Stanford University to host right-wing trucker convoy adjacent political event.
Stanford University to host right-wing trucker convoy adjacent political event.
Covid contrarian symposium scheduled a month before the U.S. presidential election - same old characters, backed by right-wing money, with the same extreme politics against public safety.
Stanford has a history of embracing eugenics, if you know about the horse breeding stuff[1] as well as hosting people like Andrew Huberman, who are associated with being limelight seekers advertising dubious products,[2] promoting dubious claims about probably non-existent science,[3], and turning to Christianity once outed for untoward behaviour.[4] So it’s not surprising that the political interests involved in the Stanford pandemic symposium would be the most egregious of covid contrarians. With the timing of the seminar being October 4, 2024, the anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration, despite it coinciding with a Jewish holiday[5] - it’s hard not to see this symposium as another right-wing political stunt. It seems like an extension of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025[6] which has overlap in funding with some participants’ other associations, such as the Brownstone Institute.[7] And it has even more significant overlap with the right-wing led Congressional hearing from February 2023, as Walker Bragman and Allison Neitzel described it: “The name and theme of the Stanford Health Policy conference echo those of the February 2023 opening hearing of the Republican-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP), which was called “Preparing For the Future By Learning From the Past: Examining COVID Policy Decisions.” The similarities are no coincidence. The Stanford summit is the project of one of the GOP expert witnesses from the HSSCP hearing.”[8]
Is it possible these people thought their little declaration would be the “October Surprise”[9] back in 2020? Is it possible they’re going to try again because these people seem to have a great deal of conceited pomp and hubris that I would not necessarily rule out this level of self-importance, and thus intend this as an audition for potential positions in an imagined future Trump administration. They have to compete since the Trump MAGA campaign is now fortified with RFK Jr. who is not only against vaccination in general, he’s against even studying infectious diseases, and is still pushing disproven covid remedies and suggesting scientists should be forced to republish the oh so many retracted studies on covid and failed treatment ideas.[10] Trump advisor Peter Navarro, who spent some time in jail for defying a subpoena[11] connected to “The Green Bay Sweep” coup plot stuff.[12] was arguing in favour of disproven covid remedies as recently as 2023.[13] And doctors connected to the FLCCC are still reportedly recommending discredited treatments for long covid,[14] or what they claim is vaccine injury, among other things.[15] RFK Jr. also echoed calls for punishing public health officials.[16] His rhetoric on that is perhaps more level measured than Ivan Raiklin who infamously announced that there is already planning in the works for anti-vax ex-military to be deputized to do “livestreamed swatting raids” on public health officials and others.[17]
It does appear that the campaign against public health is still a central issue for Republicans in the upcoming election. They’re possibly trying to recapture old bizarre glories like the trucker convoy protests against restrictions that no longer existed,[18] or in some cases never existed in the first place — these people are all lockdown revisionists.[19]
The Speakers
NOTE: Jay Battacharya is not a scheduled speaker at this event but apparently he took credit for organizing it.[20]
John Ioannidis (Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford Medicine)
Very early in the pandemic John Ionnidis advocated against the Precautionary Principle, an important public safety tenet. This important public health concept is described in a paper from 2002: “The precautionary principle is intended to take into account these limits of science in addressing grave or irreversible risks. More importantly, however, it addresses the temptation for decision makers to rely on scientific expertise in order to avoid taking responsibility for their policies, requiring experts to recognize the imperfection of their science and placing the burden on policymakers to decide what level of risk is acceptable.”[21] Instead of the position that lives are worth saving, Ioannidis wrote an op-ed in STAT in March 2020 bemoaning any precautionary position, hand-wringing about the unknown wait for “vaccines or affordable treatments", saying: “Sadly, that’s information we don’t have. In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns”[22] - as if the few weeks of non-essential business shutdowns wouldn’t have happened anyway if there was mass sickness. Businesses[23] and schools[24] have shut down or have had issues - forced out of necessity because of illness much later in the pandemic, after authorities started neglecting public health measures. I’ve seen this locally.[25]
A month or so after disparaging the precautionary principle, John Ioannidis & Jay Battacharya, with several other authors, published a study that they claimed bolstered their position against safety interventions. It was a study in Santa Clara County, California that supposedly showed that the area was closer to some sort of herd immunity[26] than the public health case surveillance[27] was reporting. It was reported that the study authors didn’t know where the study funding came from, but that seems like a superfluous point, since it’s kind of obvious that a tycoon of some kind known to be very vocal against pandemic mitigation forked over money to pay for a study by vocally anti-prevention scientists, who then went on to be sloppy about the particulars of their methods - specifically an inaccurate antibody test which discredited the study.[28]
Any mogul interested could’ve easily found out these people were like-minded. Like John Ioannidis, Jay Battacharya also had a covid contrarian op-ed published March 24th 2020 in The Wall Street Journal of all places, boldly claiming that the mortality rate for the pandemic coronavirus was supposedly exaggerated,[29] right while we were getting news that Italy’s world-class health system was collapsing with healthcare workers bearing witness to mass death,[30] and less than a week before the reports of freezer truck morgues in New York City started hitting the headlines.[31]
Eran Bendavid (Professor of Health Policy, Stanford)
In a 2021 piece in Tablet, Eran Bendavid positions himself as having been humbled and unable to make any predictions about the trajectory of the pandemic, saying he’s an infectious diseases physician that was taken off guard perplexed by, for example, India and Vietnam being “spared” in the first wave of covid.[32] The problem is that maybe he just wasn’t paying attention for some reason, because there was a journal publication about how Vietnam avoided the worst, crediting NPIs (Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions) like closing schools and the border with China, and strict enforcement of mask rules and gathering restrictions.[33] As for India, there were those who speculated and analyzed the situation of India having possibly been “saved” by travel restrictions and public health interventions,[34] while Monica Gandhi erroneously declared in February 2021 that India had probably already reached “herd immunity” through natural infection,[35] right on the precipice of the horrendously grim Delta wave outbreak disaster in India.[36] And with the benefit of hindsight, more recent reports of data on the first wave in India say that it was actually way much worse than had been estimated anyway sadly, and a study suggests the numbers could be 8 times higher than the official statistics.[37] Nevertheless, one infectious disease doctor couldn’t have been expected to be paying attention to everything, and his expression of humility on not being able to predict outbreaks is duly noted.
However, a few months later Bendavid found a boatload of confidence - since by early 2022 he was assertively pushing the widely debunked “immunity debt” theory to promote anti-mask political sentiments for a much larger media outlet known as Fox News.[38] He claimed that moderate amounts of viruses and parasites are good for kids' health balance, which is not how it works, and I think not how most of us would want it to either.[39] The term “immunity debt” only popped up in the summer of 2021,[40] as a buzzword, this just wasn’t any kind of medical term prior to the pandemic and masks as a political football. It seems to have cropped up part and parcel with the propaganda push to force in-person for schools no matter how unsafe[41] and to unmask the kids by fall.[42] This was all quite obviously driven by dark money - again a lot of the same money - motivated by industries like fossil fuel[43] and commercial real estate,[44] with tycoons like the late Sam Zell[45] hostile to remote options.[46] The concept of “immunity debt” is not based in science and only based vaguely on the hygiene hypothesis, which is hazy itself and not even applicable to viruses.[47] The immune system is not like a muscle,[48] though some people have instead also used the term inaccurately to describe how certain exposures were delayed and that’s what may explain some off-season outbreaks. But pushing this concept, that not getting infected is a problem, has led unfortunately to people thinking not only that they should have their kids repeatedly infected with covid - which is definitely not advisable[49] - but also has led to some misguided people being furious at parents of surviving immunocompromised children and other high risk people. Some of these people actually believe eugenics pseudoscience theories[50] that are interpreted to mean that the continued sickness their “healthy” kids are experiencing is the direct result of “weaker” people who refuse to sacrifice their lives or their children for the sake of the herd.[51]
Eran Bendavid was also a co-author on that March 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed with Jay Battacharya[29] and a co-author on the Santa Clara study with Battacharya and John Ioannidis.[26]
Monica Gandhi (Professor of Medicine, UCSF)
The painful facepalm on the botched India prediction wouldn’t be the last time Monica Gandhi got it infamously wrong. There have been a virtual litany of examples, many covered by Medhi Hasan in an interview in 2022 with Gandhi that took her to task for many errors.[52]
In mid June 2021 she was celebrated as a hero by San Mateo County at a gathering, at least it was outside, but at this party they had a ribbon cutting ceremony where the ribbon was made out of medical masks[53] and Monica Gandhi relished in cutting the masks with a big pair of scissors and then jumping up and down with a line of people prematurely celebrating the supposed end of the pandemic.[54] This was about 6 months before the horrendous winter Omicron wave, the deadliest surge for American cancer patients that peaked in January 2022.[55]
In October 2021, in a bizarre mixed up woke-washing statement to Democracy Now, Monica Gandhi declared that she would not be getting the public health recommended booster dose of covid vaccine, and claimed it was in protest for people in other nations who hadn’t been caught up in getting vaccinated at all yet.[56] This made no sense because unused vaccines in American communities would not somehow miraculously mean that people on other continents would get those doses, they would merely go to waste, and then lesser vaccinated Americans would just be more likely to continue getting sick, crowding in hospitals, and maybe even more likely to take the virus to other places when they traveled. Vaccine equity is a serious issue but not one that would be ameliorated by Monica Gandhi personally declining a boost, and public health is certainly not served by this upside down messaging to depress vaccine booster uptake in the U.S. This argument of hers frankly sounded ever so reminiscent of climate contrarians who muddy the discourse with woke-washing disinformation like framing climate justice as colonialism by demanding that regions harshest hit by climate change need fossil fuel,[57] and by chastising as supposedly elitist any legitimate criticism of predatory practices like crypto orbs distributed in developing countries.[58]
But embracing the upside down is how Monica Gandhi is such an insidious covid contrarian. She was contrite and publicly apologized for the gravely mistaken prediction about India. I have no doubt she was sorry. She went on Democracy Now to coo socially responsible lefties with a pro-vax and pro-mask message.[59] And she used the pandemic to make a progressive case for universal healthcare, saying the lesson should be “to recognize healthcare as a right, not a privilege.” in her book[60] She went on MSNBC in the summer of 2021, to make a case for businesses to require vaccination.[61] Monica Gandhi is not MAGA.
