There is an excellent podcast by the name of Some Dare Call It Conspiracy, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, who did an extensive four-part deep dive into the saga of Twitter troll David Cartland, a former British GP (general practitioner, aka standard medical doctor) who completely immolated his professional career out of dedication to his social media fan club of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. The whole series is worth a listen, but I wanted to compare and contrast Cartland’s well-documented downfall in the United Kingdom with another medical professional who was also publicly humiliated in the news recently: Vinay Prasad, an oncologist who calls the University of California San Francisco home.

David Cartland was once a well-respected and upstanding member of his community of Cornwall, a village in the South of England, where he proudly served as a medical professional. Prior to 2020, UCSF’s Vinay Prasad was considered a rising star in medicine, and his book Ending Medical Reversals was held in high regard. While unscientific misinformation & disinformation has been a feature of numerous pandemics of the past, COVID-19 was the first pandemic in which social media was readily available to amplify destructive garbage like never before.

A Mutual Abandonment of Science

David Cartland and Vinay Prasad were staunch critics of masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, with both making wholly inappropriate comparisons to Nazi Germany. Cartland would be marched out of the hospital where he worked and kicked to the curb, while UCSF turned a blind eye to Prasad calling his employers stupid for implementing a hospital mask mandate and rallying his social media followers to agitate (literally using the word “resist” in the title of one Youtube video) against measures to prevent patients from dying of a hospital-acquired virus.

David Cartland and Vinay Prasad both grew a following from fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine, especially in children and pregnant women, while downplaying the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, calling it a “cold” on multiple occasions; a basic myth that Some Dare Call It A Conspiracy’s Neil Sanders, who to my knowledge is not a medical professional, explains quite simply: that the symptoms of COVID-19 similar to a flu or cold have less to do with the disease and are in fact resulting from the immune system fighting the virus. Becoming hooked by what SDCIAC calls “lovebombing” by anti-vax conspiracy theorists on social media, Cartland and Prasad both abandoned science to impress jerks on the Internet.

Cartland would then allow himself to be bamboozled into the ridiculous belief that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow make you magnetic, which is utterly hilarious on its face. Stateside, Vinay Prasad would endorse the utter nonsense pseudoscience of “immunity debt,” suggesting that children were now constantly ill in 2022 not because of the new SARS virus they were being repeatedly infected with, but because of remote schooling and masks from 2020. Both abandoned a professional commitment to medical science in order to lend the legitimacy of their credentials to absurdity.

Share

Harassment of Medical Colleagues

David Cartland & Vinay Prasad also lost all respect amongst many of their professional colleagues in medicine, with neither refusing to acknowledge their basic, basic errors when corrected. What would eventually see Cartland stripped of his medical license, however - rendering the years of his life dedicated to med school a complete waste - was the same sort of vile vulgarity that Vinay Prasad regularly engaged in, egging on their respective fanclubs of abusive trolls. To quote the description from the Some Dare Call it Conspiracy podcast:

It’s hard to argue that Vinay Prasad has not engaged in similar behavior across social media platforms such as Twitter, Substack, & Youtube. Prasad has frequently attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, blaming him for the pandemic - as an example, he tweeted: “To me it’s obvious that the reason Fauci supported lockdown & school closure was a misguided attempt to atone for the fact that he funded the work that led to the pandemic. No one acts more irrationally than the guilty. The house subcommittee has damning evidence.” In reality, no such “damning evidence” was presented, and does not exist. Fauci has faced numerous threats upon his life as a result of such conspiracy theories that Prasad, a UCSF faculty member, endorses.

In another tweet, Vinay Prasad attempted to pin the blame for the murder of a healthcare CEO on popular comedian and medical professional “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” stating “Glaucomflecken is not actually a student of health policy. He doesn’t understand insurance. Denying coverage does not increase their profits. That idea may have gotten someone murdered. Sad”

As another devastating example of unprofessional misconduct, Vinay Prasad peddled the conspiracy theory that remote schooling in 2020 caused an uptick in suicides & the sexual abuse of children and attempted to pin the blame on Dr. Peter Hotez, who has also been targeted with harassment and threats upon his life. In his tribunal, David Cartland was found to repeatedly insinuate that a professional colleague was a pedophile and was forced to pay significant financial penalties as well as issue multiple public apologies after repeating the behavior. Not a single member of his social media fanclub could save him from what happened next.

Subscribe now

A “Hero” on the Internet, a Scourge in Reality

Having an extended meltdown in the public eye, Cartland seemed to face significant pushback in his local community, resulting in him calling his fellow Cornwallers “a bunch of inbreds.” This did him no favors and ended with him being thrown out of his local church and publicly scolded in the local Facebook group. But wait, it gets worse for “The Honest Doctor!” - a moniker Cartland assigned himself as part of his current “Health Coach” grift.

Sacrificing his medical career upon the altar of a delusional martyrdom complex fueled by social media, Cartland returned to his passion of soccer, becoming a referee. This would not last in the wake of losing his medical license. After admitting to producing fraudulent vaccine exemption letters for travel, David Cartland found himself on the UK’s Disclosure and Barring Service’s Children’s Barred List, forbidding him from employment that involves working with children & vulnerable adults. The local football association then suspended him from refereeing immediately after being notified of Cartland’s prestigious new membership. Taking to social media, Cartland cried that he had “committed no crime” and was the true victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks to award-winning journalism from the same village full of “inbreds,” in Cartland’s words, David had effectively rendered himself unemployable. A self-proclaimed “family man” who can no longer provide for his wife and children, reduced to begging his anti-vaccine fanclub for help after giving them everything he had - with nothing to show for it but an Amazon.com bestselling author ranking in the... 9000s. For someone who regularly engaged in homophobia on social media, Cartland had proven himself to be quite un-masculine & weak in the end.

For once, accountability had finally caught up with an anti-vaccine grifter.

The Cowardice of American Medicine

Across the Atlantic Ocean, such antics would be rewarded by one of America’s leading medical schools: the University of California San Francisco, in a saga that the PAI has covered for years. In 2025, it would see Vinay Prasad elevated to the Food & Drug Administration, where he was ousted twice in less than a year of proving that his enthusiasm lied with impressing his anti-vaccine fans on Twitter, instead of a dedication to upholding any sort of professional or scientific standards.

Most notably, Vinay Prasad produced an intentionally leaked memo in which he claimed that the Food & Drug Administration had and would soon present “evidence” in which the COVID-19 vaccines killed at least 10 children. There was no evidence - this was merely a federal handout to anti-vaccine grifters on social media, like Prasad’s Twitter BFF & deranged misogynist Alex Berenson. Even Benjamin Mazer of The Atlantic, who has never resisted the opportunity to lend credibility to anti-vaccine myths such as “immunity debt,” treated Prasad’s e-mail rant as credible. The actual report found no evidence of such claims, with Mazer and The Atlantic failing to issue a public apology and redaction of the article. Prasad engaged in an incredibly serious act of misconduct that is on the level of Andrew Wakefield, who violated young children in the production of fraudulent “evidence” suggesting the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Wakefield lost his medical license before running away to the United States to play the victim. Prasad on the other hand, after engaging in numerous instances of serious misconduct which required bringing in an outside firm, was allowed to return to the University of California San Francisco and Sensible Medicine as if nothing had ever happened. What UCSF is teaching the future doctors and scientists of America is that the best way to advance your career is to be a reactionary and abusive social media troll, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

StopAntiVaxPropaganda Substack

Creating Misinformation About Total Childhood Vaccine Doses

Anti-vaccine influencers have long inflated the total number of vaccine doses children get to make it seem like they get too many immunizations. What’s different now? That misinformation is coming from the FDA and CDC…

Read more

6 days ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · vaxopedia.org

Vinay Prasad’s co-author on numerous opinion editorials masquerading as scientific literature, Tracy Beth Hoeg, was also kicked out of the Food & Drug Administration and immediately ran to anti-vaccine slopagandist Maryanne Demasci to insist that they were victims of a conspiracy by Big Pharma. This is precisely the same claim made by Andrew Wakefield. Whereas British medical authorities correctly understood cranks like David Cartland to be a threat to patient health and safety, UCSF and California’s Medical Board has instead established a standard in which such behavior is encouraged, and clearly a role model for students to follow in the footsteps of.

This cannot stand. While California Democrats are presently humiliating themselves by rallying behind the former Health & Human Services Secretary who couldn’t be bothered as tens of millions of Americans were disabled by COVID-19, the state’s medical institutions are helping to drag the nation further into an anti-intellectual reactionary spiral into utter irrelevancy. There is no justifiable reason for why the United Kingdom can have the decency to drop the hammer on obnoxious quacks, while the United States allows such pestilence sycophants to prosper unimpeded.

In closing, it’s worth restating that the podcast Some Dare Call it a Conspiracy and their four-part deep dive into the saga of David Cartland, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, is a must-listen for anyone with concerns about the intersection of social media and medical quackery. It’s clear that America’s universities & other institutions have much to learn from our friends across the ocean, if we are to ever reverse course.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

California has had the misfortune of having some truly awful governors, such as Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and the vatborn nightmare that is Gavin Newsom - an early frontrunner for the Democrat Party’s Presidential Nomination in 2028, with the full backing of Roblox shareholder Nancy Pelosi. This year, the state’s Democrats are holding a primary election, and Xavier Becerra is a major contender with a SuperPAC that has all sorts of “interesting” donors. They include the following:

• California Association of Realtors

• Pacific Gas & Electric Company

• McDonalds

• Chevron

• AirBNB

• Uber

• Meta (aka Facebook)

Y’know, just a smorgasbord of all the worst jerkwads making California (and America as a whole) all the more miserable of a place to live in. It’s not like these companies are throwing this money around in support of Becerra’s campaign out of the goodness of their heart, or some genuine belief that he’s the best choice for millions of working Californians. No, in fact, it’s a reflection of the same mentality that guided the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 pandemic response: that the whims and demands of corporate America come first - no matter who gets hurt as a result. If elected governor, the needs of working Californians will not be a concern to Becerra.

Instead, Xavier’s priority will be answering to every whim of the corporations that have worked to make much of the state unlivable and render its major cities into dystopian theme parks for the wealthy. Many not in the know are backing him as the “most qualified” candidate. Being overshadowed by the ongoing horror show led by the brain-worm from space currently operating the cerebral controls of the current Seceretary of Health and Human Services, many seem to forget that Becerra was the previous HHS Secretary under the Biden Administration. So just what did HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra do when it came to the national crisis of COVID-19?

Secretary of HHS: Heh…Heh…Schwoopsie!

Claimed That Only “Severity” Matters: As the pediatric COVID-19 death toll doubled from just over 500 to over a thousand before Christmas 2021, Xavier Becerra told CNN that when it came to the Omicron variant “It’s not about cases. It’s about severity,” an unscientific meme that was laundered into the mainstream. Millions of Americans would go on to become disabled by “mild” cases of COVID-19 (not being hospitalized or dying) that winter, and tens of millions more in the years that followed. Trying to suggest that the Biden Administration’s failed vaccine-only strategy hadn’t played a part in schools and workplaces being overwhelmed with COVID-19, and hundreds of children dying in just a matter of months, Becerra was more than happy to absolve himself of responsibility for what was unfolding.

Schools drowning in unmitigated outbreaks, with classrooms full of coughing and vomiting children, ceased to be able to educate kids. Becerra simply shrugged his shoulders while the virus burned through tens of millions of children, largely unvaccinated. This is the mentality he will bring to the governorship of California:

• Prematurely Declared the Pandemic Over: On September 19th, 2022 just after Biden declared the pandemic “over” at the Detroit Auto Show because nobody was wearing masks, HHS Secretary Becerra chose not to correct the President’s false statement, but instead played good little soldier, stating, “The President is correct.” Hundreds of thousands of American would die and millions would be disabled by COVID-19 between when this statement was made and the humiliating 2024 Presidential election. Oh, dear. How embarrassing.

• Oversaw Nation’s Largest Medicaid Disenrollment: With the ending of the Public Health Emergency in May 2023, states begin the rapid mass disenrollment of tens of millions of Americans who were receiving expanded Medicaid coverage. Politico reports that many of these Americans lost Medicaid coverage due to a software glitch caused by a third-party contractor, DeVoit, which received a $340 million dollar taxpayer-funded contract. In a total lack of response, Becerra writes a pathetic letter to states suggesting that they merely “space out” these mass disenrollments. This is the sort of cowardly deference to private corporations that you can expect from a Governor Becerra. This same mentality led to child poverty doubling under the Biden Administration.

