of accomplished staff, the public should understand what kind of organization this is. To test how NewsGuard holds up to its own rating system, we subjected its website and practices to the same criteria it uses to evaluate other sources. The results reveal a website that preaches a very different standard for others than it adheres to in its own work....
"NewsGuard applies a 100-point scorecard to the websites it rates.... Our Rating of NewsGuard: 36.25/100. This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate.
"The truth is best sought through the marketplace of ideas where reason and evidence are the weapons of choice. When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags. NewsGuard’s behavior illustrates the tired idea that, during events like Covid-19, we should simply do as we’re told and not question the government or its experts. On this matter, they have shown themselves to be either unable to appropriately moderate public discourse or act as little more than cheerleaders for favored political figures and their preferred policy approaches to Covid-19. It wouldn’t be a stretch if they happen to be both."
February 15, 2022 - "Anti-lockdown scientists were viewed as having ‘fringe’ ideas because those calling for draconian restrictions had more followers on social media, a study has shown. Professor John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, an expert in data science and the reliability of research, studied the expertise of authors who signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) compared with signatories of the John Snow Memorandum.
"The GBD called for vulnerable people to be shielded while allowing immunity to build up in the rest of the public to avoid huge costs to society, education and public health. In contrast, the John Snow Memorandum (JSM) argued that such a policy of herd immunity was unethical.
"Prof Ioannidis said he wanted to examine the 'prevailing narrative' that the Great Barrington Declaration was a minority view among experts, and found that 'Twitter firepower" had helped shape the conversation. In an article published in BMJ Open Research, he found that both letters were authored by very influential experts, but that the John Snow Memorandum authors had a far greater reach on social media, which made it appear that their view had more support. By November 2021, just four key signatories of the GBD had more than 50,000 Twitter followers, compared with 13 of the key authors of the JSM.
"Prof Ioannidis concluded: 'Both the Great Barrington Declaration and John Snow Memorandum include many stellar scientists, but JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative. GBD is clearly not a fringe minority report compared with JSM, as many social media and media allude.
"'If knowledgeable scientists can have a strong social media presence, massively communicating accurate information to followers, the effect may be highly beneficial. Conversely, if scientists themselves are affected by the same problems (misinformation, animosity, loss of decorum and disinhibition, among others) when they communicate in social media, the consequences may be negative.'
"Prof Ioannidis also said signatories of the JSM had contributed to the vilification of authors of the GBD through their tweets and op-eds.
"Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St George's, University of London, who was one of the GBD signatories, said: 'I am not at all surprised at this. Of course it is a problem that should not be. I personally have actively avoided using social media and Twitter accounts, initially because of data leaks but then due to this being no way to conduct science, nor influence policy.'"
Lockdown protester, Cincinnati, Ohio, April 2020. Source: Vox
February 2, 2022 - "Do you remember the 'libertarian moment'?... For a few years around the end of the Obama administration, ... it looked as if the right just might coalesce around restrained foreign policy, opposition to electronic surveillance and other threats to civil liberties, and enthusiasm for an innovative economy, very much including the tech industry. Beyond policy, the libertarian turn was associated with a hip affect that signaled comfort with pop culture.... The New York Times compared the movement's electoral figureheads, the father-and-son duo Ron and Rand Paul, to grunge bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
"In retrospect, those descriptions seem naive. Less than a year after the Times feature was published, the announcement of Donald Trump's presidential campaign sounded the death knell of the libertarian moment (along with Rand Paul's own bid for the presidency).... While in office, Trump had deployed an apocalyptic idiom that clashed dramatically with the libertarians' characteristic optimism. Although personally indifferent to ideas, Trump also inspired a cohort of intellectuals who denounced libertarians' ostensible indifference to the common good and proposed a more assertive role for government in directing economic and social life.
"But as the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci. Its heroes include Joe Rogan, whose podcast has been a platform for vaccine skeptics, advocates of ivermectin and other dubious treatments for COVID, and other challenges to the expert consensus.
"Appeals to personal freedom, limited government, and epistemological skepticism against pandemic authorities have some basis in the organized libertarian movement. Early in the pandemic, the American Institute for Economic Research issued the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected lockdowns and argued (before vaccines became available) that mitigation strategies should be limited to the most vulnerable portion of the population. In the Senate, Paul (Ky.) has been the leading critic of Fauci and the CDC. Long-standing libertarian positions have also been energized by the pandemic. The disruption of public education, for example, has revitalized the school choice movement. But ... [m]ore than any coherent political theory, the libertarian revival draws on inarticulate but powerful currents of anti-authoritarianism in American culture....
