February 25, 2023 - "New academic 'histories' now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on 'market fundamentalism' or 'neoliberalism.' The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a 'manufactured myth' arising from the 'inventions' of 20th century business interests.... All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.
"At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.... A reader ... will be left wondering why this same story needed yet another repackaged recitation....
"The Big Myth is structured in sequential vignettes about various themes and figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Friedrich Hayek, Rose Wilder Lane, and Milton Friedman, all of whom are portrayed as either willing propagandists for big business or hapless dupes of the same. The authors expend almost no effort on understanding the arguments of the thinkers they set out to debunk.
"A revealing example appears in the book's treatment of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil." Read's story is a fairly straightforward allegory for Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand," showing how complex social coordination arises from routine economic exchanges and signals in the absence of a centralized design. To Oreskes and Conway, however, the metaphor is literally the hand of God working from above to ensure the market system provides. As they put it, 'God made the marketplace and the marketplace made the pencil; ergo God made the pencil'....
"Interpretive peculiarities continue in their treatment of Ludwig von Mises' Socialism. After initially acknowledging that the book was written in German in 1922, Oreskes and Conway soon drift into anachronism by insinuating that it was intended as a critique of President Franklin Roosevelt. ("Mises's use of the term socialism was misleading," they contend, "because no credible American political leader in 1944 was advocating central planning.") They augment this ascription of prophecy with a sleight of hand, replacing the revolutionary Marxists of Mises' original commentaries with the comparatively benign Norman Thomas as their own preferred avatar of socialism. Like other texts in the anti-neoliberalism genre, The Big Myth removes 20th century free market authors from their historical context by hand-waving the Soviet Union out of existence and proceeding as if socialism means nothing more than a narrow swath of modern Scandinavian social democracies.
"Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors' fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical. This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target's qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an 'absolutist who sympathized with fascism,' Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist's migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises ... struggled to find a respectable academic job until 'dark money' funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University..... Meanwhile, Mises' academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved....
"They casually brand Milton Friedman a 'racist extremist' and defender of segregation, but not for any actual defense of segregation. The authors simply disagree with his argument that markets were more effective tools for bringing about integration than government edicts.....
"They accuse Friedrich Hayek of eschewing 'the essence of scholarship,' which 'is to look past the immediacies of time and place,' while themselves constantly processing history through their modern partisan commitments. They accuse free market economists of venturing outside their scientific expertise while offering their own decidedly nonexpert opinions on everything from economic inequality to COVID-19.
"The authors' discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. 'market failure' with the alleged success of 'countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,' China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China's centralized 'zero-COVID' regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair."
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."
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 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."
August 25, 2021 - "The recent surge of academic interest in 20th century conservatism, libertarianism, and associated developments in free-market economic thought also carries with it a curious historiographical implication. Encompassing contributions by authors such as Kim Phillips-Fein, Quinn Slobodian, Bethany Moreton, Kevin Kruse, and Nancy MacLean, the genre varies widely in scholarly quality. Its contributors nonetheless share a pronounced ideological hostility to their subject matter, which in turn shapes how they select and construe their source materials....
"The approach taken in these works essentially conspiracizes ... routine historical records from disliked conservative, libertarian, or free-market sources as if they were evidence of a collective will to politically transform the mechanism of history in ways that disrupt a specific course of progressive political development desired by the author. A predictable assortment of problematic consequences in the present allegedly follows from the decades-long designs they claim to have identified: the 2007-2008 financial crisis, environmental degradation, rising inequality, the political ascendance of the religious right, and Trump.
"Lawrence Glickman’s Free Enterprise: An American History offers the latest contribution to this booming yet peculiar subfield. Styled as an intellectual history of the concept, his thesis holds that 'free enterprise' is essentially a constructed mythology that arose from political opposition to the New Deal. Over the course of the 20th century, this version of 'free enterprise' recast economic interventionism as an aberration from an artificially constructed history of the pre-Roosevelt American economy.... In his telling, the myth’s expositors — mostly a group of business interests and associated free-market intellectuals — set out to morally 'delegitimize' the New Deal order and with it 'the most basic functions of government,' namely taxation, regulation, and public expenditures....