In sales they call this trick start with a yes, or “the yes set” technique, described as “creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree” and which sales experts openly state is a type of hypnotherapy.[62] It plays on one of the many cognitive biases that trip people up, especially when people are not vigilantly engaging in critical examination, which is usually.[63] I call it Truth with a Lie Chaser - today the influencer says something you like, and tomorrow they take money to try to sell you something.[64] It’s about gaining trust by creating a comfortable rapport in order to introduce other stuff. Another form of trickery at play here is manipulating the natural desire for people to be told what they want to hear.[65] David Gorski pointed this out about Gandhi positioning herself “as the “reasonable” middle ground between “let ‘er rip” ideologues like Makary and Atlas and conventional public health science recommending standard public health interventions to mitigate the pandemic, viewing the latter as too strict, all the while polluting the COVID-19 information landscape with obvious misinformation and falsely pacified people the worst was over, when in fact the worst was yet to come.”[66]
I don’t suggest it’s deliberate on the part of Monica Gandhi since I don’t really believe her to be some PR mastermind. But I could see her triangulation for whatever reason being very attractive to the actual PR savvy operators, recognizing its value, and her walking ass-backwards into audience capture to those who boost her voice. It’s also possible that being the supposedly “reasonable” middle ground is like catnip to a mass media all stunlocked[67] on the false balance of truth and lies, no matter how many criticisms pointing out the flaws and the dangers,[68] and the complete absurdity of it, summed up well by Hayden Buckfire: “Clearly, an equally weighted roundtable discussion between squirrel believers and squirrel denialists would not be worthwhile.”[69]
Scott Atlas (Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
Scott Atlas is quite obviously MAGA. He was literally a part of the Trump administration as a science advisor,[70] where according to The Washington Post he “advanced fringe theories” and “advocated allowing infections to spread” when he was put on Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force in the summer of 2020.[71] The Scott Atlas Wikipedia page says: “He is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located at Stanford University.” And Dr. Scott Atlas already had a partisan right-wing history pre-pandemic, going back to at least March 2012 in an op-ed in Politico, where he called for striking down, and urgent opposition to, the Affordable Care Act — based on partisanship — stating that Republicans were opposed to it and claiming only Democrats supported it.[72]
By March 26th, 2020, he had a Washington Times op-ed, already invoking the “focused protection” trope that would become the hand waving defense of the Great Barrington Declaration’s gruesome plan later in the year. In his op-ed, Atlas claimed that the economic harms would be “enormous” and longer lasting than the effects of the virus.[73] He doesn't explain how anything could be longer lasting than death, and so far as I know he’s not walked back or apologized, even after so many Americans are gone from us forever, the longest of the long-term effects of the pandemic.
Scott Atlas appeared on CSPAN Washington Journal Primetime on March 30, 2020, just as we started seeing the freezer truck morgues in the news.[31] He admitted that much spread of the pandemic disease could be asymptomatic, but insisted this would be a good thing and claimed without evidence: “We have a reason to want to have a certain amount of immunity develop naturally that is the way viruses and other diseases ultimately get under control.”[74] This is directly contradicting the real fact that there has been no disease in human history that was ever eradicated or even eliminated locally by allowing it to spread naturally and unfettered. Infectious disease epidemics are stopped by vaccination, and or other mitigation interventions. I don’t understand how a doctor could be unaware of this, but it’s like he got his understanding of infectious disease from stories about “chickenpox parties" in the 1980s based on confused reasoning. A New Yorker article about pandemic era “covid party” urban legends and their connection to “chickenpox parties” points out that: “Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation.”[75] It was unusual, but some children died as a result of chickenpox infections, and I’m sure a few kids infected on purpose died back then, just before the chickenpox vaccination program started in 1995, which has prevented an estimated 238,000 hospitalizations and 2,000 deaths.[76]
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis report from June 2022 states: “Within weeks of arriving in the White House, Dr. Atlas set out to arrange a roundtable event in the Oval Office to build support among senior Trump Administration officials for his herd immunity strategy.44 In August 2020, Dr. Atlas invited Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and Dr. Cody Meissner — all of whom supported this approach — “to speak with the President and the Vice President” and other Administration officials about the pandemic response.45”[77] Scott Atlas supported a strategy of “facilitating disease-acquired herd immunity” and the anti-mask policy he was advocating for was found by the Select Subcommittee to be consistent with the pursuit of that aim, “whatever his rationale” his strategy was “enabling the virus to infect and kill many more Americans.”[78]
Anders Tegnell (Former Swedish State Epidemiologist)
Anders Tegnell was in charge of Sweden’s pandemic response - or really - the grisly lack thereof. There’s a book by Sigurd Bergmann and Martin Lindström from 2022 titled, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, described this way by Martha Lincoln, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University: “Sweden’s pandemic failures have drawn on a constellation of institutional failures: in media, in crisis management, in health care, in public health, and in national scientific research institutes. Presented without fear or favor, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment should prompt a reckoning in Swedish society.”[79] A science article from the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications reported that in Sweden’s healthcare system, “Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.”[80] And the Sweden government’s regard for children doesn’t seem much better since they recommended against covid vaccinations for kids.[81] Parents faced fines if they tried to keep their children from school to protect clinically vulnerable kids or family members.[82] And revealed internal emails from Swedish government officials showed that, even though the Minister of Health and Social Affairs said that the herd immunity strategy was a “rumor”, an email from Anders Tegnell to his counterpart in Finland, recommended allowing the virus to spread, and specifically suggested keeping the schools open “to reach herd immunity more quickly.”[83]
The gruesomeness of what went on in Sweden makes me hesitate to even mention the absurd “Fat Emperor” topic. Sufficient to say that Trump was not the only senior government official during the pandemic with embarrassingly poor online hygiene.
Marty Makary (Chief of Islet Transplant Surgery, Johns Hopkins)
Marty Makary at some point in the pre-pandemic past became known for his incorrect assertion that medical errors are a leading cause of death. Certainly medical errors cause death, and it’s definitely a big problem, but Makary’s claim is way off, and there are people who’ve explained how extrapolating statistics like that doesn’t make sense,[84] and it looks a bit like the bullshit asymmetry principle[85] was in play with that bit of… math.
Makary spoke at the February 2023 House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, where he was all over the map. Debunk the Funk show’s Dr. Wilson made fun of Makary for basically complaining about hand washing, when he’s a surgeon after all. He was hand wringing about the fact that covid is spread primarily through aerosol transmission,[86] which is a bit rich really since he’s also presented as anti-mask. In an op-ed co-authored with Cody Meissner in August 2021, they were claiming a litany of mostly petty reasons to not mask, for example that some people who wear eyeglasses sometimes with some masks have their glasses fog up.[87] I’ve never thought being sick with a serious illness, or even just being sick for a week, would be worth it just to not figure out how to mask with glasses. The central claim of the op-ed though was that kids shouldn’t have to mask because of unvaccinated adults. The irony being that uptake on vaccination would’ve been a lot higher at that time, and since, if these people weren’t out there always downplaying and minimizing the seriousness of covid, and arguing that prevention isn’t needed, and in fact often advocating for deliberately infecting people. I have no illusions that they actually care who lived or died in that scenario, but a great many people assume doctors become doctors to save lives and would surely assume that doctors saying infect people on purpose were not advocating for the deaths of their fellow Americans. Cody Meissner suggested that natural infections are desirable[88] at an FDA VRBPAC vaccine meeting as recently as 2023.[89] Cody Meissner was also involved with Scott Atlas early in the pandemic and signed the Great Barrington Declaration.[69]
Vinay Prasad (Professor of Medicine, UCSF)
Vinay Prasad often uses language that Jonathan Howard has described as turning science and medicine into WWF bloodsport for entertainment - citing Prasad’s endorsement of RFK Jr, with quotes like: “RFK Jr would destroy Hotez.” and “RFK will obliterate him.” and “RFK Jr will flatten most public health experts in debate…”[90] RFK Jr. was once listed by The Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the “Disinformation Dozen” described by Walker Bragman as “a group of the most prolific spreaders of online misinformation about COVID vaccines.”[91] which I first heard about from Matt Binder on a podcast livestream in early 2021.[92] RFK Jr. who was running for president, suspended his campaign informally, and endorsed the right-wing presidential candidate Donald Trump, and appeared with Trump at a rally in August 2024.[93]
Vinay Prasad has been financed by The Arnold Foundation, which is a libertarian funding outfit that also funds “school choice” campaigns[94] which reportedly have the right-wing agenda to undermine public schools.[95]
During wildfire smoke pollution across the United States in June 2023, including where I live in the northeast,[96] The Washington Post ran an article specifically recommending respirator masks for health protection to the general public, citing official guidance that “Anyone, including generally healthy people, can be negatively affected by wildfire smoke.”[97] Vinay Prasad asserted that wildfire smoke pollution was not a health threat, despite evidence and official guidance to the contrary, because he said: “Even in your house, you still can smell smoked salmon.”[98] As if that’s even comparable, and apparently completely missing the news about the use of gas stoves creating an indoor air hazard.[99] He claimed that worrying about safety is essentially “crazy” by saying it’s “untreated mental illness” for anyone to use respiratory protection such as required by OSHA respiratory protection standards.[100] Vinay Prasad often uses “mental illness” as an insult, which is really discriminatory and ableist and inappropriate,[101] and also unbecoming for a physician frankly, particularly one specializing in cancer.[102] It makes one wonder what he says behind the backs of scared cancer patients about their “fears” if he’ll say this sort of thing about elderly, disabled, and immunocompromised patients wanting to protect themselves against a real and officially established threat to life and health.[103]
It’s not a great look. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Vinay Prasad luxuriates in “triggering the libs” and his online countenance as a science scoundrel.
Kevin Bardosh (Applied Medical Anthropologist, University of Washington)
Kevin Bardosh is still promoting the Great Barrington Declaration in 2024.[104] I’m not sure why anyone feels the need because most of it has been embraced by most elites and those in power. Except the implementation has been that the wealthy largely exercise “focused protection” to protect themselves while having others be forced into repeated infections.
Kevin Bardosh is on the team at an outfit called Collateral Global[105] - an organization that appears to exist in order to organize against public health and advocates against public safety and preventing harm. Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya are also involved. I have to assume the organization getting named Collateral Global was inspired by the fact that what they're advocating for will lead to mass global collateral damage. Definitely evokes a vivid grim image.
Kevin Bardosh also hangs out on podcasts with Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya has a podcast called “The Illusion of Consensus”[106] which is very funny since he seems to be hell bent on creating the illusion of a consensus around the idea that most people want to be sick a lot with a potentially dangerous disease…by having podcast after podcast and symposium after fancy declaration meeting, year after year, to try to beat it down our throats with the mere exposure effect[107] and repetitive propaganda techniques to create a “majority illusion”.[108]
Kevin Bardosh does engage in medical anthropological science, or at least tries. He has co-authored a study on covid mitigations in Haiti. Unfortunately, it seems to be a vehicle for hand wringing about “lockdowns” in rural Haiti, where the authors advocate that they should’ve just went for “shielding the vulnerable” (focused protection?) in a place where elders tend to live in multigenerational living circumstances with youths under crowded circumstances, and that’s the people whose homes haven’t been destroyed in disaster and forced them into crowded tent towns or sleeping outside and being afflicted with a number of underlying conditions and respiratory diseases.[109]
A glance over the paper suggested to me that this study highlighted how the leadership apparently failed to adequately explain to the public the benefits of disease prevention and failed to support people with adequate public health measures.[110] That wasn’t the takeaway of the study authors though. As far as I can tell their anthropological takeaway was that more Haitians should’ve died in service to ideological adherence to Great Barrington Declaration eugenic economics - perhaps Kevin Bardosh should be a guest on the podcast of Jack Murphy, who in 2021 tweeted out “If covid had been left to do it’s thing, our nation would have become as a result, healthier, fitter, and younger - ie stronger.”[111] Perhaps those two might have topics to discuss.