• Said Dying of COVID-19 Was Yer Own Dang Fault: On June 6th, 2023 Becerra declares that “The people who are still dying of COVID are unvaccinated or undervaccinated...If you’re dying of COVID today, you didn’t take precautions.” While anti-vaccine disinformation certainly did kill hundreds of thousands, that’s not the sole cause of these deaths. Since 2021, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (which falls under the HHS umbrella) quietly began tracking COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status, only making the data public in April 2022.

  
  Well…between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of Februrary 2022, over 99,500 vaccinated Americans died after doing everything right, according to Becerra’s HHS: They got vaccinated, they took off their masks, got really sick with COVID-19, and died. When the first 100,000 Americans died of COVID-19, The New York Times printed all of their names on the front page and called it “An Incalculable Loss.” Popular podcasts such as This Week in Virology wrote off these deaths as irrelevant and not worth preventing, while smug liberals twisted their spines into a pretzel whining about the “base rate fallacy,” completely ignoring the fact that these are the very tangible casualties that resulted from abandoning masking another other non-pharmaceutical interventions in a deathmarch towards a fantasy of “normalcy.” For Becerra to outright lie to the American people about the cause of many of these deaths, blaming them for their own demise because they listened to his HHS, is utterly obscene and disqualifying.
  

• Made a Mockery of Long COVID: On July 31st, 2023 speaking with WHEC, HHS Secretary Becerra feigned ignorance about Long COVID, which we had known about since 2020 and has disabled millions of Americans since, stating: “If I get 10 people I get 10 answers of what Long COVID really is.” Instead of employing the precautionary principle of public health and advising greater precaution to prevent the COVID-19 infections which lead to Long COVID, Becerra stood idly by as millions more developed the condition. It is now the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma.
  
  On September 20th 2023, claiming that “treatment of Long COVID is a major focus for HHS,” HHS awarded a pathetically miniscule $45 million to Long COVID clinics, with no approved treatment or cure available to this day. As governor of California, you can expect more pitiful token gestures that do little to actually address the problems everyday Californians are facing. Just like California’s most beloved hero, Awh-nooooooold!

• Feigned Helplessness in the Face of Internet Trolls: After his failed leadership contributed to a humiliating defeat in the 2024 election, The Washington Post gave Xavier Becerra an opportunity to reflect upon his tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Feigning powerlessness, Xavier Becerra whined that “I can’t go toe-to-toe with social media,” as if anti-vaccine disinformation was the sole cause of which hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 and millions became disabled. Becerra whines that, as the head of a multi-billion dollar agency with seemingly infinite resources at his disposal, he was simply helpless. Seriously?
  
  You can’t think of a single thing the entirety of the Department of Health and Human Services could have done in response to a rising tide of anti-vaccine disinformation? What did the U.S. Government do after crushing the fascist powers, Mr. Becerra? They made movies!

  We do know what Becerra did, which was to insist that the people who died of COVID-19 were responsible for their own demise. While anti-vaccine disinformation is certainly responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths, for the leader of the Department of Health & Human Services to throw his arms in the air & shrug truly shows how little he cared, and how little he will care about everyday Californians as Governor. This is not acceptable leadership, especially with everything that has happened since Trump took office - California needs a leader that will stand up on their behalf, not quivering on his hands and knees for the approval of corporate oligarchs like a trained circus animal.
  

  Subscribe now

Final Verdict

Xavier Becerra already had his chance to prove himself as a trusted leader in a national crisis, and completely blew it: As Secretary of Health and Human Services in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Becerra sat idly by as hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed by COVID-19 - many of them having done everything right according to his HHS - and millions more Americans disabled by COVID-19, of which he never took seriously. He wants to be just like his hero, Gavin:

California is a state in the midst of numerous crises from affordability to homelessness, to climate collapse and wildfires. When faced with a crisis, Becerra revealed the true nature of his character as a leader: He absolved himself of responsibility, deferred to the whims of corporate interests, and allowed the crisis of COVID-19 to grow exponentially worse under his tenure. If this is the best the Democrat Party has to offer the American people, then it might as well disband.

The absolute gall of Xavier Becerra to have completely failed in a major leadership role during a crisis, only to turn around & decide he’s entitled to become Governor of California, is absolutely revolting. Electing Becerra as governor of California would merely reward such behavior, and in exchange, you would get an empty suit that acts as nothing more than a middleman for the actual leaders of California: reactionary billionaire creeps that see you as nothing more than uppity disposable serfs.

What a waste of a legacy.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

It’s been some years since starting the PAI. Looking back, the reason for starting the Pandemic Accountability Index was twofold:

1) To produce a digestible periodical for the public which compiles and shares the latest scientific research on the impacts of COVID-19, something which has been left almost entirely out of pandemic policy debates and endless opinion editorials. There has to be a sweet spot between highlighting single studies and dumping hundreds of thousands of studies that no single person can read & understand.

The “What COVID-19 Does to the Body” series, followed by the “Answered” series of guides on how COVID-19 impacts different parts of the body, have hopefully helped shine a light on the gaps in people’s knowledge.

2) The horror of watching the advertising playbook being used to sell a deadly and disabling virus is too much to bear. The general public needs a hard look at many of the “experts” who have dominated discussions around COVID-19, making countless basic errors that you don’t need a medical or scientific background to point out. The Profiles the Pandemic Accountability Index has assembled should help better inform the public on whom is trustworthy, if and when another public health crisis happens.

Here are a few of the best and most informative articles the Pandemic Accountability Index has produced:

RESEARCH

• What Do We Know About Long COVID?

• Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children?

• Can COVID-19 Be Prevented?

• Does COVID-19 Harm the Brain?

• Does COVID-19 Impact the Immune System?

PROFILES

• Emily Oster, Brown University Economist

• “Covidians” & Cults: Jay Bhattacharya’s Immature Fantasies

• Leana Wen, Brookings Institute & Washington Post

• Nick Coatsworth, Former Australia Deputy Chief Health Officer

• Ashish Jha, Final COVID Czar

• Vinay Prasad, UCSF (Ousted from the FDA)

• Monica Gandhi, UCSF Professor of Medicine

• Anders Tegnell, Former Swedish State Epidemiologist

• Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times

• Francois Balloux, University College of London

REVIEWS

• Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years by Richard J. Evans

• The Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian Deer

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

• The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

COMMENTARY

• RFK Jr. Fanboys Owe You An Apology

• HHS Just Admitted They Screwed Up Massively

• Vox’s Kelsey Piper Is Indefensibly Ignorant About COVID-19

• COVID-19 & The 2024 Election

• What You Can Learn From Kevin Bass

If this is your first time visiting the Pandemic Accountability Index, I hope this guide was helpful. If you’re a recent subscriber and haven’t dug through the archives, I hope you appreciate this look at some of the classics! If you’ve been a longtime subscriber, thank you so much for your support!

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Been busy with birthday-related shenanigans, and I unfortunately missed some critical news. Thanks everyone for the well-wishes. Now back to regular programming!

Marty “There is no Long COVID, there is only Long Anxiety” Makary, endorsed by liberal public health influencers like Ashish Jha and Leana Wen, resigned from the role of FDA Commissioner via text message. What finally brought this about was his resistance to re-legalizing fruit flavored vapes, which he approved as his final act. According to reporting by Politico, his insistence on bringing back Vinay Prasad was also a significant contributor to Makary’s fall from grace. It’s darkly funny for Makary to pretend he ever cared about the health of children, considering how and why he was selected to serve as FDA Commissioner:

Marty Makary was rewarded with the role of FDA Commissioner solely because of his COVID-19 disinformation, especially when it came to children. Actively downplaying the virus at every term and its potential for serious harm, Makary & his handpicked goons Vinay Prasad & Tracy Beth Hoeg would even go on to mock the people disabled by his favorite SARS virus, claiming they merely had “Long Anxiety” on FOX News. Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children, with no treatment or cure. Makary has contributed a great deal more harm to the health of America’s children than flavored vapes ever could, as Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children. Oh my:

Makary has no shame in his many failings.

Share

Vinay Prasad, Hanta-Thought Police Officer

Hantavirus has been in the news a great deal as of late. There’s a great deal of confusion going around, and it’s hard to know what to think and who to trust; this is part of why I started the Pandemic Accountability Index: to produce a public resource of accurate and reliable information about pandemics. The International Hantavirus Society put out a statement that the risk of a pandemic is relatively low, so that’s reassuring. Hot off the heels of a historically humiliating tenure as the Food & Drug Administration’s Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Review, Vinay Prasad is back to his old embarrassing self on Substack, screeching and howling that he knows better! Frankly, he thinks it’s illegal that you’re thinking at all about hantavirus! The media is out to get you! You can only trust Prasad!

Even worse, Senator Ron Johnson forced the Food & Drug Administration to release the report Vinay Prasad claimed in an intentionally leaked e-mail rant that the COVID-19 vaccines killed children. The FDA found, in fact, that the vaccines killed zero children. So why should anyone give a damn what Prasad has to say about anything in medicine or science? This should be grounds for Prasad losing his medical license, being terminated from UCSF & publicly condemned, and forced to write a 5,000-word apology to his paying Substack subscribers.

How embarrassing for the University of California San Francisco and Sensible Medicine to welcome Prasad back with open arms after making an ass of himself on the public stage, only to immediately revert to spreading medical disinformation on social media. In his new Hantavirus rant, the oncologist gets basic facts wrong and completely misses the forest for the trees. Prasad has a profit motive to engage in this chicanery and will never admit error, making him anything but “Sensible.” It goes to show that Prasad’s priority is promoting himself, and he sees the constant stream of negative headlines from his tenure at the FDA as an asset, not an indictment.

Subscribe now

Tracy’s Gone, and I’ve Waited So Long

As I was first drafting this, former PAI celebrity Tracy Beth Hoeg was fired from the Food & Drug Administration, as the short-lived Director of the Centers for Drug Evaluation and Research. Good riddance. This is not a reasonable person. This is a mercenary academic who, just like Kevin Bass and Allison Krug before her, is being disposed of after serving her purpose to sabotage the COVID-19 pandemic response.

With Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg all gone from the FDA - lacking any actual experience and solely being rewarded for spreading harmful disinformation about COVID-19 - it is now undeniable that depraved social media trolls are not qualified to run federal agencies. They saw Andrew Wakefield as a template to follow, and now that they are all shamefully ousted from the Trump Administration, their anti-vaccine Twitter fans are now claiming that they’re just like Wakefield - victims of a Big Pharma conspiracy!

This is true, but not in the way they think. Wakefield exploited children to produce fraudulent data and promote himself. After becoming persona-non-grata in Britain, he fled to the United States and promoted himself as a hero standing up for children’s health to cash in. There was no number of sick and suffering, dead and disabled children that was too much for Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg when it came to exploiting COVID-19. That is all they should be known as: Wakefielders.

Share

Congratulations! Your PODCAST JAY Has Evolved into LOCKDOWN JAY!

The wildly inappropriate dual director of both the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, economist Jay “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya, has evolved into “Lockdown Jay.” Travelers on a cruise ship which recently saw a horrific outbreak of hantavirus are being placed under strict quarantine in government facilities against their will! What the Jay Bhattacharya of 2020 would have claimed is that this is a gross violation of their civil liberties, and that they should be encouraged to spread the virus for “herd immunity,” is a measure he is now personally signing off on. That’s because he always knew that lockdowns work:

Jay Bhattacharya has quietly admitted that the Great Barrington Declaration, in all its bluster, was a complete farce. After seeing what happened to his buddies screwing up at the FDA, Podcast Jay did an Individual Risk Assessment, followed by a Cost-Benefit Analysis, and realized he couldn’t risk his lucrative podcasting career. I would even go so far as to guess that Trump’s White House pressured him to take extreme measures before the Midterm elections.

In good news, a high school near the NIH campus has disinvited Podcast Jay from giving a commencement address. This is a necessary first step in dismissing the pestilence cheerleader from polite society and hats off to the parents for speaking up. Now if only universities & mainstream media outlets could also stop bringing this quack on as a legitimacy voice worth hearing, we could start making progress!