"In Glickman’s telling, that attack amounted to a 'one-sided war' upon the New Deal by business interests and other defenders of 'free enterprise,' all rooted in the aforementioned myth-making. While he offers a moderately interesting etymology of the phrase ... dating back to the nineteenth century, the core of his myth-making narrative suffers deeply from the epistemic distortions of the book’s ideological hostility to its subject. In particular, Glickman’s own political commitments to the New Deal (and progressivism more broadly) effectively render him unable to even fathom the existence of valid economic criticisms for Roosevelt’s policies, or their long-term effects on the United States’ fiscal picture to the present day. Rather, the New Deal is simply 'an outgrowth of democratic processes' and unassailable as such. Its critics, past and present, are ,,, casually brushed aside as expositors of a near-religious devotion to the artificially constructed 'free enterprise' concept. This rhetorical move allows the author to sidestep any engagement with salient criticisms of New Deal policies and political actors. It’s much easier to recast the critics as fanatics under the 'talismanic' trance of a dismissed concept.
"Glickman accordingly bristles at the suggestion that the New Deal unintentionally “prolonged and deepened rather than ameliorated the Depression,” even as modern empirical scholarship has lent strong support to that exact contention.... He discounts any concern with the deficit-inducing budget strains of Social Security and similar programs on account of their popularity.... He similarly sees only fear-mongering over the specters of European communism and fascism in contemporary business complaints about Roosevelt’s affinity for economic central planning.... One need not speculate that the early New Dealers drew inspiration from Europe’s totalitarian regimes in the decade before the world descended into war with those very same powers. They openly boasted of doing so themselves....
"An unfortunate result is an ostensible history of 'free enterprise' that almost completely omits the concept’s historical use as a philosophical foil to the Soviet Union and central planning. In fact, Glickman consciously excludes this dimension from his study at the outset by little more than a wave of the hand: 'Although what we might call "the age of free enterprise" … coincided almost precisely with the Cold War battle against Soviet communism, proponents described the dire threats to the system as primarily domestic, not foreign.' The severity of the error in this assessment may be readily ascertained by looking no further than mainstream mid-century political discourse.
"As Dwight Eisenhower contended in a celebrated 1950 speech that helped to propel him into the presidency, the communist world had 'embarked upon an aggressive campaign to destroy free government… because regimentation cannot face the peaceful competition of free enterprise.' Or consider Harry Truman’s 1953 State of the Union Address, recounting that the Soviets had predicted an American reversion into the Great Depression after the end of World War II: 'We answered that question—answered it with a resounding "no".... Free enterprise has flourished as never fore.' John F. Kennedy’s never-delivered Trade Mart Address from the day of his assassination planned to contrast the military ambitions of international communism with 'the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system.' Or as Lyndon Johnson succinctly put it in a 1964 interview, 'we have one thing [the Soviets] don’t have, and that is our system of private enterprise, free enterprise.' By attempting to pigeonhole the term to its domestic political uses, Glickman has somewhat astonishingly managed to completely miss its central place in mid-twentieth century geopolitics."
April 2, 2021 - "A bizarre Covid-19 conspiracy theory appears to have taken root among the epidemiologists and public health officials who still support lockdowns.... [that] the UK government’s pandemic response was secretly captured at some point in the fall of 2020 by lockdown critics including Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] co-author Sunetra Gupta, her Oxford colleague Carl Heneghan, and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.... [They] allege that Gupta and her colleagues convinced UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak to abandon a so-called 'circuit breaker' lockdown during an audience in late September. Had the UK gone back into lockdown around the beginning of October instead of a month later – proponents of this theory maintain – it would have avoided its disastrous second wave over the fall and winter months.
"Even the basic narrative flies in the face of empirical reality. In November 2020 and again in January 2021, the UK went through two successive rounds of draconian lockdowns of the exact type that Gupta and her colleagues advised against. Championed by Johnson as a way to avert the second wave, these policies utterly failed at their stated purpose.... Equally telling, the timing of the UK’s fall/winter wave almost perfectly matched that of Sweden, which remained open throughout the same period – except the UK’s results under lockdowns were visibly worse.... Still, proponents of the newest UK conspiracy theory hold that something very different would have happened if only Johnson had enacted an earlier lockdown....
"Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London and a principal organizer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum, has aggressively promoted the alleged wresting of pandemic policy away from the lockdowners as an explanation for why the UK’s second and third lockdowns failed. As early as December, Gurdasani blasted Downing Street for supposedly listening to the 'dangerous ideology' of Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell, which 'has cost thousands of lives' and sought to replicate the 'dangerous' Swedish strategy. Never mind that Sweden, without lockdowns, has a much lower deaths-per-million residents total....