Laura Kahn (Co-Founder, One Health Initiative)
Science twitch streamer Homozygoat, aka Marcus, a science PHd candidate, described Laura Kahn on his twitch stream, as “A random lab leak lady.” adding, “I’m not even joking. I looked up this person. She’s just a random lab leak lady. That’s basically it.”[112] And I really don’t have much to add to that. Laura Kahn, at least publicly in 2022, seemed to simply express disappointment that, in order to have her particular cause of “more scrutiny of laboratory practices” championed, she’s forced to commune with these kinds of right-wing conspiracy theory weirdos who she herself described as having “kind of gone off the rails”.[113]
Jenin Younes (Litigation Council, New Civil Liberties Alliance)
Jenin Younes appears to be an anti-lockdown activist who is against vaccine programs, and advocates and even litigates for doctors to be able to tell patients medical misinformation.[114] The organization Younes is a part of, New Civil Liberties Alliance, opposes the administrative state, and had “argued in favor of overturning Chevron deference”[115] - which was overturned by the right-wing stacked Supreme Court, which will give more powers of the administrative state to rando judges, often with no expertise to make scientific, medical, or public safety judgements.[116]
Railing against “the administrative state” is a common refrain among fringe extremist right wingers. The Heritage Foundation and their now infamous Project 2025 plans, has one of the main policy aims being to dismantle the administrative state,[117] and about which ALCU’s Mike Zamore said “should alarm anyone who cares not just about the principles of constitutional freedoms and rights, but about people.”[118] The administrative state is also often intermingled with the conspiracy fiction of “The Deep State”, described by Donald P. Moynihan in 2020 as “The Attack on Public Service Under Trump” during that administration.[119]
Anup Malani (Professor of Law, University of Chicago)
“Professor Malani has a PhD in economics and a JD, both from University of Chicago” according to his University of Chicago Law School profile.[120] Anyone familiar with right-wing propaganda will know the history of the University of Chicago’s economics department connection to the horrendous Pinochet regime in Chile.[121] Anup Malani got his Phd in economics at the University of Chicago in 2003,[122] at least a decade after the “Chicago Boys” were there. And not everyone who received a PhD in economics back when are “anti-communist” fixated weirdos today.[123] Malani wasn’t anti-mask in 2022 at least.[124] But if one can be at all judged by the company one keeps, I would hesitate before assuming he’s a token reasonable person in this setup. Prior to the pandemic he focused on the legal aspects of cryptocurrency,[125] and now he’s pivoted to covid topics.[126] He’s also outspoken about free speech on university campuses[127] and yet he seems to be quite careful with his own public speech when it comes to other topics.
Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford University)
Sunetra Gupta doesn’t even try to be coy and I believe this person is way too far gone to ever repent. Gupta seemed gleeful at the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, talking about how great it is to deliberately infect the population. She wasn’t the first, that distinction would go to George Mason University Koch department[128] professor of economics Robin Hanson, who on Valentine’s Day in February 2020 suggested deliberately infecting the population.[129]
Sunetra Gupta received nearly £90,000 in funding from a Tory tycoon as soon as she started spreading inaccurate assertions that could be used to justify lifting pandemic mitigations which did happen, and resulted in increased spread of disease.[130] I believe that Sunetra Gupta is beyond being able to repent, because when the natural herd immunity thing didn’t pan out, as most knew it wouldn’t, and we couldn’t even get vaccine uptake anywhere near high enough for even vaccine immunity at any significance with the current vaccines, she just changed her definition of “natural herd immunity” - she switched to actually saying “natural herd immunity by constant reinfection”[131] with seemingly no shame, and as if nobody would notice the absurdity or the repugnance of such a suggestion.
Focused… Targeting
The worst part is the Great Barrington Declaration to a significant degree is now the standard practice in much of the world. Why on earth are these people still complaining and having their little events? Just political power seeking perhaps?
Balls to the wall to finish off all community care is not an unusual stance among the covid contrarian covid denier and anti-vax milieu. An attitude of score-settling isn’t confined to self-proclaimed minister of retribution Ivan Raiklin and his claimed army of anti-vax veterans ready for action,[17] nor only to be seen from the likes of Alex Jones agitating people against hospitals by comparing them to disturbing predator kills.[132] It includes doctors who wish slow death upon other doctors.[133] And it includes scientists like “The Norfolk Group” and their paper that named enemies like Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, and Francis Collins.[134]
I don’t know where these people are going with this symposium, but we’re already in a place that’s not good, because of their campaign against the public good. And as far as Stanford University being the proud host of this little gathering... I suspect it’s like Professor Sut Jhally has remarked: “It’s pressure, as always, with money.”[135]
References:
[1] Tech Won’t Save Us podcast — 23 02 16 [#155] The Untold History of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris Instead of waiting till the horses are older to start training them to race really fast, we’re going to start training them as soon as they’re born. We’re going to try to start racing colts, and the ones that show us that they’re fast, we’re going to focus more and more attention and resources on them. We’re going to build the fastest, youngest, horses in the world, And they do. They do this very quickly. It’s funny that it becomes, very quickly, not just an inspiration for other horse breeders, who are mad that this rich asshole has totally transformed their whole sport, but have to admit that he did do it. But also for education reformers who are looking at the training of young horses and saying: We need to do this for kids! The kindergarten movement is happening at the same time in Germany, and is coming to the United States. One of the reformers cites the Stanford Stock Farm and says: These kind of resources early is what we need for children. So the Stanfords ended up supporting, not just what they called their kindergarten track, which was the first kindergarten in California that was a kindergarten track for these horses — so a shrunk down track for little horses. They also go on to support the first kindergarten for humans, as well. So very quickly you make this jump between horse stock capital to human capital — and as horses get replaced pretty quickly in the 20th century with motor power — you see this transition from focusing on horses to focusing on people and the power of invention. How do you inculcate the youngest, fastest inventors, the youngest, fastest technicians and engineers?
[2] McGill - Office for Science and Society - Andrew Huberman Has Supplements on the Brain - Neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman hosts one of the most popular science podcasts. So why does he love dietary supplements so much? Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 7 Apr 2023 Dietary supplements are not regulated as strictly as pharmaceutical drugs and can routinely contain ingredients not listed on the bottle or not contain the main listed ingredient, which has been replaced by a cheaper lookalike. Supplements derived from herbs can cause all sorts of harm, including toxicity to the liver. A recent paper highlights rising cases of liver injury caused by these products. Why are these herbal supplements harming the liver? Some are adulterated with actual drugs; others contain poorly researched ingredients of unknown safety; yet others contain untested combinations of exotic botanical extracts or purified plant chemicals. Plants of course have inspired countless medical drugs, but taking a crude plant extract for medicinal purposes is risky.
[3] Conspirituality Podcast - 163: The Huberman Paradox (w/Jonathan Jarry) - Jul 20 2023 Michelle Wong: The claim is: he said people had used sunscreen, stopped using them for 10 years and then they were finding sunscreen in people’s neurons. So I thought well Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist, this is kind of his field, so I don’t see why I should doubt this. And then I started thinking more and going hang on, well I assume it’s sunscreen molecules. And all the sunscreen molecules that would be in someone’s brain, he is American, there’s only about I think eight common chemical sunscreens that could even get through skin and end up in the brain, but how would anyone test this? because sunscreen molecules aren’t just used in sunscreens they’re also used in lots of other products like say hand soap, so it’s used to protect the product from UV, it stops the colour change in hand soap. So I mean everyone goes to public toilets and uses hand soaps. How could you control for that? How could you make sure these people hadn’t used a hand soap? and then i started asking biologists, I’m a chemist by training, so biology and any sort of clinical studies is kind of a bit of mystery to me how any of that operates and they’re like, this would be very difficult to pass through an ethical review board. and how could you actually do this on let’s say cadavers? It’s just not possible. How could you make sure someone happened to stop using sunscreen 10 years before they died and their body got donated to science? There would be a lot of logistical difficulties. So yeah it’s just not a finding that’s possible. Derek Beres: Now here’s the thing about Michelle and her work, she spent something like a week reaching out to other scientists before coming to a conclusion regarding Huberman’s initial claim. And she’s not only addressing the chemicals in sunscreen but the entire scientific process of discovery necessary to make such a claim. And yet as I mentioned I recently heard huberman make the same exact claim again on another podcast. So here you have him, treated as an expert in neuroscience, and therefore considered an expert in related domains, this one being cosmetic chemistry and its effects on the brain. It seems like it should line up, given he knows a lot about what can cross the blood brain barrier, but as Michelle just pointed out, it doesn’t add up. And he’s repeating what he probably considers a throwaway claim, and in order to refute it, an actual chemist takes a week to reply, and then goes through the complexities of the scientific process, which takes time to unpack. And by that point Huberman and his listeners have likely moved on, having ingested these sunscreen crosses the blood brain barrier myth. And we know all too well what happens when we take something for truth. Julian Walker: I find it a particularly egregious example because as you’re saying, him being a professor of neurology lends an extra dose of authority. It’s a very specific and sensational claim. it’s made without citation and it’s specifically that molecules in some sunscreens have been found in people’s brains 10 years after they stopped using them like if you’re going to make a claim that specific citation should be fairly easy to provide because you’re you know it’s like that this is not just like a general throw away thing. it would be pretty easy to clear up and yet no response. and meanwhile i think the downstream effect is that his listeners will be hesitant to protect themselves from skin cancer because the guy that they look up to has said he doesn’t wear sunscreen.
[4] Conspirituality Podcast - Brief: Yes, Huberman’s Behavior Matters Mar 29 2024 “Huberman, alongside Joe Rogan, and Russel Brand, had recently jumped on the confession of faith bandwagon. So here we have 3 secular coded heterodox bro-fluencers all pivoting towards Jesus as some kind of final boss of the content multiplayer video game.”
[5] RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE Stanford University promotes disastrous “natural herd immunity” approaches to the pandemic September 2, 2024 Here’s another thing that I noticed about this conference that I bet most did not, even those rightfully criticizing Stanford for hosting a conference of this type: its date, October 4, 2024. Does that date ring any bells? It did immediately for me. Why? Because it’s the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed on October 4, 2020 and then released to the world the following day. I have a hard time believing that the selection of this particular date for this particular Stanford conference was not entirely intentional, given the involvement of a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration (Sunetra Gupta) and GBD-adjacent faculty as panelists. I could be wrong—and maybe I am wrong—but it’s hard not to see the choice of date as very intentional. Another oddity is that October 4 is during Rosh Hashanah, one of the most important Jewish holidays, with the site even noting this thusly, “We are aware that the conference date coincides with Rosh Hashanah. We deeply appreciate the significance of this holiday and regret the overlap.” I guess lining the conference up with the fourth anniversary of the signing of the GBD was too important to schedule the conference on a day when Jewish faculty could attend.
[7] Important Context Who is Funding the Brownstone Institute? New tax filings provide some clarity about the funders of the prolific COVID-19 conspiracy outfit. Walker Bragman Jul 24, 2023 Brownstone has worked to give an academic veneer to its agenda, which is ultimately supported by business interests. For example, in May 2022, Brownstone organized the so-called Norfolk Group, a motley crew of contrarian doctors that released an outline for a congressional inquiry into the federal COVID response in early February. That outline echoed the “Roadmap for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” report released weeks earlier by influential Washington D.C.-based conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which receives funding from a number of right-wing billionaires.
[8] IMPORTANT CONTEXT - ‘Embarrassing and Disappointing’: Stanford Goes All-In On COVID Contrarians - An upcoming conference held in the name of academic freedom raises questions about academic rigor. - Walker Bragman and Allison Neitzel - Aug 27, 2024 The name and theme of the Stanford Health Policy conference echo those of the February 2023 opening hearing of the Republican-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP), which was called “Preparing For the Future By Learning From the Past: Examining COVID Policy Decisions.” The similarities are no coincidence. The Stanford summit is the project of one of the GOP expert witnesses from the HSSCP hearing. According to public posts on social media and private messages obtained by Important Context, Stanford professor and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is in the university’s health policy department, is behind the conference, recruiting panelists. In one of the messages, as well as a post on X, Bhattacharya directly claimed credit for the event. Bhattacharya has been a controversial figure, earning a reputation throughout the pandemic for his outspoken—and often combative—opposition to public health measures. A co-author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a COVID herd immunity strategy based on mass infection and limited protections for the vulnerable only, he has long argued that lockdowns, masks, and vaccine requirements did more harm than good.