Odds are this latest Hantavirus outbreak will fizzle out on its own. If and when that happens, we cannot let cranks and pundits alike insist that this is proof that Jay Bhattacharya was right about COVID-19. In reality he got everything wrong because his priority was building his personal brand, no matter how many Americans he got killed and disabled in the process.

Subscribe now

In closing, I would like to quietly announce that I am writing a book. It is a history of the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 response. More details to come soon. Your subscriptions & donations are what make this work possible, and I greatly appreciate your ongoing support. Please consider upgrading your subscription or making a one-time donation today:

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic, and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks by Steven Johnson was originally published in 2006 by Penguin Books and can be found wherever books are sold.

In our next installment of book reviews, looking at the history & politics of public health through the lens of COVID-19, we return again to cholera & the 19th Century. Taking a step back from Richard J. Evans’ Death in Hamburg, set in the 1892 German port city, we now cross the English Channel and several decades to mid-century London, the heart of the British Empire. As we step off our vessel, with Johnson’s The Ghost Map in hand as our guide, your nose will quickly be overwhelmed with quite the most unpleasant horror.

What might the brutally subjugated subjects of the British Empire think, had they known that the imperial core was drowning & dying in a sea of their own shit?

Share

A Chronic Case of Main Character Syndrome

Your mind suddenly might flash forward to a familiar scene. In the fall of 2020, when three unqualified academics, on behalf of a Koch-funded conservative think-tank, promised the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in a mere 3-6 months via the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans, including children, with a new SARS virus. They clinked champagne glasses while publishing a useless online petition known as the Great Barrington Declaration. Many prestigious thinkers, such as “Dr. Fart” and “Prof. Fullof Schitt” bravely signed the GBD.

While Bhattacharya and Kulldorff continue to whine that the GBD was censored and debate was silenced, this is a blatant rewriting of history that many liberals have fallen for. In response to the GBD, several thousand actual doctors, scientists, and public health experts published a response, known as “The John Snow Memorandum,” named after the hero of The Ghost Map and founding father of epidemiology. Pointing out the GBD’s many errors and recklessly unethical propositions, including how many infections would lead to disability. People who have been studying pandemics and public health long before 2020 soundly rejected the absurd demands of blatantly corrupt amateurs to gamble with the lives and health of millions.

In response to these criticisms, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff responded with childish insults and namecalling, calling their professional colleagues “discredited,” “Covidians,” and “Faucists.” Instead of acknowledging her many errors, erotic fiction author Sunetra Gupta would demand “herd immunity through constant reinfection.” All the while insisting that they were the real John Snow of the modern era.

Bhattacharya insists that John Snow “favored focused protection,” “was a proponent of focused production,” and insists that were he alive in the fall of 2020, Snow would have been a GBD signatory.

Reviewing Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map and the real history of John Snow in mid-19th century London, let’s see if such a claim holds feces-contaminated water.

Manure & Misinformation

In a less revolting scene, the population explosion that came with industrialization provided London with all sorts of new challenges. Packing two million souls on top of one another like sardines requires all sorts of infrastructure the city lacked in the 1850s, most notably an adequate waste disposal system. Late at night, you might hear the occasional explosion, as an underground scavenger & his gas-burning lantern stumble into a dense cloud of methane, emerging from the massive colonies of feces lingering just beneath our feet.

Much as how SARS-CoV-2 transmitted from person to person via shared air, the bacteria which causes cholera (Vibrio cholerae bacterium) was able to bounce about like a pinball through the population, using human bodies as bumpers. (Much like how SARS-CoV-2 spreads through shared air!) As one infected person’s explosive diarrhea would find its way into the same source of water that others drank from, and the bacteria easily found new hosts to infect. Thousands upon thousands would die agonizing, humiliating deaths.

The overwhelming stench of the city, drowning in feces dumped in cellars & waterways, triggered a sort of primitive response that made miasma theory - the idea that foul-smelling air is the cause of all disease - the dominating theory of the day. Desperate for a cure, the public turned to their own version of the anti-intellectual cesspool we all enjoy called Twitter: the local newspaper. As exploitative cranks such as Mary Talley Bowden are shilling ivermectin as a miracle cure for hantavirus, Victorian London had an entire industry of quackery and little actual medicine:

Keep in mind, however, that there are those among us working to return our society to those harrowing times. As Dr. David Gorskon writes for Science Based Medicine, there are forces plotting (neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, Reason Magazine, etc.) to abolish the Food & Drug Administration in its entirety, so that exploitative quacks can kill kids by selling poison as “miracle tonics” once again.

There are some lines in Steven Johnson’s writing from 2006 that are darkly hilarious two decades later:

Oh Steven of 2006, you sweet summer child. Such an innocent babe, little did ye know what horrors await. Johnson’s predictions would be dead wrong, as the real world is not like the melodramas 24 or Spooks: the looming threat wasn’t some Hollywood racial stereotype clutching a vial with a skull & crossbones on it, but instead, credentialed saboteurs who found a profit motive in selling a SARS virus to the public.

Share

Send for the Snow, Man!

When Jay Bhattacharya likes to pretend that he is the modern-day John Snow, it’s worth comparing how the two conducted themselves when it came to the major challenges of their time. Jay Bhattacharya was an unknown conservative academic who never attained a medical license before producing a wildly unethical & fraudulent seroprevalence study on COVID-19. On the other hand, John Snow was a standout in his field & a local celebrity before deciding to take on not just cholera, but the dominating theory of miasma:

Now, this is quite confusing. Shouldn’t Snow be bent over a typewriter, smashing out short-form insults? Why isn’t he spending all his time appearing on the local radio, babbling nonsense into a microphone? As we all know now in 2026, the smartest scientists are those who talk the most, casually tossing around cheap insults. Doing actual work is for chumps!

How could Bhattacharya possibly confuse himself with someone clearly his opposite in every way? Whereas Jay had the patronage of racist billionaires to support his efforts, John Snow lacked such bountiful resources. The establishment miasmatists, as wrong as they were, struggled to overcome their primal instincts:

Industry was poisoning the drinking water of London, and miasma theory was what industry supported. Industry supported the mass infection of an unvaccinated population with SARS-CoV-2, and industry bankrolled propaganda such as Jay Bhattacharya’s GBD, Emily Oster’s data fraud, and The COVID Collaborative. The truth is, industry rejects public health in its entirety, because public health requires regulations and government invention:

Again, another darkly hilarious line to read in 2026.

Much easier to insist that the public simply accept widespread pestilence. Instead of simply acknowledging their error and adjusting their views accordingly, the entrenched miasmatists of London had their own “Great Barrington Declaration” moment. Their genius strategy was to collect all of the human waste festering across the city in private cesspools, and... deposit it into the Thames river. The very same Thames that provided much of the city’s…drinking water?

Mirroring when Jay Bhattacharya led Florida’s pandemic response, this boneheaded thinking would kill thousands upon thousands of people, including children. The resistance to John Snow’s “theory as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm,” just like the resistance to the reality that COVID-19 is preventable & capable of significant harm to all, was killing a massive number of people. Jay Bhattacharya’s insistence that John Snow would have been a GBD signatory is nothing but a narcissistic delusion.

Subscribe now

The Pump Handle That Changed the World

When Jay Bhattacharya claims that John Snow was a “proponent of focused protection,” he is referring to a series of events which led to the famous moment of the Broad Street water pump handle being removed. Snow had worked and struggled for years to prove that the drinking water supply was contaminated & ultimately responsible for cholera deaths, and it wasn’t until he presented his findings to the local Board of Governors that he had real success. In the Amazon.com blurb for Bhattacharya’s upcoming book titled “The Great Barrington Declaration,” he misrepresents his online petition as casting “a ray of hope for billions of people who were living under lockdown & mask mandates.” Let us compare this to Snow’s reality:

What Johnson leaves out is that wealthy industrialists also opposed the move. While Snow would tragically pass away of a stroke at 45, this would set off a chain of events that would massively shift the landscape of London, and the entirety of urban planning, forever. The term “focused protection” is not used once in Snow’s writing, nor the entire scholarship of credible public health literature. Whereas Bhattacharya championed widespread outbreaks of disease, Snow actively fought against them:

Bhattacharya would have you believe that Snow only sought to protect those vulnerable to cholera. While critical thinking is clearly quite painful for Bhattacharya, it’s pretty easy to say that... everyone is vulnerable to cholera. So naturally, we must focus on protecting the entire population. Bhattacharya’s rewriting of history intentionally excludes what came next, and the ramifications for the entire world.

Just look at how these deranged ZeroCholera radicals have completely corrupted our society! We need to learn to live with cholera, the overwhelming stench of human feces in the air, and thousands dying week after week! This is a violation of my freedom to deposit my filth where I please! Children need cholera to build their immune systems! Think of all the taxpayer money wasted that could have gone to building awesome battleships!

Hopefully, this finally puts to bed this absurd fantasy that Jay Bhattacharya has any sort of credibility or expertise - a delusion endlessly repeated in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other leading journalism outlets. He should be shunned from academia due to his established record of dishonesty and misrepresenting facts to suit a politicized agenda on behalf of wealthy interests, but more importantly, the sheer incompetence on all topics medical and scientific. Bhattacharya is the modern day equivalent of Dr. Johann Caspar Theodor Kraus, Hamburg’s Chief Medical Officer, who in 1893 got thousands killed by insisting nothing could be done to prevent cholera outbreaks.

Clean Air activists fighting for the infrastructure upgrades to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 could certainly learn a thing or two from John Snow’s tale. “Infection is inevitable” is still the dominating philosophy of our day in 2026 when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, not because of some mystical properties of the virus, but simply because industry’s capture of our politics has organized society into embracing widespread disease, disability, and death.

The liberalism that sought to mediate conflicts between labor and capital, which understood the necessity of state interventions such as constructing a citywide sewer system or improving air quality in schools and workplaces, is long gone.

Share

Closing Thoughts

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, originally published in 2006, is darkly hilarious in how prescient it is. Little did Steven know just how right he would be:

An airport paperback and clearly a product of the time, Johnson feared terrorism much more than zoonotic evolution. He does dedicate a great deal of real-estate to warning about H5N1, aka bird flu, something which has been in the news recently and remains a looming threat. What Johnson failed to predict, tragically, is how a coalition of wealthy interests, reactionary politicians, and mercenary academics would collude to discipline the public into simply accepting a markedly higher threshold of preventable disease, disability, and death. Twenty years later, one of The Ghost Map’s final lines does not age well:

Ha…ha…ha. Very funny, Steven. Got any more clever jokes?

According to the infamously radical leftist zine The Economist, the global death toll for COVID-19 is over 35 million. Sorry Steven, but we completely and utterly failed. No small part of it thanks to jackasses who saw a global crisis & sought to exploit it as a brand building opportunity. Just as Jay Bhattacharya sought to rewrite the history of John Snow, we are currently drowning in efforts to rewrite the history of COVID-19.

John Snow & Jay Bhattacharya both dealt with a great deal of shit in their lifetimes - except Jay’s problem is that it comes from whenever he opens his mouth.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic, and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks by Steven Johnson was originally published in 2006 by Penguin Books and can be found wherever books are sold.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Well, here’s a dark twist for the history of the pandemic: America’s most prominent anti-vaccine crusader for pestilence just admitted before Congress that his son has been “devastated” by Long COVID. This is quite awkward, considering that many of his handpicked MAHA goons, like Marty Makary, deny that the condition even exists. Much of his fan club insists that the vaccine, not the SARS virus, is responsible.

At no point did the HHS Secretary take a hard look in the mirror and admit that his years of demonizing vaccines and public health, including marching with neo-Nazis alongside a child abuser, might have contributed to his son developing this condition.

The sad reality is that layered mitigations, including vaccine boosters & N95 respirators, would have greatly reduced the probability of RFK Jr.’s son, and millions of other Americans, from developing Long COVID. We had some idea that such a condition was a risk from the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, and we knew in 2020 that young unvaccinated Americans were developing MIS-C and even organ damage. We still have no cure or treatment for Long COVID.

Sadly, this is yet another tragic example of how the young have, time and time again, had their health and futures sacrificed in service of the fantasies of the old throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Swedeaboo Fantasy

Years ago, we covered the Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who rejected hard science to instead take pandemic policy guidance from an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist social media troll by the name of “FatEmperor.” Deciding that the best way to manage a new SARS virus was to infect millions of Swedes before a vaccine was available, Tegnell’s disastrous response caused widespread disruption & significantly more death when compared to similar countries. A few years later, a Swedish insurance company found that a third of young adults were struggling with cognitive impairment. Just recently, another study from Sweden saw that those with Long COVID were struggling in the workplace with declining health.