"The same narrative has become a favorite of Devi Sridhar, an anthropologist and Snow Memorandum co-signer who frequently appears in the UK media to advocate the fringe 'Zero Covid' strategy (the same one that claims we need more lockdowns to prevent future lockdowns, apparently unaware of the contradiction that entails). Attempting to explain why her own lockdown approach did not work, Sridhar wrote on January 5th that 'Chancellor Sunak invited Heneghan, Gupta & Tegnell to advise on strategy. That says it all'....
"Guardian columnist Owen Jones repeated it in a December column targeting Sunak and the scientists for allegedly delaying the lockdowns until it was 'too late to bring coronavirus rates down to anywhere near the level needed to suppress the virus'. A little over a month later, Sam Bowman, a right-leaning self-described 'neoliberal,' penned an almost identical argument to Jones in the same newspaper, writing 'Sunak was reported as having been the decisive voice in government against an autumn lockdown that might have brought cases low enough to make things like test-and-trace viable,' all because of “Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell being invited to speak via Zoom at Downing Street'....
"Gupta, Heneghan, and Tegnell did meet with Downing Street via Zoom on September 20th to voice their opposition to lockdowns in general – a position they have consistently held throughout the pandemic. Unfortunately, as Gupta has explained and as the next four months repeatedly demonstrated, the Prime Minister largely ignored their advice.
"The conspiracists’ alleged 'smoking gun' is a series of minutes from the UK government’s SAGE advisory committee on September 21st, which included a 'circuit-breaker lockdown' among a 'short-list' of policies 'that should be considered' in response to rising Covid-19 cases. Apparently in their minds, being 'considered' equates to adoption, and the fact that Johnson did not lock down the very next day is proof that the dissenting scientists had wrested the reins of the UK’s pandemic policy from those who advocated lockdowns, delaying the necessary response until November 5th after which it was too late....
"Wales tried a 'circuit breaker' lockdown that almost exactly followed the proposal being considered by the SAGE committee, announcing it on October 19.... Wales’s per capita case numbers followed the same trajectory as the rest of the country, including the sharp spike in late December and early January.... Wales’s 'circuit breaker' lockdown only slightly shifted the timing.... Its maximum daily peak of 87 cases per 100,000 residents nearly matched England’s peak of 96, and its curve for Covid-19 fatalities followed the same pattern as the rest of Britain."
June 19, 2021 - "Is the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) simply a front for a secret global eugenics plot, hatched at AIER [American Institute of Economic Affairs] by the British Ministry of Defence and financed by the Koch Brothers as part of an ongoing effort to force climate change, tobacco, and Covid-19 infections on our senior citizens? Such claims may sound like the farcical ravings of an internet paranoiac, yet precisely this narrative has gained a shocking amount of currency among ostensibly serious public health scientists and journalists since the Declaration launched last October 4th....
"Nafeez Ahmed, a writer from a London-based blog called the Byline Times ... has spent the better part of the last year posting conspiratorial bromides against scientists who question lockdown ideology. Fresh off of an unsuccessful Twitter campaign to flood the GBD’s website with fraudulent signatures during the week after it went live, Ahmed shifted his tack in mid-October with a new charge. In a succession of blog posts, he purported to show that the GBD was part of an elaborate scheme by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch to force the reopening of the American economy in spite of Covid’s risks, using AIER as its front. After outlining the financial portion of his conspiracy theory, Ahmed quickly appended a new 'partner' in the alleged plot: the British Ministry of Defence, which he implied to be the source behind the GBD’s website. To top it off, this growing plot was allegedly orchestrated through the owner of a resort hotel in Wales....
"Contrary to Ahmed’s wild imagination, Charles Koch had absolutely no involvement with the Great Barrington Declaration or AIER’s hosting of the conference that produced it ... (the few exceptions where a Koch-network organization has weighed in on the subject at all tend to take a pro-lockdown stance, such as the Mercatus Center’s Tyler Cowen, who awarded a research prize to Neil Ferguson of Imperial College for his Covid-19 lockdown model. AIER was one of the first high-profile critics of Ferguson’s model and continues to track its abysmal performance over the last year.)
"Although Ahmed’s batty narrative about the GBD’s origins does not withstand even minimal scrutiny, his conspiracy theories spread like wildfire on the pro-lockdown side of the epidemiology profession, and among the journalistic outlets that support them.... Paul Krugman ... promoted the product of Ahmed’s ravings.... Several of the most widely-quoted critics of the Great Barrington Declaration in the press seized on the same narrative and began repeating tall tales about nonexistent funding sources and the wholly imaginary British Ministry of Defense website scheme. Some even added new fringe theories of their own....
