Subsequent month, Stanford College’s Division of Well being Coverage is about to host a convention on pandemic coverage that includes various outstanding COVID-19 minimizers. Of specific concern to public well being and medical specialists is the participation of the college’s new president, Jonathan Levin, who beforehand served as its enterprise college dean. The occasion itself was organized by Stanford well being economist and creator of the pro-economy, anti-lockdown Nice Barrington Declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
However earlier than that, Bhattacharya and two of the opposite doctor panelists from the Stanford convention, Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Marty Makary, are set to seem at a related occasion this week in Washington D.C. hosted by the Johns Hopkins College Carey Enterprise Faculty. This discussion board, which is notably not being carried out in coordination with the celebrated Johns Hopkins medical or public well being faculties, reveals a regarding development: Proper-wing enterprise pursuits are working to infiltrate academia in an effort to legitimize pro-business, anti-public well being coverage.
The Atlas Dogma
Atlas, Bhattacharya’s colleague from Stanford’s conservative assume tank, the Hoover Establishment, can be talking at Hopkins on a panel titled “Well being coverage 2025 & past.” In June 2022, the Democratic-led Home Choose Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Disaster (HSSCC) printed a report, “The Atlas Dogma: The Trump Administration’s Embrace of a Harmful and Discredited Herd Immunity by way of Mass An infection Technique,” particularly exposing the work of Atlas and Bhattacharya inside the Trump White Home in 2020.
Atlas and Bhattacharya are founding fellows of the Academy for Science and Freedom on the right-wing and politically energetic Hillsdale Faculty – a sponsor of the Heritage Basis’s notorious Challenge 2025 plan, which serves because the extremist coverage technique for a second Trump presidency and is markedly anti-public well being.
Again in June, Atlas and Bhattacharya spoke at an occasion on the New Faculty of Florida titled “Reversing the Ideological Seize of Universities and Establishments.” New Faculty is a public liberal arts college overhauled by the far-right state authorities to be the “Hillsdale of the South.”
The Heritage Basis
This previous March, Atlas co-authored a report titled “COVID Classes Realized: A Retrospective After 4 Years” printed by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a gaggle whose management contains Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media; Arthur Laffer, a former member of President Reagan’s Financial Advisory Board; and Steve Moore, a Wall Road Journal contributor and visiting fellow for The Heritage Basis’s “Challenge for Financial Progress.”
The Heritage tie is notable given their authorship of Challenge 2025. Heritage additionally authored a “Highway Map for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” which seems to be the playbook being adopted by the present GOP-led Home Choose Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) (the HSSCP changed the HSSCC following the 2022 midterms).
Deceptive claims
Atlas’s co-authors on “Classes Realized” embrace Philip Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity; Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics on the College of Chicago and former chief economist for the Council of Financial Advisers within the Trump Administration; and Steve Hanke, Professor of Utilized Economics at Johns Hopkins.
Their report incorporates a number of deceptive claims together with “lockdowns don’t work to considerably cut back deaths or cease viral circulation” (they did) and “masks have been of little or no worth” (false). It echoes messaging promoted by the GOP-led HSSCP, together with overstating injury precipitated to youngsters from college closures and decrying the hurt of supposed governmental suppression of scientific dissent.
This week, Atlas and Bhattacharya can be joined for the “Doctor autonomy and management” panel by Makary, who’s, tellingly, the only real medical illustration from Hopkins. Makary infamously over-promised that the U.S. would “have herd immunity by April” in a 2021 Wall Road Journal opinion piece, regardless of having no background in infectious illnesses or epidemiology.
The Norfolk Group
Bhattacharya and Makary are each members of the Norfolk Group apparently created to ship GOP-friendly specialists to the HSSCP. Shortly earlier than the opening HSSCP listening to in February 2023 that includes Bhattacharya and Makary, the Norfolk Group printed a blueprint of “questions for a COVID-19 fee,” which bears a putting resemblance to the Heritage Basis’s “Highway Map.”
Of be aware, Norfolk Group member Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg – a part of the 2022 so-called Urgency of Regular, which felt very very like a school-focused rebrand of the Nice Barrington Declaration and downplayed the threat posed to youngsters by COVID-19 – is at present a visiting scholar at MIT’s enterprise college, the Sloan Faculty of Administration (she just isn’t taking part within the Stanford or Hopkins occasions however testified to the HSSCP final 12 months).
Rounding out the “Doctor autonomy and management” panel are two Hopkins professors: Phil Phan (Professor of Technique and Entrepreneurship) and Dan Polsy (Professor of Well being Economics and Coverage). Shortly following the signing of the Nice Barrington Declaration, Polsy hosted Bhattacharya at a webinar on the “herd immunity vs. lockdown” debate by the enterprise college.
Darkish cash and rewriting historical past
As my colleague Walker Bragman reported, the lineup at this Hopkins occasion additionally options audio system affiliated with right-wing darkish cash teams with ties to billionaire Charles Koch, a main donor to Hopkins ($1.3 million from 2021-2022) and Stanford ($3.3 million from 2020-2022). The Nice Barrington Declaration, which codified the herd immunity technique pushed within the Trump White Home, was itself on the perimeters of the Koch Community.
These Hopkins and Stanford occasions in addition to the GOP-led HSSCP serve the aim of rewriting pandemic historical past to push an anti-public well being agenda favored by right-wing enterprise pursuits – simply forward of the presidential election. If these contrarians proceed to be platformed this manner, there have to be a concerted effort to attract consideration to the injury their ideologically-motivated methods precipitated in Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Preview of what could come
The docs who aided in his harmful pandemic response are very possible contenders for positions in a second Trump administration. These “conferences” serve the twin function of auditions and campaign-adjacent occasions, and their harmful anti-science narratives are usually not one thing academia ought to be validating by platforming. That is not about educational freedom or censorship; this is a matter of educational integrity and knowledge security.
If in case you have not already, now can be a wonderful time to learn Science-Based mostly Drugs’s Dr. Jonathan Howard’s 2023 e book “We Need Them Contaminated,” which expands on the HSSCC’s “Atlas Dogma” report. And maybe donate a duplicate to Stanford’s President Levin and the Carey Enterprise Faculty.