Did Anders Tegnell apologize for failing his fellow Swedes? Nope! He paraded himself around the world like he was some sort of heroic freedom fighter. He even came to Stanford to speak at a quack-ridden “Pandemic Policy” conference with an audience free of Stanford students but chock full of old white conservatives. You can even buy his book or give him a bunch of money to have him speak at your event. The facts don’t matter. You are supposed to celebrate Tegnell as some sort of hero for getting millions of his countrymen disabled.

These young Swedes didn’t get much of a choice in being served up as human sacrifice for an ignorant old man’s fantasy. Many American-based disinformation artists now hold up a totally fictionalized account of Tegnell’s failures as some sort of model we must follow should another pandemic arrive. This can only end in disaster.

Share

From Denial to Horror

Back here in America, some grimly cracked jokes about COVID-19 in 2020, calling it the “Boomer Remover.” However, we also spent the first year of the pandemic watching younger people develop serious long-term complications instead of “natural immunity,” as Ed Yong’s reporting from June of that year shows. Those who championed mass infection of the unvaccinated refused to acknowledge or even outright denied that this was a potential risk factor, most notably the elder academics behind the Great Barrington Declaration. In fact, GBD author Jay Bhattacharya recently whined that he was the true victim of the pandemic, claiming he lost 30 pounds because his useless online petition was criticized. His co-author Martin Kulldorff demanded in April 2020 (!) that young people have a civic duty embrace a brand-new virus that was killing so many.

After electing a new President (with a history of getting thousands of young Americans killed & disabled) as some sort of pandemic savior, much of the American public became more receptive to misleading propaganda. Had the public been warned that a former deli owner with zero medical or scientific credentials would be appointed COVID Czar, or that the pledged pandemic response plan would be immediately tossed for junk like “Doordash and Wallgreens are teaming up to deliver Paxlovid to underprivileged communities,” they might have been more cautious.

Instead, the public found themselves bombarded endless torrent of minimizing propaganda encouraging the abandonment of most mitigations & the embrace of mass reinfection. The pediatric death toll doubled in a matter of months the back half of 2021, and countless children found themselves developing all sorts of serious long-term health issues. Students developed cognitive impairment, young athletes were forced to abandon their dreams due to chronic fatigue, singers found their vocal chords damaged & other horrors. Pandemic pundits wrote this off as “immunity debt.”

Not an ounce of acknowledgement of this was made by the geriatric plagiarist who previously insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that Theranos was the laboratory of the future. Instead, he gleefully slashed pandemic relief in a gleeful victory lap over a mountain of suffering. The young had their health and futures sacrificed for the delusional narcissistic fantasies of the old.

Subscribe now

Closing Thoughts

We shouldn’t have to see a constant stream of news reports of how children and young people have had their lives upended by a virus they were promised was harmless to them, while cantankerous old men act like immature brats on social media. Let’s not stop with COVID-19. Look towards the accelerating climate collapse: If the young people of today truly understood not just what the old and powerful have done to them, but were willing to do to them, they would burn down the nursing homes with us inside.

America has let itself be dragged into a reactionary spiral of anti-intellectualism, in which impotent mythology is valued over scientific fact. If we are to ever escape from this whirlpool towards eldritch horrors, we must first reset our priorities.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

With Vinay Prasad set to return to the University of California San Francisco (Psst...sign and share this petition!) after being ousted twice from the Food & Drug Administration in less than a year, having facilitated zero of his much-demanded randomized control trials, it’s worth revisiting the true purpose of “Evidence-Based Medicine” arguments in debates over pandemic policy. As part of what Dr. Jonathan Howard calls the “COVID Amnesia Project,” it seems that much of pandemic punditry has truly learned the wrong lessons. Let’s set the record straight.

One of the worst side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been how academics love to take to social media to demand impossible or wildly unethical randomized control trials, especially in the onset or midst of a crisis. Professing a commitment to “Evidence-Based Medicine,” academics such as Vinay Prasad (UCSF) and Carl Heneghan (Oxford) attacked PPE such as N95 respirators by claiming there was “no evidence” to support their use. They insisted that all forms of face coverings are wholly ineffective in protecting oneself from infection with COVID-19, even going so far to compare the practice to bloodletting.

I’ve said this a million times before, but these accusations imply a major conspiracy: that 3M, Armburst, BNX, and other PPE manufacturers are engaged in a global conspiracy of fraud. It implies that entire scientific fields of engineering and aerosol dynamics are pseudoscience, and just as Hamburg’s chief medical officer insisted about cholera in 1892, nothing can be done to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses. Insisting that their ignorance is the center of all scientific understanding, “Evidence-Based Medicine” zealotry is little more than weaponized stupidity deployed to sabotage public health.

What you will notice is how “Evidence-Based Medicine” zealots refuse to demand Randomized Control Trials to support the use of other medical interventions for other threats to the public’s health. Here in New York City, we just had a major fire in which several firefighters were tragically injured. Using the same logic and arguments used to demand RCTs for COVID-19 interventions, let’s apply Evidence-Based Medicine zealotry to evaluating other forms of Personal Protective Equipment!

Does Firefighting PPE Actually Prevent Burns?

Across America, we regularly see horrible fires that can cause property damage, horrible burns, and even asphyxiation. When fire prevention fails, (of which there are ZERO RCTs evaluating their effectiveness!) firefighters are our last line of defense. Leaping out of heavy trucks covered in bulky turnout coats and often donning a respirator, their hindered movement can mean the difference between life and death for your loved ones in harm’s way. As the recent calamity in Queens reinforces, we have no good evidence that supports the effectiveness of firefighter PPE.

America’s firefighters are plagued by a culture of safetyism, in which incredibly muscular men in the peak of physical health are terrified by the same heat working class chefs face without complaint or protective equipment. Every day in America, children put their hand on a hot stove and make a full recovery, yet grown adult men are living in fear. Obviously, the solution is to generate better evidence over the true effectiveness of PPE solutions for firefighting.

Thus, I am bravely demanding on social media that we enroll 100 fire departments across America in a randomized control trial. Half of them will be allowed to wear full firefighting gear to respond to calls, while the other 50 will be restricted to white cotton t-shirts and blue jeans as part of the control group. Only through applying the rigorous standards of Evidence-Based Medicine can we truly evaluate whether or not heavy jackets are effective in preventing burns, or respirators from preventing smoke inhalation. Otherwise, we are wasting precious taxpayer dollars and risking American lives to enforce a safety-ism culture of unproven interventions.

Critics of such a proposal are obviously mentally unwell & willing to put American lives at risk by mandating ineffective PPE which is not supported by evidence. Burns and smoke inhalation are generally mild and resolve upon their own. Why are we still refusing to learn the most important lessons from the benefits of normalizing repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections across the population? Only “Evidence-Based Medicine” can guide us out of poor-decision making in a crisis.

Why Do This?

The purpose of this exercise isn’t to demand that some of the bravest among us needlessly risk their lives in order to generate data points in an Excel spreadsheet for “EBM” zealots to torture. These supposed champions of “Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine” were so vocal about attacking mitigations against COVID-19 yet never applied these standards to other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Taking advantage of an ignorant and irresponsible media, their goal was purely to promote themselves by sabotaging the pandemic response with reckless disinformation.

These mercenary academics, bankrolled by wealthy interests, have sought to poison the waters in building a fraudulent consensus that the government does not have the obligation, or even the right, to intervene during a public health crisis. That industry is allowed to dictate what degree of public health the citizenry is entitled to, if any at all. This is a phenomenon that has been repeated throughout numerous public health crises dating back centuries. Let us not forget that the precursor to the Great Barrington Declaration, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers insisted in the early months of the pandemic that hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen should have embraced dying of COVID-19 as human sacrifice for “the economy.”

Just as the separation of church and state is a requirement for civic democracy, we also require a separation between industry and public health. Letting the wealthy dictate public health policy has time and time again been a disaster ending in needless death and suffering. Only when universities root out corruption & condemn unethical misconduct, journalists stop legitimizing bad faith propaganda into the mainstream, and when politicians are willing to stand and fight for working families will this necessary change be realized.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Prior to 2020, the vast majority of Americans didn’t think too much about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of our most essential federal agencies. As part of its day-to-day operations, the CDC operates as a sort of publishing house, producing data and statistics on a rapid basis. This information about the biggest threats to Americans’ health is deployed to assist doctors, nurses, and other health professionals in their day-to-day duties in something called the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). This essential resource has long been a target of MAHA grifters, as we’ll soon cover.

On October 10th, 2025 the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported via Bluesky:

“Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Dozens of ‘disease detectives,’ high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed.”

These are essential staff whose work is incredibly important in safeguarding the American public’s health. Half a year later, we see where this intentional sabotage has led. Playing Calvinball with public health, the parasocial menace Jay Bhattacharya has taken a break from neglecting his duties as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to play pretend as the temporary Director of the CDC. Even after the legal constraints around Shameless Jay’s temporary appointment as CDC Director expired, he has been allowed to remain as a “shadow” CDC Director. This somehow involved recording even more podcasts on the taxpayer’s dime.

One of the few times he did bother to show up to work at the CDC is when he found yet another opportunity to censor science.

Unqualified Economist Faceplants…Again?!

Left in the hot seat, evidence that contradicted Jay Bhattacharya’s feelings slid across his desk after passing scientific review. Like clockwork, it was further proven that COVID-19 vaccines worked, reducing the likelihood of hospitalizations by half. Contrast this with the growing mountain of evidence that no benefit is conferred by repeated COVID-19 infections in pursuit of “natural immunity;” the basis of Bhattacharya’s entire pro-pestilence worldview. So just what is the nation’s smartest scientific mind, completely untainted by “ideology” (just after speaking at yet another white nationalist hate rally) supposed to do?

After years of making the evidence-free claim that he was the victim of censorship, dismissed by the Supreme Court, the dual NIH & CDC Director doubled down on his petty reign of censorship and blocked the study from publication in the CDC MMWR. This is a completely unprecedented abuse of authority he technically shouldn’t even have. When it became widely known that Bhattacharya had yet again engaged in censorship, the unqualified social media narcisscist took to his official Twitter account “NIHDirector_Jay” (seperate from “DrJBhattacharya,” where he blocks American doctors, scientists, and taxpayers to crack wise with trolls who regularly engage in harassment) to proclaim on April 22nd:

“There were no peer reviews. MMWR is not currently a peer reviewed journal. But we are working on changing that.”

This is a rather curious statement. I asked multiple doctors and scientists for input, who all responded with some version of the iconic Psyduck stare of confusion. According to Bluesky user “Shep/Polly,”

“I’m an author on several papers published in MMWR as well as other journals and this is a bald faced lie. The peer review process for an article submitted to MMWR is rigorous”

It should be a scandal that this shadow CDC Director is blocking publications of studies he personally doesn’t like after claiming he was “getting ideology out of science” and seeks to remake the NIH as “the research arm of MAHA.” Especially when he has zero relevant qualifications or experience to make such a decision, overriding those who do. In a softball interview with a fellow economist who struggles with basic arithmetic and champions repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2, Emily Oster, he exploited the safe space to ramble on about “test-negative design.” Oster, a bought-and-paid-for MAHA cheerleader, pretended he knew what he was talking about:

Now, you might be asking yourself: Why screw around with the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report?

Share

Peer Review is for Economic Girly-Men! All of the Med Journals are Woooke!

MAHA “Doctors” have long hated actual medical research and the rigorous standards of the world’s leading scientific journals. Tweeting and podcasting is a lot easier than actual science, it turns out. These social media provocateurs insisted that their fact-free proclamations were more credible than mountains of peer-reviewed evidence. Jay Bhattacharya branded doctors and scientists as heretical “Covidians,” Martin Kulldorff proclaimed that the signees of the John Snow Memorandum, a consensus response to their useless online petition, were “disgraced,” and Vinay Prasad frequently made baseless accusations that his professional colleagues researching Long COVID were grifting fraudsters & that all the leading journals are “woke.”