"David Gorski, a professor of medicine at Wayne State University and one of the media’s favorite go-to sources for quotes denouncing the GBD, published a blog post on October 12th where he liberally quoted and endorsed Ahmed’s conspiracy theories.... Gorski appended his own paranoid attack by branding the GBD a 'eugenics-adjacent' plot to cull and 'sacrific[e] the elderly' in the name of economics.... Gorski’s attacks are not only symptomatic of a deeply disturbed state of mind – they’re unbecoming of a scientific professional, let alone one that the media enlists for expert quotations as a primary interlocutor of the GBD.
"So did Eric Feigl-Ding*, one of social media’s most aggressive promoters of school closures and the fringe 'Zero Covid' theory. Deepti Gurdasani* of Queen Mary University in London, a principal organizer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum, similarly promoted the Byline Times conspiracy theories about the GBD’s funding. As did Gabriel Scally*, a UK-based epidemiologist who serves the pro-lockdown 'Independent SAGE' group. David Fisman*, a Canadian epidemiologist who aggressively pushed for lockdowns and school closures in Ontario, is another fan of Ahmed’s conspiracy theories....
"Justin Feldman*, a self-described 'epidemiologist of social inequality' at Harvard, ... has published a nonstop stream of frenzied allegations against lockdown critics in the public health profession, usually consisting of unsubstantiated innuendo about shady pecuniary motives behind their scholarship.
"Duke University epidemiologist Gavin Yamey* offered a 'huge shoutout to Dr. Nafeez Ahmed' for supposedly uncovering the bizarre conspiracy linking the GBD website to the British Ministry of Defense and the Welsh hotel proprietor. Elsewhere he praised the Byline Times’s 'great investigative journalism' about the GBD. Half a year later he still asserts that 'Charles Koch shaped [pandemic] policy in the US' through a group of scientists who have no tangible connection to Koch’s philanthropy.
"Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen*, another frequent critic of the GBD in the press, embraced the funding conspiracy theory ... accusing the three scientists of being part of a 'propaganda campaign' in the service of AIER’s supposed goal of 'ignore the pandemic, let’s get back to making money via unfettered capitalism.'
"Martin McKee*, a public health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who denounced the GBD as a 'fringe view' shortly after its publication, has a habit of giving his endorsement to Ahmed’s conspiracy theories about the very same document. Ahmed’s crazy tales of intrigue have another fan in Robert Dickinson*, a professor of medicine at Imperial College London and signer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum. Snow Memorandum signer Hisham Ziauddeen* promotes the same conspiratorial claims, in addition to his own blogging against the GBD for Ahmed’s outlet. Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves of Yale, another of the media’s favorite sources for ad hominem-laced anti-GBD hot takes, apparently concurs with Ahmed’s paranoid ravings. So does the University of Washington’s Carl Bergstrom*, another press favorite for expert statements defending lockdowns.
"Keep in mind that these endorsements of Ahmed involve claims that are not simply dubious or uncharitable interpretations – they are factual falsehoods that have entered the talking points of scientific experts who simply agree with their associated political connotations and believe that repeating them enough will discredit an opposing viewpoint. As matters of scientific analysis though, it would not be inaccurate at this point to state that leading academics on the pro-lockdown side of the Covid political debate are now regularly relying upon the paranoid ravings of a conspiracist blogger as one of their primary sources for attacks upon the Great Barrington Declaration."
June 9, 2020 - "The problem of causal inference presents one of the great challenges of empirical analysis. While it is relatively easy to find patterns in data that appear to move over time in response to overlapping events, it is much harder to show that those events specifically caused the data to move as expected. Think about how presidents often cite positive economic data such as GDP growth or the stock market as vindication of their own economic policies. Prior to early March 2020 this was a favorite tweeting topic of Donald Trump, although his predecessors almost all made similar claims....
"[C]onsider the ongoing question about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 lockdown policies employed in several U.S. states as well as other countries. A causal inference test of the lockdowns would require clear evidence of different outcomes between states that adopted shelter-in-place rules and states that did not. Given the complex multitude of confounding variables affecting COVID-19 transmission and mortality rates, isolating causality from the lockdown policies is no easy task.