[9] October surprise - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In the politics of the United States, an October surprise is a news event that may influence the outcome of an upcoming November election (particularly one for the presidency), whether deliberately planned or spontaneously occurring. Because the date for national elections (as well as many state and local elections) is in early November, events that take place in October have greater potential to influence the decisions of prospective voters and allow less time to take remedial action; thus, relatively last-minute news stories could either change the course of an election or reinforce the inevitable.
[10] Retracted coronavirus (COVID-19) papers - Retraction Watch
[11] AP NEWS - Peter Navarro is 1st Trump White House official to serve prison time related to Jan. 6 attack By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER Updated 6:45 PM EDT, March 19, 2024 Navarro, who served as a White House trade adviser under Trump, was subpoenaed by the committee over his promotion of false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election in the run-up to the Capitol attack.
[13] Who What Why — How Musk Sold MAGA on HCQ — and Opened the COVID-19 Disinformation Floodgates — Karam Bales 01/08/24 In a sign of just how politicized science was getting, Trump adviser Peter Navarro — who, to this day, is still arguing for HCQ on Twitter/X and blaming the Food and Drug Administration for its “suppression” — co-authored a lengthy pro-HCQ document that attempted to undermine the results out of Minnesota that stood at odds with the president’s lofty claims.
[16] RFK Jr. as Trump’s health secretary? Here’s what he wants to do - Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist, appears to be angling for a Cabinet role. He has advocated dismantling core functions of federal health agencies. Aug. 22, 2024, 5:00 AM EDT / Updated Aug. 23, 2024, 3:31 PM EDT By Brandy Zadrozny Kennedy has criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for Covid’s death toll and said Fauci should be prosecuted if he committed a crime. He has also said the attorney general should force editors of medical journals to publish retracted studies. [...] Accepting an award at the group’s annual conference, he said he would stop the National Institutes of Health from studying infectious diseases, like Covid and measles, and pivot it to studying chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes environmental toxins, a category in which he places childhood vaccines, to be the major threat to public health, rather than infectious disease.
[17] Are they really planning an anti-vax military retiree interahamwe in America? If the far right wrests power, the best case scenario is that possibly medical technology gets shelved and masks and vaccines are maybe banned. The worst case scenario is... worse. Chloe Humbert May 28, 2024 There was a video posted by Ivan Raiklin on twitter that was taken as he was being interviewed by someone from the radio show “This American Life” and he describes planning what sounds like some kind of retribution vendetta of what he described as a “deep state target list” which involves, he claims, mobilizing 80,000 retired and former members of the military, which he claims left or were thrown out of the military because they wouldn’t comply with getting vaccinated for covid. He references wild false theories about the covid vaccines and inappropriately refers to them as “illegal DNA mutilation” (event though the vaccines do not alter DNA, this is misinformation). He refers to vaccination as “forced injections” and also refers to what he calls “the CCP lab incident” and CCP influence on the federal government — presumably referring to the covid vaccines, or perhaps the whole pandemic, as a plot by China. This idea seems related to the misinformation “plandemic” story, which has permeated and morphed over time. It even pre-dates the pandemic and is related to the post-viral sequelae called ME/CFS.
[18] Meet the Pennsylvania trucking business owner who plans to block DC Beltway by Kevin Lewis, Montgomery County Reporter (7News) Tue, February 22nd 2022 at 4:47 AM Updated Wed, February 23rd 2022 at 1:12 PM A Scranton, Pennsylvania trucking business owner plans to block the D.C. beltway on Wednesday afternoon to protest federal COVID-19 mandates, inflation, and illegal immigration. “Ultimately, it may be the whole Beltway that’s blocked down,” Bob Bolus told 7News Monday. “We’re making a statement for you people.”
[19] COVID-19 lockdown revisionism Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543 The term “lockdown” has become a powerful and perverted word in the infodemic about democracies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown, as used in public discourse, has expanded to include any public health measure, even if it places little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction. For example, a working literature review and meta-analysis on the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality misleadingly defined lockdowns as “the imposition of at least 1 compulsory non-pharmaceutical intervention.”1 This working paper therefore conflated mandatory isolation for people with confirmed infections and masking policies with heavy-handed limitations on freedom of movement, and since it gained viral fame, it has helped fuel calls for “no more lockdowns.”
[20] Important Context ‘Embarrassing and Disappointing’: Stanford Goes All-In On COVID Contrarians An upcoming conference held in the name of academic freedom raises questions about academic rigor. Walker Bragman and Allison Neitzel Aug 27, 2024 According to public posts on social media and private messages obtained by Important Context, Stanford professor and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is in the university’s health policy department, is behind the conference, recruiting panelists. In one of the messages, as well as a post on X, Bhattacharya directly claimed credit for the event.
[21] Sonia Boutillon, The Precautionary Principle: Development of an International Standard, 23 MICH. J. INT'L L. 429 (2002). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol23/iss2/7 Having its origin with the rise of environmentalism in Germany in the 1970s,2 the precautionary principle was exported to the United States in the 1980s before it became an element of the European Community's environmental policy in the 1990s.3 At the same time, the principle was incorporated into numerous international conventions and declarations, not limited to environmental law.4 Despite this thirty year history, defining the precautionary principle remains problematic (as will be further discussed), with the Rio Declaration providing the most commonly stated definition: "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."5 As this definition indicates, although significant scientific advances have been made, science is, as yet, incapable of addressing ever-growing global threats to human health and the environment. The precautionary principle is intended to take into account these limits of science in addressing grave or irreversible risks. More importantly, however, it addresses the temptation for decision makers to rely on scientific expertise in order to avoid taking responsibility for their policies, requiring experts to recognize the imperfection of their science and placing the burden on policymakers to decide what level of risk is acceptable. The precautionary principle applies when (1) a situation (use of a substance, or behavior, for example) exists, (2) which may threaten the environment or human health in a grave or irreversible way, and (3) there is a serious risk that the threat will materialize. Implicit in this setting is the scientific uncertainty about the nature and extent of the threat, or uncertainty as to the realization of the risk into a major harm.
[22] STAT - A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data By John P.A. Ioannidis March 17, 2020 Sadly, that’s information we don’t have. In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns.
[23] Reuters - Walmart temporarily shut nearly 60 U.S. stores for COVID cleaning in December By Richa Naidu and Danielle Kaye January 3, 20227:50 PM EST If COVID-related store closures disrupt Walmart’s operations into late January, they could begin to worry some investors, said John Augustine, chief investment officer at Huntington Private Bank, which invests in Walmart, Target (TGT.N), and several other retailers.
[24] WREG NEWS CHANNEL 3 - TN elementary school closes briefly due to COVID cases by: Alex Coleman Posted: Aug 14, 2024 The Humboldt School District temporarily shut down an elementary school Tuesday because of the rising number of COVID-19 cases. Class is now back in session at Stigall Primary School after it was briefly closed. But it shows that COVID is still part of our lives.
[25] There were lots of choices that could’ve been made differently the whole pandemic, and still could be made differently. Chloe Humbert Mar 20, 2024 “Reply: I wonder who called for grocery store closings, but not gyms, bars, or restaurants?! I bet this is intentional.”
[26] COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California Eran Bendavid, Bianca Mulaney, Neeraj Sood, Soleil Shah, Emilia Ling, Rebecca Bromley-Dulfano, Cara Lai, Zoe Weissberg, Rodrigo Saavedra-Walker, Jim Tedrow, Dona Tversky, Andrew Bogan, Thomas Kupiec, Daniel Eichner, Ribhav Gupta, John P.A. Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya medRxiv 2020.04.14.20062463; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463 “Conclusions The estimated population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection may be much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. More studies are needed to improve precision of prevalence estimates. Locally-derived population prevalence estimates should be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Funding Statement We acknowledge many individual donors who generously supported this project with gift awards. The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study, nor in the decision to prepare and submit the manuscript for publication.”
[27] CDC - National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) - What is Case Surveillance? Overview Fact Sheet [162 KB, 2 Pages, 508] Case surveillance is foundational to public health practice. It helps us to understand diseases and their spread and determine appropriate actions to control outbreaks. Case surveillance occurs each time public health agencies at the local, state, or national levels collect information about a case or person diagnosed with a disease or condition that poses a serious health threat to Americans.
[28] JetBlue’s Founder Helped Fund A Stanford Study That Said The Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly - A Stanford whistleblower complaint alleges that the controversial John Ioannidis study failed to disclose important financial ties and ignored scientists’ concerns that their antibody test was inaccurate. Stephanie M. Lee BuzzFeed News Reporter Posted on May 15, 2020 The whistleblower complaint alleges, however, that the coronavirus study was rife with some of the pitfalls Ioannidis has famously lambasted, from a sloppy statistical analysis to an apparent conflict of interest.
[32] Tablet - The Faustian Bargain Between Pandemic Scientists and the Media Casting scientists as polarizing media figures has proved a disservice to both science and the public by Eran Bendavid October 17, 2021 I am an infectious diseases physician, and a faculty member at Stanford University. My areas of academic expertise include disease modeling and empirical health policy evaluations. I study the role of biomedical, behavioral, and health care interventions in the control of communicable diseases using mathematical models. To my surprise, I became an exemplar of a scientist with expertise relevant to the most pressing problem facing the world—and I was popular with reporters. Yet, from the early days of COVID-19, I routinely found myself in a state of profound unknowing: I could not understand how it spread, or why it hit some places hard early on (Bergamo, Queens) while sparing others (Vietnam, India), or why waves came as they did, and faded as they did. Even now, with much more information, I have little confidence in my ability to predict where and why and how the next waves will come.
[33] Dao TL, Nguyen TD, Hoang VT. Controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Useful lessons from Vietnam. Travel Med Infect Dis. 2020 Sep-Oct;37:101822. doi: 10.1016/j.tmaid.2020.101822. Epub 2020 Jul 10. PMID: 32653477; PMCID: PMC7347475. Vietnam reported the first two cases in the country on January 23, 2020 [3]. On the next day, the Government ordered the activation of the emergency prevention system against SARS-CoV-2 [2]. On January 31, 2020, Vietnam ceased all flights to China and Hong Kong. The border with China was also shut few days later. After new infections in March, all international flights were grounded, and a nationwide lockdown commenced on April 1, 2020 for two weeks. All schools have closed for more than 3 months. Use of face masks was mandatory in public places. Gatherings of more than 30 individuals or festivals, religious ceremonies and sporting events were also banned. A national steering committee for COVID-19 management was established early and developed a multi-sectoral response plan with the Ministry of Health (MOH) playing a central role. Ministry of Information and Communication has been in close contact, from the beginning, with the MOH about the dissemination of information on control and prevention of COVID-19. Official newspapers, specific website of MOH [2] and open television channels continuously provided daily updates on positive cases worldwide and in Vietnam. Repeated communications about COVID-19 prevention were broadcast on loudspeakers of each village. Moreover, the MOH has created an official account on social media, sent SMS to all residents and changed the waiting ringtone into a voice message to remind peoples about preventive measures against COVID-19. In fact, public compliance with precaution measures, including wearing face masks, hand hygiene and social distancing, was high. Rule breakers were severely punished.
[34] Raina SK, Bar Yam Y. Was India saved by staying below the critical travel threshold and was lockdown and travel restriction the most important public health intervention? https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2102.12405 Submitted on 24 Feb 2021 “Indian response to the pandemic has been described from "India is in denial about the covid-19 crisis" or "India staring at corona virus disaster", to "The mystery of India's plummeting covid-19 cases". These responses have been far from being backed scientifically and appear ignorant of India's capabilities of leveraging its strengths to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.”