Over the years, these pro-COVID “scientists” circumvented relevant peer review in a number of ways to mislead the public. Publishing in open-access journals without peer review, sharing pre-prints that had not been peer reviewed, publishing in journals totally irrelevant or unequipped for the subject matter of said paper, etc. were all tactics to exploit their social media audiences while avoiding rigorous scrutiny from peers with relevant credentials or experience. Imagine if a MMA fighter refused to compete against anyone over the age of 12, and then bragged that he was undefeated. Would you seriously consider them to be one of the world’s top fighters?

Disinformation artists then decided to start their own journal, brazenly called the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” in Februrary 2025. (Misinformation Doctors Start a Misinformation Journal to Spread Misinformation - Dr. Jonathan Howard for Science-Based Medicine) Claiming to value “peer-review,” the rules insisted that only members of “the Academy of Public Health” can submit manuscripts, but the editor cannot reject these submissions no matter how negative the peer reviews are. The editor also has the power to decide who peer reviews said submissions. In other words, here’s a bunch of social media brats playing at starting their own propaganda mill. Needless to say, it was yet another quickly-forgotten astroturf grift.

Subscribe now

The War on the CDC MMWR

Since the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, pro-infection quacks have demonized the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and targeted the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report specifically. Instead of making meaningful lifesaving contributions of their own, these charlatans profited by lazily tearing down others. Knowing that their pseudoscience could not withstand the rigorous standards of peer review, these social media trolls promoted themselves by attacking the credibility of one of the nation’s most respected public health publications. This served as little more than sensationalist “infotainment” to their anti-vaccine fanboys.

On March 17th, 2023 Vinay Prasad squealed, “Latest CDC MMWR study on LongCovid in kids is trash,” while sharing sentiments that those suffering are actually “lying fake disease grifters.” The FDA’s current CDER Director Tracy Beth Hoeg, an unqualified sports physician who used her own child as a prop to attack the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, proclaimed on Twitter on June 1st, 2023 that: “Next week I’m returning to DC to testify before congress about systemic problems within the CDC, their process for developing public health guidelines, errors made & the scientific integrity of MMWR,” before crowdsourcing “thoughts, ideas & reciepts” from her devoted anti-vaccine fanclub. On July 12th, 2023 Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg again attacked the CDC with a preprint (so, not peer-reviewed!) titled “Characteristics and quality of studies pertaining to masks published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” shared by Tracy with another snarky tweet:

“Is CDCMMWR a reliable journal for informing health policy? In a new paper Alyson Haslam [Vinay Prasad] & I analyze 77 MMWR reports pertaining to masks. Our results were concerning. >75% concluded masks were effective w/only 30% testing masks. 0 were [Randomized Control Trials]”

Needless to say, anti-vaccine trolls such as Benjamin Ryan lept upon this non-peer-reviewed pre-print as confirmation of their conclusions. As it turns out, none of these creeps ever cared about peer review and never will. On November 15th, 2024 Vinay Prasad declared: “MMWR is less a journal, and more a propaganda newsletter.” Having spent most of the pandemic doing little more than producing a propaganda newsletter on Substack, this is quite ironic.

CDC MMWR’s MAHA Review

When Jay Bhattacharya insists that he will be introducing “peer review” to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, what he actually means is that he will be tossing federal handouts to his favorite anti-vaccine cranks in order to form a MAHA review board for the CDC MMWR. Bhattacharya’s pathetically embarassing record of research output dating back to 2020, as well as the pitifully disgraceful studies he’s endorsed, show that he is woefully unfit for the task. Factual science will be censored, sensationalist anti-vaccine trash will granted undue legitimacy, and America’s healthcare workers will no longer be able to rely upon one of their most critical resources. We’ve already seen this with the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it’s clear that the long-term goal is to convert the CDC MMWR into an onramp of legitmacy for those who could only be published in the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” previously.

While much of the nation’s energy is focused on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his constant obscene blabbering, his underlings are corrupting the essential functions of our federal public health agencies. As many breathe a sigh of relief that Trump is nominating a shockingly qualified & reasonable candidate to serve as CDC Director, she will be inheriting a compromised institution and given little leeway to right the ship. Should a crisis emerge under her tenure, she’s set up to be the obvious fall person. It’s a brutally unfair position to be in.

Imagine yourself in Jay Bhattacharya’s position: you’re the laughing stock of the entire world of medicine, science, and public health. Large parts of MAHA, your once loyal followers, are mad that their fantasies of the mRNA vaccines being banned and public executions of doctors & scientists were never realized. You’ve wasted your entire life to become a pathetically impotent old man who has zero talents beyond babbling on social media, desperately clinging on to relevancy. How else are you supposed to leave your mark on the world?

Final Verdict

The war on the CDC MMWR is yet another sad pathetic attempt to rewrite the rules for incoherent incompetents, sloppily written by pitiful manchildren.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

In the wake of Vinay Prasad’s dramatic ousting from the role of the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Director, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has shown an inability to learn an important lesson from the ordeal: You simply cannot put unqualified, inexperienced social media posters in charge of essential federal departments. Makary is looking to replace Prasad with Houman David Hemmati, a regular guest on FOX News. Walker Bragman over at Important Context wrote a great article, of which I’m following up with a stack of damning, incredibly disqualifying quotations.

Houmann is seemingly incapable of independent critical thought. Whenever it comes to COVID-19, he can be found on FOX News simply repeating whatever conservative anti-vax memes he reads on Twitter. This is deeply embarrassing, while making him an obviously perfect pick for Marty Makary’s FDA.

Unless stated otherwise, these quotes come directly from Houman’s Twitter account, “houmanhemmati.”

2021

October 6th, 2021: Hemmati got in early on the propaganda grift to sabotage the pandemic response by spreading disinformation and minimizing the virus. Appearing for the “Global COVID Summit,” Houmann Hemmati declares that “risk analysis does not support vaccinating children.” In August of this year, around 500 pediatric COVID-19 deaths were recorded. This number would double to over 1,000 before Christmas 2021. As hundreds of children, overwhelmingly unvaccinated were dying, Hemmati was telling parents that these deaths weren’t worth trying to prevent. This sort of incredibly unethical garbage establishes that Hemmati has no business in any sort of role at the Food & Drug Administration, especially as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research.

In a just world, Hoummati would be forced to go door to door to the parents of these dead children and tell them just why it’s so great they died of a vaccine-preventable cause. Instead, he’s a coward who hides behind the safety of a keyboard.

Share

2022

January 10th, 2022: During the worst months for pediatric COVID-19 deaths recorded, with record numbers of children hospitalized for COVID-19 and shoots shutting down as a result of unmitigated outbreaks, goes onto FOX News to demand that all mitigations to protect children are abandoned:

March 30th, 2022:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 after Hemmati made this claim. Referring to lifesaving vaccines as merely “pharmaceutical products” is an intentional and irresponsible choice to mislead the public. Over a million Americans died in pursuit of this mythical “natural immunity,” with millions more struggling through the ongoing emergency of having become disabled by SARS-CoV-2. This is conservative grievance politics in a nutshell: Whenever society is faced with a real-world problem, such as say, climate collapse, the conservative mind rushes to childish and pitiful denial.

April 25th, 2022: Sharing a LA Times editorial titled “California’s schools don’t need a vaccine mandate - at least, not right now” Houmann declares,

Reactionary mythologists love to abuse the phrase “common sense” to present their uninformed fictions as fact. I have tragic news for Houmann: Repeated COVID-19 infections have rendered millions of previously “healthy kids” into a state of rather unhealthy disability and chronic illness. The thousands of American children who died of COVID-19 were overwhelmingly unvaccinated, meaning that their deaths were preventable. We as adults failed them. Writing off these preventable tragedies as merely “unhealthy” children not worth protecting is morally depraved and unbecoming of a medical professional.

May 10th, 2022:

This is the tired old binary fallacy that has been debunked time and time again. As a licensed medical professional, Hemmati has a professional obligation to be up-to-date on the latest medical research, especially about a widespread SARS virus. It’s obvious that he will prioritize junk he reads on Twitter over hard science at the Food & Drug Administration. Even if “case counts are meaningless,” widespread unchecked pestilence is simply not the hallmark of a healthy society.

July 22nd, 2022:

The “Urgency of Normal,” for those who don’t recall, was a pop-up astroturf of credentialed medical professionals such as Monica Gandhi and Scott Balsitis (a major fan of white nationalist Christopher Rufo), that argued that COVID-19 was harmless to children, and that non-pharmaceutical interventions were destroying a whole generation of kids. As part of their “advocacy toolkit,” they frequently got basic facts about SARS-CoV-2 wrong. They claimed that they simply cared about children’s mental health, and their advocacy suddenly stopped when they got what they wanted: schools becoming hotbeds for COVID-19 outbreaks. Pediatric suicide rates climbing, mass shootings, ICE committing a domestic terror campaign, etc. though? - Urgency of Normal is suddenly nowhere to be found. Hemmati’s dishonesty shows how he will be an irrational, politically motivated hack just like his predecessor Vinay Prasad.

August 2nd, 2022:

This is not how N95 respirators work. Houmann, not an engineer, is simply repeating a tired old meme he read on Twitter. The leadership of our federal public health agencies must be held to a higher standard than simply regurgitating anti-intellectual slop from the gutters of social media. There are plenty of competent, talented civil servants at the FDA who shouldn’t have to be constantly sabotaged by willfully incompetent leadership.

October 13th, 2022: Houman Hemmati appears on the libertarian crackpot outlet podcast The Atlas Society, presenting himself as a “longtime outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and medical censorship:”

It is a truly pathetic softball “interview” in which he frequently spreads the same tired old anti-vaccine myths you’ve heard a hundred times before.

Subscribe now

2023

Februrary 14th, 2023: Hemmati faking concern that PPE is strangling kids, he squeals:

This is darkly cruel because COVID-19 has not left children alone, willful understanding about the effectiveness of PPE and PPE mandates aside. A lot of children have died or developed very serious health issues as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2, and as a medical professional, Houmann has a responsibility beyond putting his fingers in his ears and turning a blind eye to sick and suffering kids. If he’s unable to accept tangible reality, then he will make poor decisions at the Food & Drug Administration.

March 12th, 2023: Houman threatens violent revolution if any form of public health measures, no matter how necessary, are ever re-introduced:

Donald Trump was President in 2020 when these measures were first introduced. If Hemmati joins the FDA, he will share in the responsibility should another pandemic begin under the second Trump Administration, including all of the deaths that result.

March 14th, 2023: Referring to a now-infamous and long debunked “Cochrane Review of Masks” by two Evidence-Based Medicine zealots out of the United Kingdom by the names of Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, Hemmati refuses to acknowledge the paper’s basic errors:

The paper is inconclusive, neither proving a positive or a negative - only for Jefferson to run to an anti-vaccine Substack and intentionally obfuscate this fact. They conflate airborne and droplet transmission of viruses, as well as pretending that a blue surgical mask and a 3M 1080+ N95 respirator are somehow the same thing. Basic, basic errors as a result of treating their ignorance as the definitive article; a trait Hemmati clearly shares. If you are endorsing obviously junk research you clearly haven’t read, you have no business working at the Food & Drug Administration.

March 20th, 2023: Much like his Twitter buddies Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, Hemmati squeals that Long COVID is all fake and no big deal:

We knew long-term health complications was a possible result of infection with a SARS virus, long before 2020, for a significant percentage of the infected. It is now 2026, and the mountain of evidence for Long COVID is undeniable. Hemmati was never close to right, and his inability to simply admit error disqualifies him from science and medicine entirely, much less running CBER.

May 20th, 2023: After getting everything from he wanted from the Biden Administration with the total abandonment of children to repeated COVID-19 infections, Hemmati went on FOX News to smugly take a victory lap:

In it, he attempts to rewrite history and pretend that doing nothing would have been much more preferable, claiming “the consequences of COVID lockdowns will last for decades.”

July 30th, 2023: Replying to the former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Houmann yet again shows his poor critical thinking skills in an extensive rant:

This argument simply does not work when it comes to socially transmitted diseases such as COVID-19, in which someone can be asymptomatic but infectious. 99% of the Americans who died or was disabled by COVID-19 was infected by someone else, often people who “didn’t WANT to be protected.” This was also the arguments people made against drunk-driving laws:

Even the fairy godmother of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, understood that government had an obligation to intervene in preventing the spread of a deadly and disabling virus.