"That brings us to a new report published in the journal Nature by the epidemiology team at Imperial College-London (ICL).... This is the same epidemiology research center whose agent-based simulation model convinced the American and British governments to switch to a lockdown strategy.... The paper [in Nature] and an accompanying press release from the university put numbers to this claim, asserting that the lockdowns saved an estimated 3.1 million lives in Europe.
"Although this headline-grabbing claim will likely be treated as a vindication of the lockdown approach by its political supporters, a closer look at the analysis suggests the Imperial College team reached this conclusion without offering a viable causal inference strategy. As they describe in the paper, 'By comparing the deaths predicted under the model with no interventions to the deaths predicted in our intervention model, we calculated the total deaths averted in our study period' [stress added - gd]....
"Put differently, the epidemiologists reached their estimates by taking the difference between observed deaths and their own agent-based simulation.... They then depict the difference as if it demonstrates the validity of their own simulation model, despite providing no evidence that their original simulation was correct....
"If that line of argument sounds familiar, it’s because Donald Trump beat the Imperial College team to the punch. Citing the now-infamous March 16th ICL report by Imperial’s Neil Ferguson, the American president now regularly claims vindication for his own support of the lockdowns on account of the difference between its 2 million-plus projected death toll and the actual count of just over 100,000 as of this writing. As Trump tweeted on May 26, 'For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number.'
"Whether used by Imperial College or Trump, this line of argument falters as social science because it assumes the validity of the very same forecast it purports to demonstrate. Rather than testing the causal inference that lockdowns reduced the COVID death rate, it takes [its] own forecasted death rate as a given and then purports to calculate the number of lives saved by simple subtraction from its own model....
"The new paper essentially acknowledges as much in noting that 'the counterfactual model without interventions is illustrative only and reflects our model assumptions.' Rather than investigating this seemingly-crucial assertion further, let alone subjecting it to empirical testing, the authors indulge in a handwaving exercise that simply declares: '[all scenarios broadly show the same trends]. Given this agreement in differing scenarios we believe our estimates for the counterfactual deaths averted to be plausible'....
"The result is not a valid exercise in social scientific analysis, nor is it even an empirically robust test of the ICL model’s performance. Like Trump’s tweeting about both the economy before March 2020 and his own claimed role in reducing COVID deaths after the lockdowns, it is an exercise in statistical astrology. Sadly, unlike Trump’s tweets, however, the ICL managed to convince Nature, a top journal in the profession, to publish these unfounded claims."
July 18, 2015 - "The current national debate over the display and meaning of the Confederate battle flag has reopened a number of longstanding arguments about the meaning of the American Civil War, including within libertarian and classical liberal circles.... Unfortunately, bad history often accompanies this politicization, and libertarians are by no means immune from this tendency.
"The first and perhaps best known 'libertarian' approach to the Civil War attempts to find sympathy with the defeated Confederacy because of its resistance to the federal government and northern military authority or its professed cause of free trade and political self-determination.
"Some aspects of this position have intuitive appeal that produces sympathy for the Confederate cause: It professes outrage against a Union that is said to have conquered by force, trampled on the rights of states and individuals, unleashed a military invasion, suspended civil liberties, denied government by consent, elevated Lincoln to a 'dictator' and effected a lasting centralization of federal power....
"This interpretation falters in what it neglects: slavery.... A continuum of classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill and J.E. Cairnes forged the main intellectual case against the slave system.... [P]ro-Confederate libertarians ... abandon what is perhaps the single most important and beneficial contribution that classical liberalism has made to the human condition: the abolition of slavery.
"[L]ibertarian defenders of the North are keenly aware of both the centrality of slavery to the conflict as well as the importance of the abolitionist cause to the liberal intellectual tradition.... This view recognizes slavery and celebrates its abolition, but it tends to neglect or even rationalize the war’s uglier features and consequences: a dramatic weakening of the constitutional federalism laid out in 1787, a rapid acceleration of the scope and power of the federal government, a precedent-setting assault on habeas corpus and expansion of presidential war powers that persists to the present day — and the horrendous destruction itself....
"In place of both views, and in recognition of their deficiencies, libertarians might develop a better appreciation for the Civil War’s complexity by turning their analysis to the nature of the ruinous agency of the conflict itself.
"War, whether waged to hold human beings in bondage or subjugate a political rebellion, is a consciously coercive action of the political state in its most expansive and direct form. And armed warfare, as both the Union and Confederacy came to discover across four destructive years, is horrifically messy, unpredictable and destructive of human life and human liberty."