"Whatever its origins, the new quasi-libertarianism is an obstacle to the managerial tendencies that increasingly define the center-left. More than opposition to the government as such, it revolves around opposition to administrative restrictions imposed for one's own good. If the old libertarianism was obsessed with the risk of ideological totalitarianism, the new version concentrates on the influence of human resources bureaucrats, public health officials, and neighborhood busybodies.That reorientation from philosophical to mundane grievances is key to its demographic appeal.... Rather than a defense of natural rights, it's an instinctive dislike of being bossed around....
"The unimpressive performance of schools, the FDA, and other vehicles of public policy have undermined the ambitious goals Democrats hoped to pursue under the Biden Administration. It's hard to make the case for free college, increased educational spending, or single-payer healthcare with the institutions that would have to deliver these benefits seem unwilling or unable to do their current jobs. Progressives don't want to hear it, but the era of big government is probably over again.
"In the past, that conclusion might have been celebrated by conservatives. Today, it's more controversial. During Trump's presidency, some theorists entertained hopes that Republicans might become the 'party of the state.' In addition to conventional hopes for restricting pornography and halting or reversing the legalization of drugs, that includes proposals for sweeping industrial policies to promote domestic manufacturing and cash benefits for married parents to promote traditional family patterns. Rejecting libertarian confidence in spontaneous order, these intellectuals argued that both the economy and the culture need to be intentionally guided toward the common good.... But ... their hope that the dour and devout can achieve theoretically rational outcomes by capturing and redirecting some of the same institutions that have been discredited during the pandemic ... now seems utopian.
"Iconoclastic podcasters and the 'Freedom Convoy' of truckers protesting vaccine mandates may not have been what journalists and activists had in mind when they spoke of the libertarian moment five years ago. But they're the vanguard of its sequel today."
January 6, 2022 - "The greatest feeling about Florida is the sheer 'Gonna ride this hog wherever it takes me' exuberance. I’ve been down there maybe eight or 10 times during the pandemic and arriving in any airport is like crossing the Wall out of East Berlin. Quite a lot of people wear masks in malls and stores, but most don’t. Nobody mask-shames anybody. You don’t need a vaccine card at all, much less have to dig out your Excelsior Pass three times a day.
"This is because Florida accepts the basic truth that should have been Washington’s guidance from Day 1: If you’re vaccinated, the COVID-19 emergency is over for you; if you’re not, well, the risk is yours.
"Florida schoolchildren have been back in school and unmasked since August 2020. Life is normal for them, except for the amusement value of seeing panicky teachers in masks. New York’s children, like those in many areas where the Democratic Party and its affiliated teachers unions rule, are essentially being used as human shields.... Kids are suffering so badly here that even the New York Times is starting gently to suggest that maybe we should take our hands off our children’s throats — masking them, forbidding them to socialize and exercise and even talk at lunchtime, canceling their extracurriculars, canceling childhood.
"The unemployment rate in Florida, heavily dependent on tourism, spiked to 14.2 percent in May 2020, fell to half of that by September and now stands at 4.5 percent (as of November). New York? Peaked at 16.6 percent in April 2020, but remains third-worst in the nation at 6.6 percent. In February 2020, that figure stood at 3.9 percent. New York is stacking its own crises on top of the virus problem.
"Florida’s response since the summer of 2020 has been to act as the state embodiment of the Great Barrington Declaration in which academics Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta (of Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, respectively) argued that we are never going to eliminate the virus, so we’d better take mitigation strategies for the most vulnerable but otherwise learn to live with it....
"One of the great self-owns in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s career of auto-embarrassment came when she took the bait National Review dangled when it published a picture of her enjoying a Christmas vacation drink in Miami Beach. Florida, people like AOC keep telling us, is a COVID-superspreading lunatic state that actually voted for Donald Trump (twice). Yet where does AOC go when she wants to unwind? Not just Florida, but the part of it that is getting hit hardest in the Omicron wave....AOC then attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and suggested he take some 'tips' from her state’s governor, Kathy Hochul.