This is simply yet another tired rehashing of anti-vaccine memes debunked years prior. The “From/With COVID-19” meme saying that COVID-19 deaths aren’t real is really a revival of the centuries-old miasma myth, that COVID-19 has fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics which render it omnipresent yet totally a harmless and benign friend. It also serves to confuse the public about the mechanics of death reporting, which is incredibly basic, basic stuff.

This is, of course, preposterous. No matter what hard evidence you show to Hemmati, he’ll simply put his fingers in his eyes and whine “nuh-uh.” This rank dishonesty is childish and unprofessional. As one expects from your standard Twitter troll.

June 4th, 2023: Replying to a former jeans executive and contributor to the “Brownstone Institute,” a propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, Houman writes:

Just the year before, it was reported that hundreds of thousands of children lost a parent to COVID-19; many because they brought the virus home from school. Had Houmann been in charge in 2020, that number would be much higher - and he’d write those off as just “a few lives” anyways. You can show Houmann every study, every news clip of the many children suffering from Long COVID, and he simply doesn’t care. He never cared - he is lying to you, centering himself as the judge of what is real or not. Houmann irresponsibly abuses social media, cultivating a safe space from the facts that contradict his feelings. Sadly, this makes him a perfect “culture fit” for the Trump Administration.

June 5th, 2023:

This is a lot of words to say: “freakin’ hysterial broads,” as if we’ve learned nothing about medical misogyny and post-viral illness since the 1800s. Maybe we just need a federal law mandating that male physicians have to take a class (or two or three?) on just how to not treat female patients like garbage?

June 8th, 2023:

These sorts of childish japes and jabs are simply unprofessional and disqualifying. It’s just plain simple: If you don’t want the responsibility, don’t take the job. The sad reality, not to downplay over a million deaths, is that the primary threat to Americans has been developing disability or chronic illness caused by a virus that didn’t kill them. As FDA CBER Director, it’s apparent that Hemmati will handle serious challenges (not the fake ones he gets from Twitter) by simply denying they exist.

June 17th, 2023: As failed med student Kevin Bass turned out to be a massive creep who confused the professional politeness of nurses with flirtation, Houmann decided to try and take the little dweeb under his wing. Inadvertantly, Hemmati’s words would be prophetic:

Bass was expelled soon after. Odds are, this will also be an accurate summary of Hemmati’s tenure at the FDA.

Share

2024

June 06th, 2024: In a truly pathetic extended rant, Houman manages to get every aspect of not just pediatric COVID-19, but basic morality, dead wrong:

It’s okay the kids die of COVID-19 because of other problems? Check. Parents should be allowed to let their kids die of vaccine-preventable causes? Check. Putting Long COVID in air quotes? Check. Pediatricians are too stupid to diagnose their young patients dying of COVID-19? Check. Even after everything we’ve learned about how COVID-19 harms pediatric health and development, with Long COVID overtaking asthma to become the leading chronic illness in kids, Hemmati doubles down on babbling tired old anti-vaccine Twitter memes. This is truly embarrassing.

August 13th, 2024:

Hemmati got what he wanted. Schools now shut down regularly across America due to infectious disease outbreaks instead. Chronic absenteeism is up. Young people share memes such as “the lion does not confirm himself with his brain fog and/or chronic fatigue.” This is the “normal” that Hemmati considered so urgent.

Nobody was thrilled about remote schooling, an imperfect piecemeal that was understaffed, underresourced, and essentially designed to fail. This happened as a result of dozens of educators dying of COVID-19 in New York City in Spring 2020, who could then educate zero kids as a consequence of...dying. Hemmati apparently finds himself entitled to the deaths of teachers so he can pretend nothing was wrong.

December 05th, 2024:

For ah...what, exactly? Being publicly criticized for getting basic facts wrong and refusing to ever admit error? That we as Americans collectively failed in performing a fantasy, sort of like stage actors in a theater production, in which they’re the heroes who - in their words, not mine - gave a “ray of hope” to imagined “billions” for clinking champagne as bodies piled in the streets?

Should public health policy be dictated by online petitions written by delusional narcissists and bankrolled by crooked billionaires? Clearly, the frequent FOX News guest believes this to be the case.

Subscribe now

2026

January 14th, 2026:

Well, ah...that certainly didn’t happen and was obviously never going to happen. Whoopsie!

Final Verdict

If Houmann David Hemmati is confirmed as the replacement for Vinay Prasad as FDA CBER Director, he will likely follow a very similar path as his predecessor. Reporters will have a field day of writing up the constant melodrama, rank incompetence, and inevitably Hemmati’s dismissal. Much like Prasad, Hemmati treats his ignorance as the anchor the rest of the world should center itself around. Entertaining their anti-vaccine Twitter fans is their priority in life.

Here is an outrageous thought: selecting a biotech entrepreneur to regulate the biotech industry is a poor decision. I am forced to agree with one of the hosts of The Cancer Letter podcast, that perhaps the best candidates for these sorts of roles lack a social media presence. While I would certainly like to be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong, I believe the most likely outcome is, as a loyal MAHA soldier, Hemmati’s arrogant ignorance leads to a preventable tragedy such as Americans dying from complications resulting from deregulated peptides.

My sympathies to the people at the FDA trying their darndest to do a decent job and keep the ship afloat. Whatever disagreements, you don’t deserve this crap. If Hemmati was a decent man, he would take a hard look in the mirror, delete his Twitter account, and quietly retire from the public sphere. He’s got enough blood on his hands.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Tomorrow on April 23rd, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are holding a “Fireside Chat” about “Enhancing the Integrity of the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” “featuring top policymakers and advocates for change.” One of the most prestigious institutions for science and medicine in America has invited two of the most unscientific voices of the past several years: Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster. Not to point out their total lack of credibility caused by their constant errors & inability to admit them. Not to denounce weaponized quackery to advance a reactionary agenda. Instead, the NASEM is lending its credibility to the ongoing campaign to rewrite & obfuscate the history of COVID-19 as a submissive surrender to the narcissistic delusions of Donald Trump and RFK Jr.

Now the PAI has spent years covering both of these laptop class academics and their constant errors in the past, which can be contrasted with a growing mountain of evidence showing the harms of COVID-19 - a reality that both have denied; especially for children. We’ve also covered that both made quite a pretty penny spewing propaganda on behalf of lecherous conservative billionaires such as vampire Peter Thiel and cape-wearing neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, just the same with Big Tobacco and oil companies. It’s a tired old playbook that we’ve seen time and time again, and yet… those whose job it is to know better keep falling for it.

The National Academies of Sciences hosting Oster & Jay for a “fireside chat,” alluding to images of President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking directly to Americans through a Great Depression and a Second World War. Sorry, but making bank while falsely assuring parents that SARS-CoV-2 is harmless to kids isn’t half as heroic. Just because an anti-vaccine quack and his cronies have infested the Department of Health and Human Services, doesn’t mean that widely respected and prestigious organizations need to pretend that they’re worth platforming, much less be endorsed as “top policymakers and advocates for change.”

Should sports debate shows be bringing on 8-year-old Little Leaguers to critique the batting technique of the New York Yankees? Not doing so is censorship, y’know!

What’s even more offensive is that the National Academies of Sciences could have taken this opportunity to platform the scientists who have done critical research on the impacts of COVID-19, such as Putrino Lab. They could have platformed the doctors who are treating the millions of Americans disabled by COVID-19, including many children. They could have even been bold and platformed the engineers whose knowledge of how to prevent the transmission of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 was soundly rejected by Oster and Bhattacharya! Instead, we get useless economists. Why shouldn’t we call this out for what it is? Censorship. Censorship of real science, engineering, and medicine in order to waste the spotlight on incompetent fraudsters blabbering nonsense to obfuscate the facts.

Why doesn’t the National Academies of Sciences just cut out the middlemen entirely, and bring on the billionaires directly to decree just what scientific facts the public are allowed to believe in?

An Alternative 2020

Let us briefly imagine a very different timeline.

The day after the online petition that was the Great Barrington Declaration was published, the administrations of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford Universities put out a joint statement condemning the GBD and terminating the professorships of Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta for unethical misconduct, exploiting the credibility of their respective institutions to sabotage the COVID-19 response. Brown University kicks Emily Oster to the curb for data fraud on behalf of lecherous billionaires. The University of California San Francisco sends Monica Gandhi packing for mocking those taking the pandemic seriously and later gives Vinay Prasad the boot for claiming that public health mandates are a gateway drug to fascism.

Together, these universities put their foot down and declare that the wealthy cannot buy science, and that gross incompetence during a crisis will not be tolerated. Would conservatives whine about censorship? That’s what they always do, so who cares?

Let’s take this fantasy another step further and start imagining an alternative timeline in which journalists at The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other outlets honestly report the truth: crooked billionaires are attempting to sabotage the pandemic response, putting American lives at risk. Massive front-page exposes on how propaganda outlets such as Collateral Global and the Brownstone Institutes are muddying the waters, misleading the public with the help of credentialed yet crooked academics. Truth be told, most people don’t want the “Metaverse” dork or a cape-wearing neo-Confederate influencing decisions about the health of their children in the midst of a crisis. Yet, that’s what these institutions Americans should be able to trust helped make possible!

With all of the shamelessly unproductive distractions dumped in the garbage, we could start to have an actual policy debate about how to best save lives & safeguard the public’s health in the onset of the disaster. Instead, we’ve had to waste so many years & lives having to relitigate basic facts and argue against the absolute laziest, bad-faith attacks. The academy is supposed to be a great filter for discarding frivolous nonsense, and instead, the National Academies are helping to legitimize a regressive, anti-intellectual decline that celebrates widespread, unchecked pestilence.

Share

A Harsh Proposal

Here’s a hotly controversial policy proposal nobody will like: The universities which choose to fail to enforce professional standards amongst their faculty - in which unqualified academics misrepresented themselves as experts on all-things COVID-19, often lashing out with childish & vulgar insults, showing a total disregard for the consequences of their influence - should be brought under strict federal oversight. The wealthy shouldn’t be able to buy their desired policy agendas (such as hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths) by buying the credibility of the academy and laundering this influence through our leading media outlets. If you won’t show respect for the public by keeping your own house clean, then maybe the government needs to come in and do it for you.

Most academics, doctors, and scientists in America are perfectly reasonable people. Unfortunately, they found themselves demonized and vilified as part of a massive anti-vaccine propaganda campaign that found itself legitimized in more mainstream media outlets, and the administration of their institutions that is supposed to have their backs cowardly stayed silent. We should be able trust the academy to separate fact from fiction, unthinking they would ever defer to the whims of wealthy jerks. This isn’t about censoring free speech, but instead defending free speech, by ensuring that factual information used to inform serious policy debates aren’t drowned out by a well-funded torrent of absurd nonsense.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine could have put on an incredible panel on how Bhattacharya and Oster should have been laughed out of the room in 2020. They could have hosted people with relevant qualifications about how to best minimize the negative impacts of COVID-19 in 2020. Instead, they’re putting on another useless fact-free podcast rewriting history.

If America is to survive through the many challenges, we face (fun side-effect of climate collapse: more pandemics like COVID-19!) we have to make a major shift in our politics, economics, and culture.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

As America teeters on the edge of a devastating recession, I have done my best to stimulate the economy…by shopping for the most expensive toilet paper I could possibly find. Lepers and germs, the search will finally soon be over. Over at the webz0ne which shares a name with the rainforest we’re presently destroying, “MAHA Books” is selling an upcoming premium designer toiletry product which can be found quietly hiding away under:

It’s called “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations,” (GBD) edited by HHS senior staffer and ex-Harvard academic Martin Kulldorff & the shadow director for the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as well as the National Institutes of Health director, Jay “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya. Preorders are being sold for $50.00, and the “Brownstone Institute,” an anti-vaccine propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, is featured prominently on the cover. The creep who wants to take your teenage daughter out of high school to give her a Hooters uniform and a pack of Virginia Slims is currently pitching another useless online petition:

About the Authors

In the “About the Author” section on Amazon, it lists Jay Bhattacharya as a “physician, epidemiologist and health economist.” Jay never did a residency and never bothered to a attain a medical license - instead writing conservative policy after graduating. As a “health economist,” playing God with other people’s lives by torturing data in an Excel spreadsheet, his previous claim to fame was arguing that health insurance was subsidizing obesity. As NIH Director and now shadow CDC Director, Jay has done little more than censor scientists and record dozens of podcasts with wellness grifters, anti-vaccine quacks, and white nationalists.