[35] Monica Gandhi MD, MPH @MonicaGandhi9 10:29 PM · Feb 4, 2021 High prevalence COVID-19 in Karnataka, India. So, the plummeting deaths from COVID (&cases) in India do make sense from herd immunity. This type of immunity is nigh in U.S. with vax - protection from severe illness is most important. Non-severe illness can't merit restrictions
[36] How India’s second wave became the worst COVID-19 surge in the world - The sudden spike in cases has brought the nation's healthcare system to its knees. There are no hospital beds, no oxygen, no medicines. And then there are the variants. By Nilanjana Bhowmick Published April 23, 2021 During the past few weeks, Indian social media has been inundated with SOS messages: hospitals tweeting about dwindling oxygen supplies and physicians watching helplessly as patients perish from preventable deaths. A journalist pleading for but denied a hospital bed took to Twitter to log his deteriorating condition till he died. Overwhelmed crematoria are working round-the-clock to keep up with the pace of bodies; furnaces have melted down from overuse and additional funeral platforms are being built outside. Such are the heartbreaking messages and haunting images that highlight the formidable second wave of the coronavirus pandemic raging through the country.
[37] Al Jazeera - India’s hidden COVID deaths: Was the toll in 2020 eight times higher? India had nearly 1.2 million excess deaths in 2020, new data shows. The life expectancy of Muslims fell the most among all Indians – by more than five years. By Yashraj Sharma Published On 20 Jul 2024 India’s actual death toll during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic that ravaged the world’s most populous country could be eight times higher than the government’s official numbers, reveals a new study. While that initial wave of the virus caught the world off guard, leaving governments and health systems scrambling for responses, India, after implementing a strict lockdown, appeared to have escaped the worst of its effects. The country was devastated by the delta variant in 2021 when hospitals ran out of beds and oxygen, people died gasping outside healthcare facilities and rows upon rows of smouldering pyres chequered cremation grounds across the country. But the new research suggests that the first wave, while not as deadly as the one in 2021, wrought far greater devastation than has been acknowledged until now.
[38] Stanford medical professor argues masking and social distancing doing long-term damage to our immune systems 'Too much exposure to some microbes leads to disease, and so does too little' Brandon Gillespie By Brandon Gillespie Fox News Published February 2, 2022 Dr. Eran Bendavid, associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, is making the case that continued masking and social distancing as measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic are actually doing long-term damage to our immune systems.
[40] Counter Disinformation Project - "Immunity Debt"? Established 2021 - The term didn't exist before 2021 - COUNTER DISINFORMATION PROJECT - OCT 6, 2022 The concept has been cited as a lockdown harm and as a reason why masks and in some cases even ventilation and clean air should not be used as mitigation measures in schools. It has been argued by some paediatricians in the UK and elsewhere that due to immunity debt infections don’t just catch up but overshoot. Immunity debt is a form of extension of hygiene dogma, in practise it looks a lot like an extension of the thinking that supported herd immunity by infection as a strategy to handling the pandemic.It is worth noting that those who raise concerns about immunity debt are generally the same people who initially claimed children were considerably less likely to be infected and didn’t contribute significantly to transmission. These are also generally the same people who still claim the majority of covid infections in children occur outside of schools. This is despite contact tracing and testing studies demonstrating the direction of transmission, the latest being a comprehensive study from Italy. Although there had been some reporting in May 2021, immunity debt entered the public lexicon late June 2021 after a Wall Street Journal article went viral.
[41] CMD - How Dark Money Shaped The School Safety Debate by Walker Bragman & Alex Kotch But the end of school masking is also in part due to a campaign by right-wing business interests, including the dark money network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, to keep the country open for the sake of maintaining corporate profits. These interests have been meddling in the education debate, first pushing to reopen schools and then fighting in-school safety measures, even as COVID case numbers were rising and children were ending up in hospitals. For nearly two years, these groups have been promoting questionable science and creating wedges between parents, teachers, and administrators in order to get America back to work — even at the risk of the nation’s children.
[42] WVTM 13 — Birmingham doctor says masks are no longer needed in schools for students Updated: 11:59 AM CDT Aug 17, 2021 Vaughn said he isn’t the only physician who’s concerned about children continuing the use of masks. “I’ll have 25 physicians that agree with me — that the harm being caused to our children outweighs the benefits of the mask,” he said. “Scientific studies have shown that mask-wearing has no significant adverse health effects for wearers,” the Alabama Department of Public Health said. “We strongly recommend that anyone age 2 and older wear a face mask anytime you are around other people in indoor settings.”
[43] The Lever: How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID, Dec 22, 2021 - Walker Bragman & Alex Kotch One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
[44] Wall Street Journal - Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. Landlords face a $1.5 trillion bill for commercial mortgages over the next three years. By Konrad Putzier, June 6, 2023 Many of the commercial landlords on the hook for the loans are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured. Unlike most home loans, which get paid down each year, many commercial mortgages are known as interest-only loans. Borrowers make only interest payments during the life of the loan, with the entire principal due at the end. Interest-only loans as a share of new commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance increased to 88% in 2021, up from 51% in 2013, according to Trepp. Typically, owners pay off this debt by getting a new loan or selling the building. Now, steeper borrowing costs and lenders’ growing reluctance to refinance these loans are raising the likelihood that many of them won’t be paid back. Many banks, fearful of losses and under pressure from regulators and shareholders to shore up their balance sheets, have mostly stopped issuing new loans for office buildings, brokers say. Office and some mall owners are facing falling demand for their buildings because of remote work and e-commerce.
[45] How Capitalism Murdered Journalism with Margot Susca - Adam Conover - Factually - May 29, 2024 “Sam Zell former private equity billionaire took over Tribune in 2007 and he had people coming to him saying we need to embrace the digital future that lies ahead he you know he had executives writing him memos that said you know anybody who says we should invest in digital get rid of them our business is in print”
[46] Business Insider - Remote work is 'bullshit,' says real-estate billionaire Sam Zell, to cheers from fellow execs who profit from offices. By Alex Nicoll Apr 23, 2023 The value of big office properties is hanging in the balance as corporate tenants pull back on space, or don't renew leases altogether. The trend and dire outlook had real estate giant Brookfield defaulting on a loan tied to offices this month for the second time this year. WeWork, a once celebrated investment and cornerstone of the co-working space movement, was just warned that it could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
[47] Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - Is the Hygiene Hypothesis True? Did Covid shutdowns stunt kids' immune systems? Published October 25, 2022 By Caitlin Rivers You mentioned the hygiene hypothesis, which was postulated back in the ‘80s. German scientists noticed that families with fewer children tended to have more allergic disease. This was interpreted [to mean] that allergic disease was linked to experiencing fewer infections. I have explored this idea in my research for a couple of decades now. This phenomenon has helped us to understand the immune system, but our interpretation of it has grown and expanded—particularly with respect to viruses. Almost no virus is protective against allergic disease or other immune diseases. In fact, infections with viruses mostly either contribute to the development of those diseases or worsen them.
[48] Financial Times: ‘Immunity debt’ is a misguided and dangerous concept - There is no evidence that an individual is worse off for having avoided earlier infection By Anjana Ahuja November 23 2022 But there is no evidence that an individual is worse off for having avoided earlier infection. “Immunity debt as an individual concept is not recognised in immunology,” Dunn-Walters says. “The immune system is not viewed as a muscle that has to be used all the time to be kept in shape and, if anything, the opposite is the case.” The constant onslaught of common pathogens such as cytomegalovirus, she adds, means the immune system begins to malfunction and slacken with age. She rejects the idea that infection is somehow good for health, saying vaccination is a far safer way of building population immunity.
[49] Bowe B, Xie Y, Al-Aly Z. Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection. Nat Med. 2022 Nov;28(11):2398-2405. doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-02051-3. Epub 2022 Nov 10. PMID: 36357676; PMCID: PMC9671810. A new analysis using US Department of Veterans Affairs databases showed that reinfection is associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality, hospitalization and a wide range of long COVID complications in individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 compared to those with no reinfection.
[51] The Economy demands full participation, herd debt paid on an altar of lies “Public health” is operating, but with the wrong information and the wrong solutions to solve the wrong problems, because those calling the shots have the wrong goals. Chloe Humbert Dec 23, 2022 They have connected dots - but all wrong. They’ve been given different dots to connect, and they’ve connected them. They are NOT blaming their own covid precautions (that they didn’t do) for ruining their children’s immune systems. They are blaming OTHER people’s covid precautions for ruining herd immunity for their children. And it seems that’s why they want everyone else to unmask and get infected - as if that’d be a good thing when it’s obviously not doing good for the people, especially not the ones winding up in hospital or six feet under. But somehow they want more spread. Why?
[52] Mehdi Hasan Questions Doctor On Covid Predictions | The Mehdi Hasan Show MSNBC Feb 4, 2022
[53] Neil R. Powe @Neil_R_Powe - 6:49 PM · Jun 16, 2021 San Mateo County celebrates Dr. Monica Gandhi Day! We are thrilled to see our UCSF Professor of Medicine and ZSFG expert in infectious disease honored. She has helped to guide us all through the pandemic with science and wisdom!
[54] 2020-06-15 - Monica Gandhi mask cutting celebration in San Mateo County (video)
[55] AXIOS - Aug 31, 2023 - Health Omicron was the deadliest pandemic wave for cancer patients Adriel Bettelheim Mortality for cancer patients overall was 4% higher during the winter Omicron surge that peaked in January 2022 compared with when the original, or wild type, lineage of the virus was peaking in January 2021.
[56] Vaccine Inequity: Meet the Doctor Refusing a Booster as Rich Nations Get 16x More Doses Than Poor - October 28, 2021 - Democracy Now Infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi says she will not receive a booster as a healthcare worker because of the global vaccine inequity, and argues the push for boosters “detracts from the fact that we in no way have fulfilled a moral and ethical obligation to the world.”
[57] DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Shellenberger was active in so-called ‘woke-washing’ discourse that attacked Western Elites for withholding fossil fuels from the Global South and/ or framed Net Zero targets as a form of colonialism that contravene the global human rights agenda. Shellenberger is symbolic of the growing overlap between climate scepticism and wider culture wars, ‘anti-woke’ or so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ content. In previous years, his public persona and outputs were primarily associated with the environment, but he now posts just as regularly on issues such as migration, homelessness, gender identity or Democratic policy agendas. During COP, this included the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the collapse of crypto-currency platform FTX
[58] Tech Won’t Save Us - 23 08 17 [#181] Pondering the Orb Molly White Paris Marx: “This project kind of further puts into perspective something that we've been talking about for a long time when it comes to crypto projects in particular. People like Pete Howson, I believe his name is, you know has talked about kinda crypto colonialism. I’ve talked to Olivier Jutel about that on the show before. But you know how these companies, you know crypto companies in particular but tech companies more broadly do go into these markets and just seek to exploit people for profit while talking about how they're going to massively empower them. And you know Worldcoin is kind of coming in and saying you know we're going to do all these wonderful things for empowerment and we're going to create this identity service and you know we're going to take all your data to train our systems. And it's like you know we're just going to use you as inputs for that process. There's no kind of real empowerment that is coming out of that and it's just yet another example of how this works.” Molly White: “Yeah and i think that it's also used to silence a lot of the criticism against the projects here where you will speak out against something like Worldcoin or even crypto more broadly and people will say that’s just your white American privilege. You have financial privilege to dismiss these technologies. Can’t you see how these projects are helping people in developing countries? But what we've seen actually play out is broadly that they are NOT helping people. You know that the people who are engaging with these projects in those locations are suffering for it and often being exploited you know in the way that Worldcoin has been exploiting people as you know as effectively test subjects without the proper disclosures or the proper consent. And so i think it really is sort of lays bare some of the disingenuous arguments that we've been seeing you know broadly around crypto and you know how dare you criticize crypto because it's going to help all of these people you know and you can just sort of look at this and say - look, it's not helping people the people who are receiving these tokens you know or not necessarily coming out better for it.”