"AOC telling Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to take tips from Gov. Hochul is laughable.... As I write these words, the state with the most COVID cases in the country is … New York, which has 70 percent more cases than Florida, and five times as many deaths per 100,000.
"Heavy restriction is getting us nowhere. If we’re going to get hammered by the Omicron wave anyway, can we please have some freedom back?"
January 2, 2022 - "There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. 'Everyone is at risk,' he announced. And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University.
"'I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,' [Woolhouse] says. 'In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15. And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
'We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt' he argues '... to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy. We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked'. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.'
"Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. 'You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.' Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse.
"Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. 'But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,' he adds.
"However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the [Great] Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity. 'This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,' says Woolhouse. 'It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.'
"Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. 'Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,' says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.
"The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of 'shielders', such as care home workers and informal carers. 'These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.' Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. 'By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community'....
"And Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. 'Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy,' he states."
December 19, 2021 - "From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call ... three of the scientists in attendance 'fringe epidemiologists,' in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency.... Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence. They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.
"So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins ... was pretty sure he knew all he had to know... In an email obtained by AIER through a Freedom of Information Act request, Collins told Anthony Fauci, CCing Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH, that he wanted 'a quick and devastating published take down (sic)' of the Great Barrington Declaration’s premises. One wonders why he would CC the Deputy Ethics Counselor on this, given the trouble these people seem to have with ethics, but here they were in October of 2020.
"Fauci wrote that same night to let Collins know that there was already a devastating take down of the Great Barrington Declaration…in that august scientific publication Wired.... There, science reporter Matt Reynolds told us there was no 'scientific divide' over herd immunity, but that’s not the funny part. The funny part came when Reynolds declared quite confidently that we no longer had anything to worry about, as lockdowns were – as of October 2020 – a thing of the past. 'The problem [with the GBD] is that we aren’t in lockdown,' Reynolds explained. '[I]t’s hard to find people who are advocating for a return to the lockdown we saw in March. When the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.' This Fauci-endorsed passage may be one of the worst takes of the entire pandemic. Less than a month later, lockdowns came roaring back with a vengeance.
"Fauci wrote to Collins again the next day, this time referencing a breathless op-ed by Gregg Gonsalves*, a public health professor at Yale, in The Nation. And here we arrive at yet another funny part. Gonsalves’ article was not exactly a critique of the Great Barrington Declaration. Instead, Gonsalves went after Martin Kulldorff, who in an interview with the leftist magazine Jacobin quite reasonably pointed out that the lockdowns hurt the poor more than most talking heads were willing to admit. Gonsalves’s grievance was that by interviewing Kulldorff, Jacobin had broken the lockdown 'solidarity' of other far-left websites including the Nation and the Boston Review.
"By October 10, the lines were well drawn, and Fauci thrust himself into the middle of the media hootenanny that was clearly emerging. Collins emailed again to boast about calling the three scientists 'fringe' in the Washington Post, although he told Fauci that their ongoing campaign to take down the GBD 'will not be appreciated in the W[hite] H[ouse].' The White House, Fauci retorted, was 'too busy with other things to worry about' the GBD. There was an election to deal with, after all.
"As the bedfellows became more strange, Gregg Gonsalves wrote directly to Collins, thanking him for his undiplomatic approach. For his part, Gonsalves became ever more hostile and profane, in his remarks on the GBD. 'This f*****g Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that won’t go away,' Gonsalves tweeted, shortly before reaching out to Collins. A day earlier, the Yale professor also began promoting unhinged conspiracy theories about the GBD and AIER that traced to the blog of a former 9/11 Truther movement activist.
"Some of the emails between Collins and Fauci sent in response to AIER’s FOIA request have been redacted, but surrounding context makes it pretty clear that they were looking for a way to impugn the GBD further if it came up at the White House Covid Task Force meeting on October 16. That morning, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. He pressed the need for her to oppose the GBD, and set the stage for an attack on Scott Atlas, who was the most friendly champion of the GBD on the Task Force. Fauci, it turns out, had to miss the October 16 task force meeting, though he likely breathed a sigh of relief when Collins emailed him two days later. 'Atlas did not take part in the [task force] meeting on Friday,' Collins wrote, 'and the Great Barrington Declaration did not come up.' Another partially-redacted email hints that Fauci celebrated this outcome. Atlas’s opposition to the lockdown faction on the task force 'is driving Deb [Birx] crazy,' he continued.