Martin Kulldorff’s section fails to mention his time as a member of Harvard faculty, after he was terminated for insisting that the COVID-19 which hospitalized & nearly killed him somehow granted him lifelong immunity, rendering a vaccine unnecessary. It lists his time on RFK Jr.’s fraudulent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was shut down by a federal judge after Kulldorff proved he couldn’t even run a simple meeting, whining that “we are rookies.” Prior to the GBD, Kulldorff wrote in Spring 2020 for The Spectator that those protecting themselves from COVID-19 (well before a vaccine as available) are “anti-herders” who should be considered just as vile and nefarious as any anti-vaxxer. Kulldorff now works directly for an anti-vaccine scam artist as the “Chief Science Officer for the Office of the Assistance Secretary for Planning and Evaluation” at the Department of Health and Human Services; an ironic title to be held by a completely unscientific crank.

What’s truly amazing is how these two federal employees have all this free time to write a whole book, after over a year of constant headlines showing nothing but constant failure and gross incompetence on their parts. Perhaps making childish posts to social media is not relevant experience needed to run critical federal agencies! Perhaps Congress should be looking into this!

If you don’t remember, the GBD was a useless online petition by a trio of laptop class academics exploiting their credentials to lend credibility to a conservative billionaire pitch that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans can magically end a pandemic. As countless Americans were killed and disabled by a new SARS virus in 2020, these three clinked champagne glasses thinking they had accomplished something meaningful. While children who suffered “mild” cases of this new disease developed MIS-C in their hearts and brains in 2020, these academics championed the virus as the best protection for children.

I will now explain how every sentence of this triple-D dogcrap excuse for a “book” is wrong - by going line-by-line through the Amazon description, as someone with an advertising background, focusing on just how the GBD lies to the public. Bolded emphasis is mine.

Share

Paragraph 01: What’s a Lockdown?

Compare and contrast the actual science above to this blurb from the GBD book:

COVID-19 is a vascular, multi-system disease caused by the airborne virus SARS-CoV-2, which is often inhaled via the lungs. Already, these laptop class academics are hard at work misleading you into believing that they know what they are talking about with multi-syllable scientific terms. As someone who has been organizing and compiling research on the impacts of COVID-19 for years, you would be a willful idiot to mispresent SARS-CoV-2 as a “mild” respiratory virus that goes in one lung and out the other, like the flu and common cold. Men generally do not develop erective dysfunction from the flu, for starters. Effective non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses have existed for decades prior to 2020, a fact that the GBD authors refuse to acknowledge.

Secondly, do you truly think that the Waltons of Wal-Mart, one of the funders of the GBD, gives a flying frak about small businesses? Do you know what dead people can’t do, on account of dying from COVID-19? Spend money at small businesses! Get real.

Credible?! Ha! This is a blatant, boldfaced lie, verified by a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. As Walker Bragman has reported for Important Context, GBD writer Jay Bhattacharya has been humiliated by the courts time and time again. From FOX News to Substack to Youtube to the NIH & CDC, nobody would be misled into believing that Martin Kulldorf & Jay Bhattacharya’s speech has ever been censored. The Great Barrington Declaration was heard and soundly rejected, a fact they have never been able to accept as it contradicts their narcissistic delusions.

Subscribe now

Paragraph 02: A Completely Fraudulent Rewriting of History

This is an exceptionally offensive statement in just how false it is. The “pharmaceutical products” in question are the vaccines that have saved millions of lives, and became widely available just months after the GBD. No pandemic has ever been ended via the mass infection of the unvaccinated. These are basic, basic facts. Secondly, the conservative think-tank AEIR did not facilitate “an educational seminar,” but a deeply embarrassing display of incompetence. They seem to want us to forget that they filmed the proceedings:

The laptop-class academics giving this “educational seminar on the basics of public health” could certainly use some remedial classes on why it’s wildly inappropriate to demand the deaths of strangers.

This is, again, a total lie. The GBD was prepared well in advance and not censored, it was soundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors as wildly unethical, utterly useless, and willfully ignorant about the harms presented by SARS-CoV-2. Astroturfed by wealthy interests, the GBD gained traction with conspiracy theorists on social media, whose grip on reality is already rather poor. While doctors treated patients and scientists developed lifesaving vaccines, these academics insisted that spreading falsehoods on social media was the truly heroic act.

This is another shameless rewriting of history. The list of signees for a useless online petition was retracted from public viewing because it was overwhelmingly fake names such as “Doctor Fart.” If the GBD was truly such a genius idea, then why do the authors have to constantly lie about it?

Share

Paragraph 03: Delusional Narcissism

The GBD proposed mandating infection with a deadly and disabling virus for hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans as government policy, demonizing those who refused to go along with this unproven gamble as “anti-herders” and “Covidians.” No, seriously! Read for yourself:

Secondly, if 97 scientists hold one position, and 3 take an opposing view, that is still a scientific consensus. We do not drop everything, shun the 97, and focus all of our attention on entertaining the ramblings of three unqualified crackpots. Conservative billionaires do not get to decide what is scientific fact or not.

The “ray of hope for billions” was Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to lifesaving vaccines that would become widely available just months after the GBD’s publication. The GBD authors are engaging in a form of “Stolen Valor,” the worst crime one can commit in the eyes of conservative Americans. Call me controversial, but I don’t believe that our federal public health institutions should serve as an adult daycare for the wildly insecure as a result of unhealthy social media habits.

This narcissistic hallucination of the downtrodden and oppressed taking to the streets waving banners portraying Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta as noble heroes to the workers of the world is deeply, deeply pathetic. Engaging in a form of “code-switching,” Bhattacharya would go on left-wing media platforms with Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, and others to lie about how he was the one who truly cared about working people. In reality, he wanted them to embrace death and disability with a smile on their face, as if we were back in the 1300s…

Really? Let’s check the tape, buckos.

The GBD was criticized by the overwhelming majority of public health scientists, because it got basic facts wrong, wildly underestimated COVID-19’s potential for serious harm and was “little more” than demanding the preventable, needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Secondly, the authors of the GBD were invited to meet the White House to meet with Trump, who was President in 2020; another fact they casually omit. Claiming that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people with a new SARS virus is merely “traditional public health wisdom” is yet another obscene lie.

Share Pandemic Accountability Index

Paragraph 04: Safe Spaces and Fake Debates

Nah, uh…no it doesn’t. If the actual book is anything like this blurb, in which every sentence is a bold-faced lie, then it is an absurdist fantasy novel in which the authors hallucinate a power fantasy in which their useless online petition somehow saved the world. Secondly, as I’m sure my friends at Science Based Medicine would agree, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration shied away from honest debate - especially with their professional colleagues in public health. Hiding in the safe spaces of conservative podcasts, FOX News, and one-sided opinion editorials, the authors of the GBD refused to engage with criticisms of their many, many errors. Instead, they tossed out childish insults like “Covidians,” and continued to make even more absurd demands such as “maintaining herd immunity through constant reinfection.” This is not how actual scientists conduct themselves:

Anyone can run their mouth for free. In fact, toddlers do it on a daily basis! This is not a meaningful or worthwhile “experience” worth writing about. The experience of the millions of Americans disabled by a virus the GBD authors insisted was harmless to them is censored. The thousands of parents who had to bury a child thanks to the virus these armchair academics sold as better than a vaccine are censored from appearing in these pages. The GBD’s support from lecherous white nationalist billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey Tucker are also censored, just as David Zweig downplayed his association when speaking as a “Local Luminary” with his neighbors in the liberal enclave of Hudson-on-Hastings.

Literally every sentence of this upcoming book is guaranteed to be a lie in some form or another. It’s a mark of shame upon the authors and the universities which previously employed them as faculty. It should be met with nothing but ridicule and mockery as an embarrassing farce, as if COVID-19 itself employed a public relations firm.

Subscribe now

Final Verdict

If I ran around Central Park jabbing a .357 magnum revolver into people’s faces and demanding the deaths of strangers at random, the NYPD would show up and slap the cuffs on me. If I did so with fancy academic credentials by my name and the backing of conservative billionaires, seemingly liberal-minded opinion editorial writers in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets would fall over themselves to insist my demands were worth taking seriously. This latest attempt to rewrite history by Fartin’ Martin & Smilin’ Jay, who insist that their feelings overrule scientific fact, is both predictable and repulsive.

The original inspiration for the GBD, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers from the United Kingdom, demanded hundreds of thousands of Brits embrace COVID-19 and the grave in April 2020 as a necessary sacrifice for “the economy.” Conservative billionaires and corporate media astroturfed these credentialed academics to lend credibility to these demands and sabotage public health efforts. Doctors in overwhelmed ICUs weren’t crying out begging for privileged academics in comfortable university offices to write an online petition to get even more patients on ventilators. Vaccine scientists weren’t hard at work in a lab blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, gleefully celebrating all the profit opportunities a new SARS virus provided.

While Amazon may not have any quality control standards, it’s blatantly obvious that “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations” does not belong in “Pathology,” “Internal Medicine,” or anywhere near “Medicine.” It is a nakedly unscientific piece of propaganda in which the authors, on behalf of conservative billionaires, demand widespread death and devastation in a failed bid for “herd immunity.” After the proposed “three to six months” of infecting hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans resulted in nothing but a mountain of dead and disabled, the authors would smugly shrug their shoulders and pat themselves on the back, declaring victory.

The GBD was nothing more than a demand that everyone be as useless and impotent as themselves. Thankfully, we’re no longer trapped in the 14th century. Perhaps these federally funded laptop class academics should get with the times instead of wasting our tax dollars to produce elaborate fanfiction.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

When the mass infection of unvaccinated young people (who generally enjoy having sex) with a new SARS-CoV-2 virus was proposed by certain voices in 2020, none of them warned that COVID-19, a multi-system vascular disease, could have negative impacts on their sexual health. Another great example of why we have the Precautionary Principle of Public Health, many are now suffering serious reproductive health issues they were not warned about. This is yet another reason of why you should continue to protect yourself from COVID-19 with layered mitigations.

As a side note, it’s worth noting that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is a major conduit for COVID-19 disinformation and frequently worries about the fertility of teenage boys, doesn’t think the virus he championed is somehow responsible for this problem. How truly pathetic!

This resource will continue to be updated regularly.

• COVID Infects Penis, Testicles and Prostate – Causes Pain, Erectile Dysfunction, Reduced Sperm Count (SciTechDaily)

• The impact of COVID-19 on the male reproductive system (JBRA Assisted Reproduction)

• Structural and Hormonal Changes in Reproductive-Age Women Post-COVID-19 (Diagnostics)

Erectile Dysfunction

• Tip of the iceberg: erectile dysfunction and COVID-19 (International Journal of Impotence Research, Nature)

• “COVID-19 infection was associated with a 27% increased likelihood of subsequent ED” (International Journal of Impotence Research)

• Increased odds ratio for erectile dysfunction in COVID-19 patients (Journal of Endocrinol Investigations)

• “We found that the prevalence of ED was higher in the past history of COVID-19 cohort (55.9% vs. 44.1%)” (Journal of Clinical Medicine)

• “1 in 5 men surveyed had erectile dysfunction up to 2 years after COVID” (Nature Scientific Reports)

Long COVID

• Long COVID syndrome: psychological and sexual dysfunction among survivors of COVID-19 infection (Annals of Medicine & Surgery)

• “COVID-19 infection is associated with impaired sexual function in cisgender women…women with long COVID experienced incrementally more impaired sexual function” (Journal of Sexual Medicine)

• Female reproductive health impacts of Long COVID and associated illnesses including ME/CFS, POTS, and connective tissue disorders: a literature review (Frontiers Rehabilitation)

• SARS-COV-2 Persistence in Semen as a Window to Study Long COVID (Journal of Urology)

Ovaries & Menstruation

• “Case reports suggest that COVID-19 infection may be associated with long-term decline of ovarian health, including premature ovarian insufficiency (POI), a loss of normal ovary function before age 40.” (Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences)

• COVID-19 and persistent symptoms: implications for polycystic ovary syndrome and its management (Frontiers Endocrinology)

• “Women have reported menstrual changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection and variation in long COVID symptoms across the menstrual cycle.” (Nature Communications)

Semen & Sperm

• Semen proteomics reveals alterations in fertility-related proteins post-recovery from COVID-19 (Frontiers in Physiology)

• “SARS-CoV-2 infection primarily affects male fertility, leading to reductions in sperm quality, count, and motility.”