[60] SLATE - What COVID’s “Wrongest Woman” Got Right Monica Gandhi became known in some circles for her inaccurate predictions about the pandemic. But her new book, Endemic, provides a road map for future outbreaks that’s worth considering. By Liz Highleyman Sept 05, 2023 “In my opinion,” she writes in her book, “one of the most important lessons of this pandemic is the need for universal healthcare coverage and the obligation to recognize healthcare as a right, not a privilege.”
[62] The International Retail Academy - Kayleigh Fazan - Sep 11, 2022 - How to Make More Sales in Retail Through the Power of YES The ‘yes set’ technique consists of creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree. It actually started out in hypnotherapy, but it’s incredibly beneficial as a tactic on how to make more sales in retail, too. If a customer gets into a habitual response of saying yes to your front-of-house staff, they’ll be much more likely to do the same with the actual sale! Traditionally, the ‘yes set’ is mainly used by retailers when selling and talking about a product.
[63] PBS – HACKING YOUR MIND – Living on Autopilot – Episode 101 – Aired: 09/09/20 It’s especially hard to overcome our autopilot biases because, much of the time, we’re not even aware we’re experiencing them. For instance, here’s an autopilot bias I can almost guarantee you’re not aware of — being biased in favor of one person over many people. One of Kahneman and Tversky’s closest colleagues studies how that bias distorts the decisions we make.
[64] Influencers and Direct Marketing Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 006 CHLOE HUMBERT OCT 21, 2023 Influencers are not going to save us. They can get word out about something, but then it could be, you know, the truth with a lie chaser. Today they're promoting what you think is good, and then tomorrow they might take money to promote something else that you don't agree with.
[65] Psyblog — Grifters: The 7 Psychological Principles That Con Artists Use *- Dr Jeremy Dean — Posted on July 16, 2022 Once grifters know what people want, even if it doesn’t exist, they are in a position to manipulate them. They will play on people’s desperation; unfortunately the more desperate people are, the easier they are to con.
[66] Stanford University promotes disastrous “natural herd immunity” approaches to the pandemic A week and a half ago, Stanford University announced a conference on pandemic policy that features several of the usual suspects who spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Truly, Stanford has become the “respectable” academic face of efforts to undermine public health. Post author By Orac Post date September 2, 2024 Monica Gandhi probably represents one of the “both kinds” of COVID-19 minimization in that throughout the pandemic she presented herself as the “reasonable” middle ground between “let ‘er rip” ideologues like Makary and Atlas and conventional public health science recommending standard public health interventions to mitigate the pandemic, viewing the latter as too strict, all the while polluting the COVID-19 information landscape with obvious misinformation and falsely pacified people the worst was over, when in fact the worst was yet to come. Basically, she tried to have it both ways, as Dr. Howard described
[67] stunlock - Wiktionary 1. (video games, transitive) To render (a character) unable to move or react by repeatedly hitting them and keeping them in a stunned state.
[68] Kirby, Jess, "A Rhetorical Criticism of “Bothsidesism” in Journalism" (2023). Student Research Submissions. 518. https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/518 With typical journalism practices prioritizing expert opinion in news stories, journalists face a dilemma when elected officials make misleading comments: practice false balance by reporting baseless claims alongside relevant, factual information about a topic, or refuse to report elected officials’ false statements. The phenomenon of false balance has been shown to have negative consequences on public perception of important issues such as vaccine safety (Casara et al., 2019; Dixon & Clarke, 2013) and global warming (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Schmid et al., 2020). Casara et al. (2019)’s four-part study demonstrated that falsely balanced coverage of vaccines affects readers’ opinion formation and gives the impression of conflicting info and expert opinion on vaccine safety and effectiveness.
[69] The Michigan Daily - Don’t fall for ‘bothsidesism’ by Hayden Buckfire June 7, 2024 “Bothsidesism” describes when journalists, in their quest to appear unbiased, give equal weight to both sides of an argument, even when one side is demonstrably false. This can also manifest in applying different standards to both sides to make them appear equal. This thought process, also called “false balance,” is faulty. Just because two arguments exist opposed to each other does not make them inherently equal or worthy of balanced coverage. It is an undeniable fact that several squirrels populate the Diag. It is just true. While virtually everyone would agree with that fact, one might be able to cobble together a group of “squirrel denialists” from far-flung corners of the world to dispute it. Clearly, an equally weighted roundtable discussion between squirrel believers and squirrel denialists would not be worthwhile.
[70] WBUR — Here & Now — Herd Immunity Is ‘Pixie Dust Thinking,’ Infectious Disease Expert Says — October 14, 2020 — by Robin Young Most of the document’s 9,000 signatures are private, but among its public signers are Nobel laureate Michael Levitt from Stanford University; Dr. Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics, an expert on vaccine development at Tufts Medical Center; and a doctor at Stanford, where Scott Atlas, the president’s current science adviser who believes in herd immunity, studied. Scientists have discredited this theory, especially for coronaviruses.
[71] The Washington Post - Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa October 19, 2020 As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response. Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials. Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
[72] Politico — Strike ‘Obamacare’ to reject overreach — By SCOTT ATLAS 03/11/2012 09:03 PM EDT The fact is, only Democrats support “Obamacare” while independents, voters in key swing states and the overwhelming majority of Republicans are opposed. In the event of a Supreme Court decision validating the individual mandate, forcing individuals to purchase a private product whose composition and price are directly regulated under the new law, voters will be sympathetic to a call for urgent action by the opposition. The GOP will point even more to the critical need to defeat the president before a further expansion of government power goes unchecked.
[73] Widespread isolation and stopping all human interaction will not contain the COVID-19 pandemic Current strategies prevent the development of immunity among the population By Scott W. Atlas - - Thursday, March 26, 2020 This would accomplish the goals of saving lives, avoiding the overwhelming of the medical system, allowing the essential immunity to develop among the population with virtually no risk of serious illnesses, and avoiding the massive economic calamity and all that would entail. There is a different strategy, one focused on protecting the vulnerable, self-isolating the mildly sick, and limiting group interactions, similar to recommendations in the Netherlands.
[74] CSPAN - March 30, 2020 Washington Journal Primetime COVID-19 and Public Health Policy Transcript: the biggest picture point made is we need to look at things rationally and not incite fear with worst-case scenarios. this is not to minimize what is happening. it is a serious problem. but the strategy on dealing with the problems has to be based on fundamental biology and i would encourage everyone to listen to those who know the science like dr. birx and doctors -- dr. fauci more than op- ed's and people who don't have medical background. and according to my op- ed, it is to say we have a reason to want to have a certain amount of immunity develop naturally. that is the way viruses and other diseases ultimately get under control. it is not necessarily perfect biologically to have every single person isolated with the of all human contact. let me explain why. when we have a disease like this where the overwhelming majority of people do not have a serious illness, this is something viewers need to understand. there are many people, hard to say how many because numbers are not known, but 20% of people or more would be asymptomatic. it's important because if people are not sick and they are carrying the virus, their body produces antibodies, the immune response that is natural. when you have people transmit the viruses, more and more people become immune and are therefore protected and ultimately more people get protected from the virus and the virus ultimately dissipates or disappears. it's also important to note there are people who are vulnerable who will have a serious disease and have a risk of dying. it is crucial that those people are protected, that means isolated from anyone who might even be just a carrier of the virus. so we need to be very clear that the policies being done, i am not disputing them right now, but we can look forward to when we get the urgent situation a little bit more under control, there will be a reason, a biological reason, to have more people intermingling with each other as long as we protect those who are vulnerable who might die, and not overwhelm the healthcare system unnecessarily
[75] The New Yorker - What Happened After the Chicken-Pox Vaccine? In the COVID era, the success of the varicella vaccine in the nineties is staggering to contemplate. By Jessica Winter February 7, 2022 The mostly apocryphal tales of “COVID parties”—which almost always turn out to be unintentional spreader events—descend from those of “chicken-pox parties,” where parents knowingly exposed their children to symptomatic peers. There was also a kind of wistfulness in the comparison. A vaccine for varicella received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and within a decade forty states and the District of Columbia added varicella as a required immunization for enrollment in public elementary schools. Today all fifty states enforce this mandate. (Medical and religious exemptions vary state by state.) Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation.
[76] CDC - Chickenpox (Varicella) - Chickenpox Vaccine Saves Lives Infographic Chickenpox Vaccine Saves Lives and Prevents Serious Illness During the first 25 years,* the U.S. chickenpox vaccination program has prevented an estimated: 91 million cases 238,000 hospitalizations, 2,000 deaths *The U.S. chickenpox vaccination program started in 1995. Then More than 4 million chickenpox cases each year More than 10,000 hospitalizations each year Up to 150 deaths each year Now Fewer than 150,000 chickenpox cases each year Fewer than 1,400 hospitalizations each year Less than 30 deaths each year Hospitalizations and deaths have become rare. Vaccinate your child against chickenpox.
[77] Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis — THE ATLAS DOGMA: THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S EMBRACE OF A DANGEROUS AND DISCREDITED HERD IMMUNITY VIA MASS INFECTION STRATEGY STAFF REPORT JUNE 2022 Dr. Atlas’s involvement in the drafting of remarks on this topic, combined with the existence of a pro-herd immunity strategy memorandum, suggests that this approach was gaining currency among senior Administration officials. Within weeks of arriving in the White House, Dr. Atlas set out to arrange a roundtable event in the Oval Office to build support among senior Trump Administration officials for his herd immunity strategy.44 In August 2020, Dr. Atlas invited Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and Dr. Cody Meissner — all of whom supported this approach — “to speak with the President and the Vice President” and other Administration officials about the pandemic response.45 The initial date selected for the event was canceled because Dr. Birx was scheduled to be out of town, prompting Dr. Atlas and the White House to seek an alternative date to ensure that Dr. Birx could attend.46 Around this time, Dr. Birx sent an email to National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, and Director Redfield, warning of the “Atlas Dogma,” which she said represented “a true threat to a comprehensive and critical response to this pandemic” that would “reverse months of incredibly hard won gains” if it was “allowed to gain traction.”47
[78] Medpage Today: Report Shows Trump Administration Embraced Herd Immunity via Mass Infection — The strategy likely contributed to many preventable deaths, report notes - by Jennifer Henderson, June 22, 2022 "Dr. Atlas's stated reasoning for his dismissal of masks -- that they were purportedly ineffective at mitigating transmission of the coronavirus -- appears inconsistent with his pandemic strategy, which was premised on allowing the virus to spread rapidly among lower-risk individuals to facilitate disease-acquired herd immunity," the subcommittee wrote. "Whatever his rationale, the anti-mask policy advocated by Dr. Atlas would have had -- and did have -- the same effect as the policies he advocated in connection with his open pursuit of a herd immunity strategy: enabling the virus to infect and kill many more Americans.”
[79] Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment (2022) Edited By Sigurd Bergmann, Martin Lindström “Its interdisciplinary contributors illuminate a wide array of inputs – sociological, historical, cultural, and political – to the so-called ‘Swedish way.’ As they show, Sweden’s pandemic failures have drawn on a constellation of institutional failures: in media, in crisis management, in health care, in public health, and in national scientific research institutes. Presented without fear or favor, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment should prompt a reckoning in Swedish society. This meticulously documented account will also be a model for researchers elsewhere, inspiring comparative analysis of pandemic strategies that have underperformed in other global settings.” — Martha Lincoln, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University and author of Epidemic Politics in Vietnam: Public Health and the State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
[80] Brusselaers, N., Steadson, D., Bjorklund, K. et al. Evaluation of science advice during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 91 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01097-5 Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.