"Fauci and Collins were not done, though.... Our story picks up again in earnest on November 2, when Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers replied to an email that was not made public in pursuance to AIER’s FOIA request. It seems pretty clear, though, that Fauci asked Folkers for a list of sources that would allow him to argue effectively against the GBD. The email’s subject line references a previous correspondence from Fauci 'as discussed,' noting that Folkers had 'highlighted the three i found most useful' (sic).
"Multiple sources, and particularly Scott Atlas’s recently-published account of his time on the task force, have noted that Fauci often relies on aides to curate lists of sources in advance of his many media appearances. He seldom reads the scientific literature on Covid-19 himself, and instead arrives at meetings with staff-prepared talking points. It appears that Folker’s email was an answer to one such request for talking points to attack the GBD scientists....
"Fauci frequently portrays himself as a staunch defender of science who stays above the political divide and remains outside of partisan debates. In light of that, you might expect that Folker’s response to Fauci’s request would yield a small sample of scientific analysis on the logic behind lockdowns, even if only in a format bullet pointed by his staff. But you’d be wrong. Folkers sent Fauci a list of seven political op-eds and articles opposing the GBD from popular media outlets.
October 13, 2021 - "It was just over a year ago, on Oct. 4, 2020, that a group of doctors and medical experts, most of them specialists in epidemiology, immunology, and related public health disciplines, published a statement challenging the wisdom of the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The primary authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration” — it was named for the town in Western Massachusetts where it was drafted — were three scientists with blue-chip credentials: Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and professor at Stanford Medical School.
"'Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people,' began the declaration, which was soon signed by thousands of additional public health scientists and doctors. 'Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.' The scientists warned that “keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.' They argued instead for a policy focused on protecting those most at risk from the virus, namely the old and infirm, while allowing others to resume normal life with common-sense precautions.The relatively brief declaration was accompanied by a much more detailed analysis of lockdowns and their collateral damage, and of the best ways to shield the elderly and people in other high-risk groups....
"Kulldorff, Gupta, and Bhattacharya expected their views to be challenged — after all, lockdowns had become the primary default strategy for containing COVID-19 in nearly every jurisdiction — but they never expected the whirlwind of denunciation and censure that their statement provoked. For a year, the three scientists have been 'vilified,' reported The Berkshire Eagle last week. Bhattacharya told the paper he is worried for his safety 'amid a campaign to censor him on the [Stanford] campus where he has worked for 35 years.' Harvard’s Kulldorff said he, too, 'continues to face denunciation.' Reflecting on their experience in an essay for the British website Spiked, the scientists expressed astonishment that their good-faith critique of the lockdown strategy caused them to be subjected to a 'multi-pronged propaganda campaign' and demonized for their views.
"But that’s been the story of this pandemic. As with so much else in contemporary American life, every disagreement has been turned into an ideological battle.... Whether the subject was lockdowns, masking, social distancing, vaccination, the origins of the virus, or even what the disease should be called, dogmatism consistently drowned out honest debate. There should have been a lively, ongoing process of questioning, testing, and revising scientific insights into COVID-19 and how best to confront it. Yet too many people preferred to dig in their heels, refusing to acknowledge that critics or dissidents might have a legitimate point. Again and again, on both the right and the left, people have insisted on viewing public health measures through a political or partisan lens.
"In retrospect, it seems clear that the Great Barrington authors were on target in doubting the advisability of sweeping lockdowns. Numerous studies have found that shutting down the economy was largely futile in preventing COVID’s spread and achieved little that could not have been done through less restrictive means. Whatever effect the lockdowns had on containing the coronavirus, there is no disputing that they damaged public health in many other ways, including domestic abuse, mental illness and addiction, anxiety and depression among children, deterioration in oral health, missed cancer diagnoses, and thousands of additional deaths from untreated heart disease.
"None of this means that the Great Barrington Declaration was unassailably correct, let alone that its prescriptions, if adopted, might not have caused other problems. But did it have to become a flashpoint in the culture war? In the midst of a pandemic, respected epidemiologists ought to be able to raise questions about prevailing public health policy without being savaged as fools or apostates. The fact that they couldn’t is appalling, and should make all of us uneasy, lockdown supporters and detractors alike."
September 16, 2021 - "In their essay 'Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt' (BMJ Opinion, 9/13/21, https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-d...), Gavin Yamey and David Gorski present themselves as defenders of sound scientific principles in the face of 'denialism' related to the Covid-19 pandemic. These authors specifically target the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) as sources of what they imply is a misinformation campaign about the efficacy of Covid-19 public health measures. Unfortunately, it seems to us that Yamey and Gorski have misrepresented both the GBD and AIER....
"In October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference on the costs and consequences of lockdowns with three highly qualified medical scientists, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. These scientists received no compensation for their participation, which came about due to a mutual recognition that the medical, social, and economic harms of lockdowns were being neglected as countries around the world pursued an aggressive lockdown strategy. At the time the evidence of the efficacy of lockdowns was being debated (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3). This novel approach conflicted with existing public health recommendations for respiratory pandemics from as recently as 2019 (https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/..., https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/..., https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-en...).
"During the conference, journalists including science writer David Zweig, Forbes’ John Tamny, and Jeanne Lenzer, who reported it for The BMJ (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3908), conducted a wide-ranging question and answer session with the scientists, which AIER videotaped for release to the public (https://gbdeclaration.org/video/). At the conclusion of the conference, the scientists drafted the GBD as a general statement of public health principles, calling for an end to lockdowns and outlining an alternative strategy of “focused protection” for vulnerable communities (https://gbdeclaration.org/focused-protection/). While AIER is proud to have hosted the conference that produced this document, its text and principles originated entirely with the scientists - indeed, the idea for a general letter came about spontaneously on the afternoon of October 4 as the conference drew to a close.
"Yamey and Gorski’s allegations of fossil fuel and tobacco company interests in AIER are unfounded. These stem from their misunderstanding of AIER’s financial assets as independently managed by our investment subsidiary, American Investment Services. As with any investment fund, these holdings inevitably include stocks from hundreds of companies, none of which have any bearing on our editorial positions. This would be akin to suggesting that Yamey’s own pro-lockdown position is tainted by Duke University’s multi-billion dollar foundation - built from the tobacco fortune of James Buchanan Duke - or that Gorski’s medical work is ethically compromised by the presence of fossil fuel stocks in Wayne State University’s $400 million endowment. To portray either as a source of financial influence appears to display a misunderstanding of the very nature of investments, which are a way of ensuring an institution’s long-term financial stability - not a payoff from the firms whose stocks are owned.
"Are financial theories about AIER and the GBD really where these authors want to hang their hats? For the record, AIER publishes its own financial reports every year (https://www.aier.org/financials/). Anyone who wants to see where the money comes from, or where it goes can simply navigate to our website and do so. There are no tricks. There is no deception.
Sincerely,
Phillip W. Magness Senor Research Faculty & Interim Director of Research and Education American Institute for Economic Research
All articles and resources listed at https://bmj.com/coronavirus are freely available for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic or until otherwise determined by BMJ. They may be downloaded or printed for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained.
October 12, 2021 - "Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth. With something like lockdown – an untested policy that affects millions – rigorous debate and the basics of verification/falsification are more important than ever.... But with lockdown, science is in danger of being suppressed by politics. Lockdown moved instantly from untested theory to unchallengeable orthodoxy: where dissenters face personal attack. Understandable on social media perhaps, but it has now crept into the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in a recent article about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
"The GBD, which I wrote, together with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya [of] Stanford and Dr. Sunetra Gupta [of] Oxford, argues for focused protection. Rather than a blanket lockdown which inflicts so much harm on society, we wanted better protection of those most at risk – mindful that Covid typically poses only a mild risk to the young. For saying so, we are smeared as 'the new merchants of doubt' – as if scepticism and challenge is regarded by the BMJ as something to be condemned. The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:
My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.
We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.
It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal.
The GBD is referred to as a 'sophisticated science denialism’. Note here how something that challenges an orthodoxy is described as anti-science – a label that presumably could have been applied to any scientific innovator who ever questioned a failed orthodoxy. Collateral public health damage from Covid restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who [downplay] the harms of tobacco or climate change.
The GBD was not ‘sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)' – and I’m pleased to see that the BMJ has at least retracted this claim. We were there for media interviews, with no sponsorship. How did such a blunder end up in print in the first place? The AIER staff did not even know about the Declaration until the day before it was signed, and the AIER president and board did not know about it until after publication. If we had written the Declaration at say, Starbucks, would the BMJ have claimed that it was sponsored by the coffee shop?