[81] Sweden decides against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11 By Reuters January 28, 2022 She added that the decision could be revisited if the research changed or if a new variant changed the pandemic.
[82] Counter Disinformation Project The Swedish Deception - Report Internal emails from FOI's question the integrity of the Swedish strategy Counter Disinformation Project Sep 04, 2022 Unlike most other countries school attendance remained mandatory, parents were fined for keeping children off to protect CEV kids/ families.
[83] Foreign Policy Magazine - The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response Stockholm denies pursuing herd immunity. But internal emails show Swedish officials were resigned to mass infections all along. December 22, 2020, 4:29 PM By Kelly Bjorklund As recently as Nov. 18, Minister of Health and Social Affairs Lena Hallengren said that the idea that Sweden had pursued a herd immunity strategy was a “rumor.” The day before his correspondence with Tull, Tegnell forwarded an email to his Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen, which contained a recommendation from a doctor to allow people to become infected with COVID-19. “One point would be to keep schools open to reach herd immunity more quickly,” Tegnell wrote. Salminen said his agency had ultimately rejected such an approach, realizing children would still spread the virus, whereas closing schools could limit the disease’s impact on the elderly by about 10 percent. Tegnell, who still thought that quickly achieving herd immunity was the best strategy, responded: “10 percent might be worth it?”
[84] McGill - Office for Science and Society - Medical Error Is Not the Third Leading Cause of Death - An alarming statistic shared by countless people is based on a highly problematic bit of data extrapolation and has been used to paint all of medicine as untrustworthy - Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 27 Aug 2021 Critics of this analysis have pointed out many flaws. It is based on studies whose data was never meant to be generalized to the entire U.S. hospitalized population. For example, one of these studies, by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was conducted in beneficiaries of Medicare, who are aged 65 or older, have disabilities or have end-stage renal disease which requires dialysis or transplant. The study authors counted the number of deaths in their sample to which they believed medical errors had contributed, and this number was then used in the BMJ analysis to extrapolate to all U.S. hospitalizations. However, this makes the mistake of extrapolating an observation found in one sample to a different type of population. Case in point: if we look at everyone hospitalized in the United States, one patient out of ten is there to deliver a baby. Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges, to adapt a popular saying to the current situation.
[85] Williamson, P. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature 540, 171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540171a Most researchers who have tried to engage online with ill-informed journalists or pseudoscientists will be familiar with Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Is it really worth taking the time and effort to challenge, correct and clarify articles that claim to be about science but in most cases seem to represent a political ideology? I think it is. Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.
[88] Incoherent natural immunity claims at FDA meeting on vaccines. Chloe Humbert Jan 27, 2023 DR. CODY MEISSNER waffles incoherently at the FDA: Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting
[90] Jonathan Howard MD @19joho 3:14 PM · Jul 19, 2023 “Destroy” “Obliterate” “Flatten” Science and medicine as WWF wrestling, entertainment and blood sport.
[91] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Homecoming Throughout the pandemic, the anti-vaccine activist raked in cash and cultivated right-wing allies. Now he's running for president with a new support base. Walker Bragman May 03, 2023 Today, however, much to the dismay of his family, Kennedy is best known as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement. He has long promoted discredited, unscientific claims about vaccine safety. The Center for Countering Digital Hate listed him as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”—a group of the most prolific spreaders of online misinformation about COVID vaccines. Those vaccines have saved millions of lives, but Kennedy and his dark money group, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2011 under the name World Mercury Project, have sought to ensure that fewer people get them. In the summer of 2021, CHD even targeted anti-vaccine propaganda at Black communities. At the time, Black Americans were dying from COVID at a significantly higher rate than white Americans. The group has also sponsored anti-vaccine mandate rallies in different cities.
[92] DOOMED Livestream - The Anti-Vaxxer Disinformation Dozen (w/ Imran Ahmed) - 3/25/21
[93] AP - RFK Jr. suspends his presidential bid and backs Donald Trump before appearing with him at his rally By JONATHAN J. COOPER, MICHELLE L. PRICE and GABRIEL SANDOVAL Updated 10:35 PM EDT, August 23, 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his independent campaign for the White House and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, a late-stage shakeup of the race that could give the former president a modest boost from Kennedy’s supporters. Hours later, Kennedy joined Trump onstage at an Arizona rally, where the crowd burst into “Bobby!” cheers. Kennedy said his internal polls had shown that his presence in the race would hurt Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, though recent public polls don’t provide a clear indication that he is having an outsize impact on support for either major-party candidate.
[94] COVID Contrarians and the Influence of Funding in Medicine, by Taylor Nichols on Medium, Aug 29, 2022 The Arnold Foundation has given over $3.5 million to the libertarian Reason Foundation to advocate for changes to pensions. But how does that relate to school choice? Well, remember, “school choice” is a libertarian ideology. So the fact that one of the first donations from The Laura and John Arnold foundation was to the KIPP program, should come as no surprised. Their organization has now given KIPP over $10 million. The ongoing support from Arnold Ventures and statements from the Arnold’s themselves haven’t been without controversy. But why does John Arnold matter if we’re talking about Oberndorf and UCSF? Well, Arnold Ventures also funds Vinay Prasad. First while he was at OHSU. Since then, Vinay has moved from OHSU to UCSF and brought that Arnold Ventures funding with him. ince he’s been at UCSF, he’s been aggressively contrarian, particularly about COVID and COVID vaccines . He has been loud and wrong for years now, which has only been amplified as outrage over the COVID pandemic has increased and was only amplified by conservatives.
[95] U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, & PENSIONS | June, 2024 By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy: The Coordinated Attacks on Public Education in the United States Senator Bernie Sanders, Chairman Under the false promise of “school choice”, Republican-led state legislatures are adopting or expanding K-12 private school vouchers that drain hundreds of millions of dollars from their state budgets and public education systems to fund unaccountable private schools. The cost of private schooling is increasing well beyond what lawmakers anticipated, further draining state resources needed to pay for public services like public schools. These efforts are fueling the creation of two, segregated K-12 education systems – a private and public one – that are neither equitable nor fiscally sustainable.
[96] Canadian wildfire smoke in Scranton Pennsylvania USA on 6 June 2023 by: Chloe Humbert
[97] Washington Post - How to protect yourself from wildfire smoke By Allyson Chiu Updated June 7, 2023 at 2:17 p.m. EDT Anyone, including generally healthy people, can be negatively affected by wildfire smoke. But older adults, pregnant women and other pregnant individuals, children and infants may be more likely to get sick if they breathe in wildfire smoke, according to the CDC. People with existing heart or lung conditions, including asthma, are also at increased risk. [...] The EPA recommends using a “particulate respirator” tested and approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health when trying to protect yourself from wildfire smoke or ash. It should have the words “NIOSH” and either “N95” or “P100” printed on it.
[98] Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts Forest fires and n95 masking Masking without evidence is an untreated mental illness plaguing public health Vinay Prasad Jun 10, 2023 “Even in your house, you still can smell smoked salmon.”
[99] University of Utah Health Clearing the Air: About Gas Stoves Apr 18, 2023 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency isn’t authorized to regulate indoor air quality. As a result, homes with gas stoves can often have nitrogen dioxide levels up to four times higher than EPA outdoor guidelines. In fact, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, simply boiling water on a gas stove releases almost twice as much nitrogen dioxide than would be considered safe outdoors.
[100] US Dept of Labor - OSHA By Standard Number 1910.134 - Respiratory protection. 1910.134(a)(1) In the control of those occupational diseases caused by breathing air contaminated with harmful dusts, fogs, fumes, mists, gases, smokes, sprays, or vapors, the primary objective shall be to prevent atmospheric contamination. This shall be accomplished as far as feasible by accepted engineering control measures (for example, enclosure or confinement of the operation, general and local ventilation, and substitution of less toxic materials). When effective engineering controls are not feasible, or while they are being instituted, appropriate respirators shall be used pursuant to this section. 1910.134(a)(2) A respirator shall be provided to each employee when such equipment is necessary to protect the health of such employee.
[101] Forbes - Please, Stop Using Mental Illness As An Insult. By Davide Banis, Jul 29, 2019 The reasons we shouldn’t use mental illness as an insult are the same you wouldn’t use any other kind of illness as an insult. It’s deeply offensive and it makes no sense. Why would you use a legitimate medical condition to insult someone? Moreover, in the case of mental illness-related insults, it perpetuates a cruel stigma, hurting millions of people who suffer from mental illnesses. The stigma is also a barrier to help-seeking for people in need. It also shuts down possible discussions on mental health, something, one way or the other, we can all benefit from. And, on top of all of this, it’s just an incredibly lazy way to engage with your opponents, because it doesn’t really say anything about why you disagree with them. You’re just polarizing the discussion and nobody, besides the people who already agree with you, will understand your reasons better.
[102] UCSF Profiles - Vinayak Prasad, MD, MPH Vinay Prasad MD MPH is Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine, and a practicing Hematologist Oncologist at San Francisco General Hospital.
[103] CDC COVID-19 - People with Certain Medical Conditions - Updated Feb. 10, 2023 This means that a person with one or more of these conditions who gets very sick from COVID-19 (has severe illness from COVID-19) is more likely to: - Be hospitalized, - Need intensive care, - Require a ventilator to help them breathe, - Die
[104] Kevin Bardosh @KevinBardosh 5:46 PM · Mar 22, 2024 I encourage those who were "against" the Great Barrington Declaration when it came out, in Oct 2020, to read it again in 2024. It was sensible then, & sensible now.
[105] Byline Times - Scientist Linked to Great Barrington Declaration Embroiled in World Health Organization Conflict of Interest Nafeez Ahmed reports on allegations of cronyism over the funding of a research paper which tries to dismiss evidence that COVID-19 is an airborne infection Nafeez Ahmed 21 April 2021 Collateral Global is founded and directed by Sunetra Gupta and her partner Alexander Caccia, a UK Ministry of Defence contractor with ties to Canadian government fossil fuel investments, who had secretly drafted the GBD document. He had also secured PR support for Gupta’s claims about herd immunity from an agency linked to the Cabinet Office ‘Nudge Unit’. OpenDemocracy has now revealed that Gupta personally received funding for her discredited research on herd immunity from a Tory billionaire.
[107] The Decision Lab: Why do we prefer things that we are familiar with? The mere exposure effect can result in suboptimal decision-making. Good decisions are made by evaluating all possible courses of actions based on their effectiveness, not their familiarity. When deciding between alternatives, we shouldn’t be choosing the familiar option, we should be choosing the best option. This is because sometimes the best option is not the most familiar one. Sometimes the most effective course of action is the one that is unfamiliar to us. Moreover, sticking with what we know limits our exposure to new things, ideas, and viewpoints. This limits the range of choices we are able and willing to consider when making future decisions, and narrows the perspective from which we make them.
[108] Australian Army Occasional Paper No. 8 The Effectiveness of Influence Activities in Information Warfare by CASSANDRA BROOKER This propaganda feedback loop demonstrates the power of inundation, repetition, emotional/social contagions, and personality bias confirmations, as well as demonstrating behaviours of people preferring to access entertaining content that does not require ‘System 2’ critical thought. Audiences encountered multiple versions of the same story, propagated over months, through their favoured media sources, to the point where both recall and credibility were enhanced, fact-checkers were overwhelmed and a ‘majority illusion’ was created.