The BMJ article mentions ‘AIER contributor Scott Atlas’, but Dr. Atlas has never been affiliated with nor written for AIER. Neither have we – unless the BMJ also views us as affiliated with hundreds of universities and organisations that we have visited during our careers or that have reprinted some of our articles. Dr. Atlas was not even aware that AIER had reprinted one of his articles until the BMJ linked to it.
Several AIER employees have gracefully supported the GBD, just like countless other people around the world, but we have never received any money from the AIER. This basic error again exposes how normal checks did not appear to have been applied by the BMJ.
The BMJ article ends by saying that my colleagues and I are peddling a 'well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests'. Nobody has paid us money for our work on the GBD, or for advocating focused protection. None of us would have undertaken this project for professional gain: it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet. As a vaccine developer, Dr. Gupta has connections with a pharmaceutical start-up, but Dr. Bhattacharya and I are among the few drug/vaccine scientists who purposely avoid pharmaceutical company funding to be free from conflicts of interests.
"The BMJ attempt to link us to the Koch brothers is an ad hominem attack of the highest order, but failed to mention much closer connections. We all work for universities that have received donations from Koch Foundations, although unrelated to any of our own work. While the AIER has received only a single $68K (£50,000) Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Since university staff frequently publish in the BMJ, the journal is arguably more closely connected to a ‘network of organisations funded by Charles Koch’ than the AIER.
"Many scientists receive research funding from private foundations, for which we as scientists should be grateful. It is hypocritical and discriminatory for the BMJ to single out Dr. Gupta because her lab received limited funds from the Opel Foundation. As one among many examples, Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College were awarded a prize by the Koch-affiliated Mercatus Center's 'Emergent Ventures' program.
"During a pandemic, it is the duty of public health scientists to engage with government officials: to use their expertise to confront what right now is perhaps the biggest single problem facing humanity. It is hard to understand why anyone would criticise that.... If we are wrong, then as scientists we would welcome a scientific discussion on how and where we are wrong.
"The BMJ article urges people to use ‘political and legal strategies’ rather than scientific argument to counter our views on the pandemic. It also calls for people to adhere to the ‘scientific consensus’ as represented by a Memorandum [the John Snow Memorandum - gd] published by the Lancet, a document that questions natural immunity after Covid disease....
"That such an article was published exemplifies the decay in standards of scientific journals. Open and honest discourse is critical for science and public health. As scientists, we must now tragically acknowledge that 400 years of scientific enlightenment may be coming to an end. It started with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and René Descartes. It would be tragic if it would end up as one of the many casualties of this pandemic."
October 5, 2021 - "From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the harms of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and maybe hint at a path back to normal life. Organized by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, the conference made a scientific case for shifting away from the heavy-handed lockdowns of the initial Spring 2020 outbreak. On their final day together in Great Barrington, the scientists wrote a short statement of principles, calling it the Great Barrington Declaration. This Declaration, their Declaration, touched a nerve well beyond the scientific community, and well beyond anything they or AIER could have expected....
"The aim that our guests had in offering the Great Barrington Declaration was to spark scientific dialogue that had been missing from the lockdown discussions until that point. It was AIER’s goal to facilitate this dialogue. The Declaration was a success in bringing, for the first time since the pandemic started, an anti-lockdown voice to mainstream policy discussion. The signatories’ stance was generally in line with the pre-pandemic plans that many, if not most mainstream authorities, (the World Health Organization, the epidemiology center at Johns Hopkins University, and the Centers for Disease Control to name just three) held. People tend to forget what the pre-2020 conventional wisdom on pandemics even was.
"As successful as we think the Great Barrington Declaration was, it failed in a number of respects.... We did not, for example, anticipate the vilification the Declaration would receive from any number of people, ranging from the progressive left to self-described libertarians. Immediately after the website launched, it was hit by a hoax signature campaign instigated on Twitter by pro-lockdown journalist Nafeez Ahmed. Most of the fake signatures were caught within hours and removed, but not before a hostile news media used them to manufacture a false story about their own self-created controversy over signatures from 'Dr. Johnny Bananas' and similar easily-caught pseudonyms....