[109] International Medical Corps - Finding Hope in Hard-Hit Haiti Following another devastating earthquake, International Medical Corps provides emergency relief October 6, 2021 Haiti Written by Sonia Lowman, Senior Communications Specialist Chronic poverty in the area, combined with an acute emergency and a lack of access to healthcare, means that needs have gone up exponentially. People’s homes—many of them multigenerational homes housing multiple families—have been destroyed, and people have had to sleep outside for weeks. [...] Many people have come into the clinic with fractures and impacts wounds from the earthquake, skin and respiratory infections caused by sleeping outside, and malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies because they’d lost access to nutritious or adequate food. “Everyone has diarrhea of some sort and stomach pain,” says Knaus.
[110] Bardosh K, Jean L, Desir L, Yoss S, Poovey B, Beau de Rochars MV, Noland GS. Was lockdown worth it? community perspectives and experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in remote southwestern Haiti. Soc Sci Med. 2023 Aug;331:116076. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116076. Epub 2023 Jul 8. PMID: 37441975. Highlights • A qualitative study with community leaders in rural Haiti (2020–21). • Explored perspectives & experiences of COVID-19 and lockdown. • Lockdowns in Haiti were seen as ineffective and not appropriate. • They were also socially harmful and contributed to growing public distrust. • Alternatives, such as shielding the vulnerable, likely more appropriate.
[111] @jackmurphylive 10:32 PM · Dec 11, 2021 If covid had been left to do it’s thing, our nation would have become as a result, healthier, fitter, and younger - ie stronger.
[113] Undark - Amid the Turmoil of Covid, Biosafety Legislation Gets Political Covid-19 has polarized conversations about lab safety. Pushes for more oversight are increasingly from Republicans. By Michael Schulson 06.27.2022 During a hearing last summer, Republican Sen. Rand Paul suggested Fauci was illegally lying to Congress about NIH-funded pathogen research, and accused him, with little evidence, of “trying to obscure responsibility for 4 million people dying around the world from a pandemic.” For experts and advocates who have spent years calling for more scrutiny of laboratory practices, the resulting political landscape has been jarring: Some welcome the attention to biorisks and want further investigations, but have concerns about seeing their cause championed by Republicans who appear eager to score political points against Fauci and the Chinese government. “One political party has kind of gone off the rails,” said Laura Kahn, a physician and policy researcher who spent 18 years as a research scholar in the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.
[114] New Civil Liberties Alliance Jenin Younes Litigation Council After witnessing governments throughout the nation violate human rights and civil liberties in an ostensible effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Jenin became active in fighting against lockdowns and related policies. At NCLA, she has litigated against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and played a significant role in First Amendment challenges to the government’s involvement in censorship on social media, including in Missouri v. Biden, a case initially brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana in which NCLA represents two of the co-signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. She led NCLA’s successful effort to preliminary enjoin California’s law punishing doctors for disseminating so-called misinformation about Covid-19 to patients.
[115] New Civil Liberties Alliance - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public interest law firm founded in 2017 by Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger. The group challenges what it views as unlawful uses of administrative power. Bloomberg Law wrote that the group was founded "to fill a gap in the legal ecosystem: the protection of individual rights from entrenched government regulation."[1] In 2024, legal scholar Jonathan H. Adler said that the NCLA had "become a significant player in a relatively short time by raising some administrative law questions that hadn't been getting as much or a lot of attention."[1] Bloomberg wrote that the group had "quickly emerged as a top US Supreme Court litigator...helping steer a broad high court challenge to government agency power."[1] The NCLA has argued in favor of overturning Chevron deference, which directs courts in regulatory disputes to defer to a government agency's "reasonable interpretation" when the governing law is ambiguous.
[116] JD Supra - July 3, 2024 The Supreme Court Ends Chevron Deference—What Does This Mean for Environmental Regulation and Enforcement? The Supreme Court of the United States’ recent ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo[1]dealt a significant blow to the power of federal agencies by ending the 40-year-old precedent commonly known as “Chevron deference.” Loper has now removed the judicial mandate that courts apply “Chevron deference” and defer to agencies on the interpretation of ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their authority. While it is unclear what impact this ruling will have in environmental enforcement cases as well as environmental regulations, federal judges will now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves, expanding the federal bench’s role in enforcement actions and policymaking.
[117] Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained 16 August 2024 Mike Wendling BBC News The Project 2025 document sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.
[118] Anyone who cares about the people, should also care about the dire impact that the Trump-backed Project 2025 will have on our civil liberties and civil rights. August 29, 2024 Mike Zamore, National Director of Policy & Government Affairs, ACLU Project 2025’s nightmarish vision of America should alarm anyone who cares not just about the principles of constitutional freedoms and rights, but about people.
[119] Moynihan, Donald P., Populism and the Deep State: The Attack on Public Service Under Trump (May 21, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3607309 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3607309 The change in tone is reflected in one senior White House official, Steve Bannon promising the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” The words were not empty rhetoric, but reflected a philosophy that government officials had little to offer in terms of expertise, and the rules and regulations they had designed should be removed where possible. In a speech in Poland Trump warned of “the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.” When Trump engineered the longest shutdown of services in federal government history, he tweeted (incorrectly) that “that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats.” The cumulative effect of this mix of cynicism and conspiracy-mongering is to not just weaken the motivation of current employees, but to also make it harder to recruit the next generation of public servants. The deep state conspiracies have also provided a useful explanation for Trump’s failures and scandals
[120] University of Chicago The Law School - Academic Faculty Full Time Teaching Faculty Anup Malani Professor Malani has a PhD in economics and a JD, both from University of Chicago
[121] The Progressive Magazine - How the ‘Free Helicopter Rides’ Meme Went Viral Referencing the dark history of the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Proud Boys have sought to desensitize people against targeted violence by making it a joke. by Zach D. Roberts September 7, 2023 7:00 AM The horrors the Pinochet regime committed over three decades are something the American far right dreams of emulating. The investigative journalist Greg Palast, who was an “embedded” student in the rightwing economic group “the Chicago Boys” at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, says he “didn’t remember Pinochet defenders celebrating the killings—they mainly just wrote them off as ‘a cost of doing business.’ ” The modern love of Pinochet seems to have grown out of “chan culture,” that vile part of the Internet where anonymous users create memes for the purpose of offending.
[122] Linkedin - Anup Malani
[123] Chicago Booth Review - Capitalisn’t: Key Lessons from the ‘Chicago Boys’ Chile Experiment September 01, 2023 The Chicago Boys were a group of free-market economists trained at the University of Chicago who shaped economic policy and reforms in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet's rule. In the book, Edwards (who also received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1981) outlines the complexities of implementing market-oriented policies in a society undergoing rapid change.
[124] Anup Malani @anup_malani 11:43 AM · Jan 12, 2022 Some are obvious: ventilation instead of remote learning. Better internet for the poor or rural areas. More masks in person. But remember, that is not really an option for poor countries! What should they do?
[125] Annual Review of Law and Social Science Volume 18, 2022 The Law and Economics of Blockchain Richard Holden, and Anup Malani Vol. 18:297-313 (Volume publication date October 2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-011921-060322 First published as a Review in Advance on July 18, 2022
[126] AnupMalani.com on The Internet Archive
[128] Inside Higher Ed — April 30, 2018 Uncovering Koch Role in Faculty Hires — George Mason says some of its past donor agreements with Charles Koch Foundation have afforded the organization a say in faculty appointments, in violation of the norms of academic freedom. By Colleen Flaherty The gifts, in support of faculty positions in economics, “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” Cabrera said, noting that one such agreement is still active (the rest have expired). All 10 of the now-public agreements relate to the university’s Mercatus Center for free market research, a locus of Koch-funded activity. Three of the agreements involve Koch. The two most recent, from 2007 and 2009, stipulate the creation of a five-member selection committee to select a professor, with two of those committee members chosen by donors. The other Koch agreement, from 1990, also afforded Koch a role in naming a professor to fund. George Mason also allowed Koch a role in evaluating professors’ performance via advisory boards. And while the agreements assert that final say in faculty appointments will be based on normal university procedures, the 2009 agreement says that funds will be returned to the donor if the provost and the selection committee can’t agree on a candidate. It is of course common for donors who support professorships to specify the academic field or subfield. So while the Koch family’s extensive giving to antiregulatory causes in politics is controversial, it is not necessarily controversial that they fund professorships in economics and even free-market economics. But academic values have long held that donors don’t get to pick who holds chairs, or evaluate them.
[129] Robin Hanson’s 2020 Viral Valentine Tweet Chloe Humbert · Feb 29, 2024 And by viral, I mean the pandemic, because the tweet itself was not very popular at all.
[130] Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown Exclusive: Johnson ruled out lockdown 24 hours after meeting with Sunetra Gupta – resulting in ‘1.3m extra COVID infections’ James Cusick Peter Geoghegan 9 April 2021, 10.42am - openDemocracy Johnson’s apparent U-turn decision to not impose lockdown, which experts say may have resulted in an estimated 1.3 million extra COVID infections, came just 24 hours after meeting with Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta. Today, openDemocracy can reveal that Gupta received almost £90,000 from the Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation to fund research “into the prevalence of COVID-19 in the population” in April last year. The funding was registered a week after Gupta incorrectly suggested that half the UK population may already have been infected by the COVID-19 virus.
[131] The Telegraph: Why it's time to end Covid self-isolation. By interfering with the maintenance of herd immunity, measures such as self-isolation actually increase the risk to the vulnerable. By Sunetra Gupta, 20 January 2022 The low risk of infection among the vulnerable arises from the maintenance of herd immunity through constant reinfection; any measure that interferes with this actually increases their risk. Self-isolation is a case in point. It may slow the spread of the virus but to what end?
[132] Knowledge Fight - #941: July 3, 2024 - Jul 8, 2024 In this installment, Dan and Jordan take in the day before Alex took off for the Fourth of July, and find him discussing his presidential predictions, the term "Ultragreen," and how other people's business is his business.
[133] MisinformationKills - Death Wish From...A Doctor Reported. Allison Neitzel Jul 02, 2024
[134] Important Context: New Scientist Group Calling For Pandemic Answers Has Ties to Right-Wing Dark Money. The Norfolk Group purports to be a group of independent experts, but familiar faces suggest a broader agenda. By Walker Bragman, Feb 16 2023 The 80-page Norfolk Group paper actually reads a bit like score-settling for the scientists involved. It takes particular aim at perceived enemies of the Great Barrington Declaration like Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Birx notably refused to participate in a roundtable discussion with Bhattacharya and Kulldorff back in the summer of 2020, calling them “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.” “Did policy experts know about pre and early pandemic statements in which experts cast doubt on the ability of quarantine and lockdown measures to stop community spread without excessive collateral damage?” the document asks. “Why did Dr. Birx purposely avoid meeting with public health experts who had specifically proposed such measures?” Other targets include Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, respectively the former directors of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the NIH. Both had been dissenting voices in the Trump White House as the administration embraced the Great Barrington Declaration.
[135] Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Sut Jhally: Are U.S. news organizations getting better or worse in their Middle East reporting? Mar 5, 2022 “I also learned a great deal about what puts pressure on university presidents. I've been teaching at UMass for a while and there's been lots of complaints about me from the kind of the lunatic right, you know from the Zionist right. The university president kind of loved that. He was like oh I can protect you against that. But the moment, the moment the pressure came from donors, the moment the pressure came from donors, he caved. And so it taught me a lot that the pressure is not just it's right wing pressure - it's pressure from people that really matter. It's pressure, as always, with money.” - Sut Jhally
This was so painful to read I could only skim it, but then you had to write it! I will never understand this strain of people.