"Ahmed also let loose what can only be called a flurry of increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories, falsely alleging that the GBD was somehow financially orchestrated by the Koch brothers, the British Ministry of Defence, and even a resort hotel property in Wales. Although Ahmed has a long history of conspiracy theorizing including the promotion of kooky claims about a controlled demolition bringing down the Twin Towers on 9/11, his ravings about the GBD were credulously adopted and shared by prominent scientists, journalists, and any number of other people who should have known better. (For the record, AIER received $68,000 in Koch funding over the last ten years. And that sum was used entirely to offset the costs of a single economics conference in 2017, with no links whatsoever to the GBD)....
"The Declaration even came under attack from a targeted propaganda campaign at the highest levels of the British government. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a pro-lockdown advisor to the UK’s SAGE committee, revealed as much in a recent book about the pandemic. Per Farrar’s account, Dominic Cummings – then serving as chief advisor to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – announced that he would orchestrate 'an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket Covid-19 restrictions,' seeking to discredit any scientist who questioned the wisdom of his government’s lockdown strategy.
"In a broader and more basic sense, the Declaration was written during a period of deep uncertainty. No one really knew what the correct Covid answers were, but the signatories followed the evidence as it emerged. Most importantly, no one had any way of knowing that vaccines were so close to being available to the public. And while the specific strategies of last fall and winter might well have been different had the signatories known what we know now, everything they wrote was compatible with the anti-lockdown message at the heart of the Declaration....
"So how well did the lockdowns perform in practice? Given the intense criticisms leveled at the GBD, one might be inclined to think they worked rather well. But they didn’t.... First consider how the lockdowners have continuously shifted their accounts of the very same policies they advocated. In the weeks that followed the GBD, its critics crafted a well-honed and widely repeated message. Lockdowns, they insisted, were already a relic of the past – perhaps a suitable strategy for the uncertainties of spring 2020’s 'first wave,' but no longer a serious consideration.... After a year and a half or so of lockdowns, we can safely dismiss this response. Less than a month later, the UK returned to full lockdown. Dozens of other countries around the world followed suit in mid-November. When cases spiked again in the United States over the winter, several states reimposed these very same 'strawman' lockdown policies that the GBD’s critics dismissed with a wave of their hands in mid-October. Not that any of them would ever admit as much now. Quite the contrary.... One new conspiracy theory even faulted the GBD’s authors for allegedly delaying the reimposition of another UK lockdown by a few weeks the previous fall...
"More pro-lockdown epidemiologists seemed inclined to grasp the central theme of the badly misnamed John Snow Memorandum in the Lancet – drafted in direct response to the GBD. This petition, co-organized by Gurdasani and other pro-lockdown scientists, predictably claimed that drastic nonpharmaceutical measures such as business closures and shelter-in-place orders had a large effect on reducing Covid transmission in the spring and summer of 2020. Recent data indicate that this statement is overblown, and common sense should have researchers looking for the tradeoffs that have to be made in these sorts of large-scale public policies. Be that as it may, the Snow Memorandum was built upon unreliable pro-lockdown studies out of Imperial College-London that have since been discredited....
"So through it all, what have we learned and what should come next? First, vaccines have been a game changer, and will continue to be so. A forthcoming Covid-19 treatment pill from Merck might well be even bigger. And there are certainly other treatments coming that we don’t know about yet, that will only emerge through the innovative processes of scientific discovery.
"Also unknown at present are the costs of the lockdowns. These will be felt for years, if not decades, and will go well beyond lost wages. What will all those foregone cancer screenings mean, in the end? What about all those people who suffered mental health crises as they were confined to their homes alone? What about substance abuse costs? And what of the various financial catastrophes that so many people suffered?
"The benefits of the lockdowns are still ambiguous at best, this after a year and a half. We still have no clear empirical evidence that they delivered anything close to what they promised. But because science has been so completely politicized, it will take years longer to arrive at the truth than would have otherwise been the case. Here, we are left to offer advice with a nearly 2,500-year track record: First, do no harm."
July 17, 2021 - "Laura Ingraham on her Fox television show in July 2021 correctly celebrated the re-opening of the US economy, so long as it lasts.... What actually drove the opening of the economy, she continued, were the red states of South Dakota, Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and others.... She further pointed out that it was not only the governors. It was business people who protested through letters and sometimes opened their shops in defiance. It was parents who demanded the schools open during impassioned speeches at school-board meetings. It was also brave scientists who dared risk their reputations and professional standing by speaking out....
"That latter group is not given nearly enough credit. The reference is to the Great Barrington Declaration that appeared on October 4, 2020. It was this document that had a decisive effect in challenging the lockdown narrative and causing tens of millions to take a second look. It was one of the proudest moments of my life to be part of its appearance. My experience has convinced me that good ideas — strategically timed and placed — can make a huge difference in the world.
"The world locked down in mid-March 2020. There were oblique suggestions coming out of the White House that this disaster could last until August, which I simply could not fathom. Sure enough, by August the lockdowns were not only still in place, but disease panic was everywhere and worse than ever. I was living in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The streets were mostly empty. The shops were closed by law. No concerts. No movies. No school. No church. People huddled in their homes.... When you did see people at the store, they shuffled like penitents at a medieval burial, covering their bodies in wool, wearing huge masks, gloves, and sometimes even goggles.... The one thing on everyone’s mind was avoiding this one pathogen that they could not see. So it was throughout the whole country in various degrees.
"In September, I was scrolling through Twitter and bumped into some posts by an epidemiologist at Harvard University. He was writing against lockdowns. I thought, wow, this must be the loneliest man in the world. I dropped him a note and invited him for dinner. He gladly accepted. The next weekend I met the man who would become a great friend over time: Martin Kulldorff. I invited a few other people in the region who had been writing anti-lockdown posts. We gathered and all became fast friends. In the midst of disease panic, we not only interacted like normal people; we had huge discussions on the pandemic and policy response. All of us learning from Martin about the dynamics of viruses and how to deal with them. The meetings ended up lasting the entire weekend.
"Soon after, Martin called me with an idea. The problem, he theorized, is that the mainline journalists out there who are writing about Covid know absolutely nothing about the topic. They, therefore, defaulted to medieval superstition. Let’s have a meeting, he suggested, that includes several scientists, plus journalists so that we can at least provide an alternative. When should this take place? In two weeks.
"Sure enough, it all came together. The participating scientists were Martin, plus Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University. There were only three journalists, but they were important people. We filmed the event for posterity. It became clear the next day, however, that something else needed to be done.
"Following interviews and discussions, Martin suggested that the three scientists draft an open letter. With a mind toward marketing, I told him that open letters always struck me as slightly lame. They seem aggressive just from the naming. It would be better to write a short statement of principles, a declaration of sorts. He liked the idea. It was his thought that it be called the Great Barrington Declaration after the town of its drafting. My first thought was: There will be some people in this town who will not like this but, whatever, no one has intellectual property in the name of a town.
"That evening, it was written. The statement was not radical. It said that SARS-CoV-2 was primarily a threat to the elderly and infirm. Therefore, it is they who need protection. The virus otherwise would be extinguished via herd immunity obtained through exposure, same as any respiratory virus in history. Society should be opened in the interest of a holistic view of public health.
"My friend Lou Eastman put together a website, pretty much overnight. The next morning, the interviews began. I’ve never seen anything go so viral, so quickly. The site alone ended up being viewed some 12 million times. Thousands of news stories appeared the world over. Eventually, 850,000 plus people signed the declaration, among which were tens of thousands of scientists and medical practitioners.
"Looking back at how and why this happened the way it did, my theory is that the lockdown had frozen debate and speech. Everyone in a position to oppose them had become afraid to speak for fear of shaming. Media was working 24/7 to say that lockdowns were the only option, so anyone against them was a 'Covid denier.' It was brutal. It went on for months. Someone needed to stand up and say the unsayable. That is what these scientists did.
"The Great Barrington Declaration changed everything. The negative press backfired. Why would these famous scientists risk everything to write this Declaration if there was not some truth in what they said? Among those who were interested was Ron DeSantis who had already opened the state of Florida to great howls of media protest. He eventually invited the scientists to a public forum to reach the entire nation.
"The rest unfolded as if scripted by a great novel. The good sense of the Declaration gradually overwhelmed the nonsense idea that destroying markets and society was good for health. The document came to be translated to dozens of languages, and the signatures poured in. The smears got worse by the day. Even the town council jumped into the fray and denounced the document....
"Still, the effect was realized. The openings cascaded through the country, slowly at first and then faster and then all at once. I rarely see the Great Barrington Declaration credited for this, but I know the truth. I was there with a front-row seat at a great philosophical theater. I saw how a simple idea can change the world."
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