• Men experience a long-term drop in semen quality after COVID infection – even if the infection was mild (European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology)

• “Although severe acute syndrome coronavirus 2 was not present in the infected men’s semen, it was intracellularly present in the spermatozoa till 3 months after hospital discharge.” (Wiley Online Library)

• Semen proteomics reveals alterations in fertility-related proteins post-recovery from COVID-19 (Frontiers)

• COVID-19 infection was associated with poor sperm quality (Nature Scientific Reports)

Testicles

• Testicular pathological alterations associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection (Frontiers in Reproductive Health)

• “…testicular damage following COVID-19-induced orchitis” (International Journal of Reproductive BioMedicine)

• “SARS-CoV-2 infects [interstitial cells of the testes], activates its immune response and impairs steroidogenesis” (Sec. Molecular Viral Pathogenesis)

• “SARS-CoV-2 can affect the whole testicular function” (Andrology)

Subscribe now

While the relationship between COVID-19 and sexual health isn’t studied as heavily as it’s impacts on the brain and heart, it’s certainly worth being aware of. If you find guides like this supportive, please consider taking out a paid subscription or making a one-time donation in order to keep the Pandemic Accountability Index going!

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

From ivermectin to RFK Jr. and Marty Makary’s latest obsession with peptides, a core principle of MAHA is the freedom to exploit the public for profit by peddling useless and potentially dangerous junk. If you’re peddling cod liver oil to treat measles outbreaks, vaccines liberating children from the tyranny of a deadly and dangerous disease might put a dink in your profits. This is logical enough, but we need to go even deeper and darker.

The 1800s isn’t the intended destination on the road to “Make America Healthy Again.” It’s actually the 1300s. Today, we review:

• Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death, published in 1969

• John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, published in 2006

  ---

Setting the Stage

The science and medicine we take for granted was virtually non-existent in 1300s Europe. Astrology was the cornerstone of medieval medicine and med students learned human anatomy by watching pigs being dissected. While many of us learned about the Black Death in history class, little time is spent studying just how people conducted themselves. Much like many wealthy New Yorkers fled the city in the spring of 2020, wealthy Europeans also fled the urban epicenters of the plague.

Just a century before the Black Death, the world had just bared witness to a rather silly incident:

Eight centuries later, parents were told to shrug off infecting their children with a new SARS virus like it was a casual field trip to the heart of Al-Adil’s empire.

When it came to COVID-19, disinformation artists said young people were like soldiers in a war; that you had a civic duty to embrace a deadly & disabling new SARS virus. When it came to children, “we want them infected” was the position of the Trump Administration, thanks to one former official who now calls for mass executions of doctors and scientists on Substack. One might suggest that the real genesis of MAHA was out of anger that polite society rejected such obscene demands.

In the 1300s, there was simply no alternative to just making up nonsense; the creative imagination was all the medieval man had. This is all Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can possibly offer and constantly does so at the slightest provocation. “MAHA” wants to go back to the world where they can’t be contradicted.

Share

Seven Centuries of Broken Records

We can start with the most obvious temptation of pandemic disinformation artistry: Blaming the Jews. RFK Jr. is on camera claiming that COVID-19 was a Jewish-Chinese conspiracy. How administrators at Johns Hopkins, UCSF, and Stanford turned a blind eye to their faculty (Makary, Prasad, Bhattacharya respectively) embracing a vocal anti-Semite is indefensible. Especially when blaming Jews for pandemics is responsible to real-world violence:

So much of MAHA’s energy is spent howling like bloodthirsty jackals, constantly screeching out baseless accusations that don’t stand up to an ounce of scrutiny. Doctors, nurses, scientists, pharmacists, and public health officials have faced a torrent of unyielding abuse, threats, and even fatal violence for simply doing their jobs. The power fantasy of having command over those willing to take up violence on your behalf is tempting for many a sadistic reactionary.

The most commonly held view of the 1300s was that the Black Death was the divine wrath of God being visited upon Man for his sins. King Magnus the 2nd of Sweden wrote: “God for the sins of men has struck the world with this great punishment of sudden death.” What were these sins, you might ask? Perhaps it the foolishness of taking the God’s name in vain while slaughtering, pillaging, and raping across the “Holy Lands?” Oh, heavens no.

After all these years, we’ve finally uncovered the real origin of COVID-19. It was never about “lab leaks” or “wet markets.” Enthusiastic female sports fans are the root cause of global pandemics. Katie Nolan, you painted jezebel, get thee to a nunnery before you get us all killed!

Subscribe now

Selling Tickets to the Torment Prison

All jokes aside, monk Knighton’s blaming of the Black Death on women wearing men’s clothing to the joust isn’t all that removed from the victim-blaming attitudes of modern-day MAHA reactionaries. Old age, obesity, taking the vaccine, or even the foolishness of being born with a rare disorder - anti-vaccine quacks came up with all sorts of reasons to blame deaths on anything but viruses. What MAHA-adjacent wellness grifters are selling a subscription to not being one of the “vulnerable.”

This is quite convenient if you’re affiliated with a Presidential administration doing everything in its power to turbocharge pestilence. Demolishing the Environmental Protection Agency is practically incentivizing the industrial pollution that causes cancer and chronic illness. Going all in on the “artificial intelligence” sham is already causing serious illness in American communities. If we put boots on the ground in Iran, a lot them coming back with PTSD and all sorts of other ailments, same as Iraq and Vietnam. It’s quite convenient for Trump to have MAHA show up and declare the public’s suffering is their own darn fault.

RFK Jr. and his fellow MAHA zealots want to shut out the distractions of actual science and modern medicine, trapping the minds of the American public in the same theatre of absurdity that the medieval European of the 1300s found themselves condemned to. How dare anyone contradict the completely thoughtless, ridiculous garbage that freely spills out of the mouth of the Secretary of Health and Human Services every time his piehole slides open. To be the warden of this horrific prison of hopelessness is a tempting prospect:

Gee whiz, that sure doesn’t sound like anything relevant to what’s happening now in the 2020s, does it?

Closing Thoughts

When you’re reaching back through seven hundred years of civilization, there are obvious limitations. A certain degree of interpretation is required. Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death from 1969 acknowledges as such, and a significant chunk of the book is working through the records of English priests and friars, making for some dry reading. John Kelly’s The Great Mortality from 2005 is a more narrativized account, which is certainly more digestible, and I say this with no disrespect to Kelly’s writing, but Great Mortality leaves you wondering just how much is interpretation.

There’s been so much rewriting of history about the COVID-19 pandemic, an event we all have experienced in different ways. Perhaps I’m overly apprehensive about misreading the history of a past that occurred over 700 rotations of the Earth around the sun prior. Publishing is already being flooded with attempts to rewrite the history of the COVID-19 pandemic, and should humanity survive another seven centuries, will future historians know that those books are revisionist garbage?

The sad truth is that the government’s failed response to COVID-19 was to weaponize pestilence as a tool of pestilence over working Americans - to simply accept worsening material conditions, constant illness & disability, and declining quality-of-life & lifespan. Through “MAHA’s” billionaire-backed war against vaccines and public health, soon Americans will find themselves trapped in a prison in which there is no escape from the erratic ramblings of thoughtless cranks who demand that we are all as ignorant and impotent as the serfs of the 1300s.

It is nothing more than a form of societal cyanide.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

If there’s one issue that unites almost all Americans, it’s their collective disgust with the revolving door between corporate America and government agencies.

With April being the month Vinay Prasad returns to the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine (UCSF), after being kicked out of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) twice in less than a year in humiliating fashion, there are some serious questions left unanswered. Oh, by the way, you should sign this petition! Prasad’s ousting is linked to a rather volatile rejection of a treatment for Huntington’s Disease, a rare yet fatal neurodegenerative condition. Upon returning to UCSF, Prasad will also go back to overseeing a vanity lab which, on its website, featured a giant logo showing their funding from Arnold Ventures.

Arnold Ventures is helmed by John Arnold, a libertarian billionaire who got his start at a little-known company called... Enron.

What’s an Enron?

If you’re under the age of 35, you likely have no memory of the Enron scandal of 2001, the precursor for the 2008 financial crisis that wrecked the global economy - of which America has never truly recovered from. Enron was a major energy company that discovered a fascinating new way to generate record profits: defraud investors by producing completely fraudulent financial records (”creative accounting”) in order to hide billions of debt from their many failures. Kind of like what’s happening now with the “artificial intelligence” bubble.

This did not end well, with Enron’s stock plummeting from $90 a share to less than a dollar in just a few years, even with their cozy relationship with the Bush Administration. Enron ended up filing for bankruptcy, and criminal charges were filed. John Arnold managed to escape prosecution, making out like a bandit with an $8 million golden parachute in the last days of the company: the largest bonus in the company’s history. He would later be deposed by Antara Resources for market manipulation, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment to again escape prosecution.

Soon enough, John Arnold would found Arnold Ventures and become the country’s youngest billionaire. Arnold Ventures has its fingers in a lot of pots, but Arnold himself has some rather... “interesting” views, as all libertarian crackpots do. Most notably, he thinks we need drone surveillance over every major city, federal nature preserves should be sold off to private interests, and that we should eradicate public education & teachers’ unions - a view publicly shared by UCSF’s Vinay Prasad:

John is not someone who has the best interests of the American people at heart.

Share

Venture Capital Funded Disinformation

As we established before, UCSF’s Vinay Prasad has a self-titled “lab” bankrolled by Arnold Ventures. Between 2017-2023, Prasad has received about four million dollars in grants from them, some of which flowed into the hands of fellow COVID disinformation artist Tracy Beth Hoeg, now head of the Center of Drug Evaluation & Research at the FDA. What you may not know is that Arnold’s also bankrolled FDA Commissioner Marty Makary with nearly $700k in grants.

Arnold Ventures has also lined the pockets of John Ioannidis, who started a pathetic conspiracy theory blaming doctors for COVID-19 deaths after his prediction that SARS-CoV-2 would only kill 40,000 Americans was immediately disproven by a mountain of corpses. Arnold even bankrolled the pro-SARS propaganda of Brown University’s Emily Oster, who made a pretty penny misleading parents into believing COVID-19 was harmless to children. Perhaps university administrators need to rethink their policies about having their faculty produce unscientific propaganda on behalf of a billionaire’s political agenda.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that wealthy libertarians are against the very concept of public health. It should be a scandal that supposed journalism outlets completely failed to disclose the financial ties to these billionaires when quoting “experts” such as Vinay Prasad & Emily Oster, who frequently made basic errors. For their ideological commitment to spewing an endless stream of elaborate fictions and inflammatory accusations about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines, three Arnold-owned quacks (Makary, Prasad, Hoeg) were rewarded with senior roles in the Food & Drug Administration. Katherine Szarama, Director of Healthcare at Arnold Ventures, would later be appointed CBER Deputy Director in October 2025. Here is all you need to know about Szarama, from the Wall Street Journal:

“Ms. Szarama has supported the requirement of randomized superiority trials for emerging therapies such as CAR-T, even when patients have exhausted multiple prior treatments. In rare diseases and advanced cancer, such demands can be impractical, ethically dubious and less informative than carefully analyzed real world evidence.”

This “revolving door” has taken a dark and twisted turn for the worse.

Subscribe now

John Arnold’s FDA vs. uniQure’s AMT-13

Huntington’s Disease is a rare yet devastating genetic neurodegenerative disorder with a 100% fatality rate. The biotech firm uniQure was developing a gene therapy treatment called AMT-130, which from early trials published September 24, 2025, showed a promising result of slowing the progression of the disease by 75%; a remarkable development. Prior to Trump taking office, uniQure met with the FDA in November 2024 and was given the green light to move forward.

Little did uniQure know, they’d soon be dealing with Vinay “RCT or STFU” Prasad. Exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic, Prasad chose to become an obnoxious social media troll who lost all respect amongst his colleagues in medicine. Prasad believes we should all simply shrug off pediatric disease deaths “as a matter of course,” and that we’ll just forget these dead kids:

Vinay Prasad is a zealot of “Evidence Based Medicine” (EBM), a hierarchy framework developed in the 1980s to evaluate the quality of evidence when making medical decisions, which often involve a great deal of ethical and technical complications. At the top of the EBM pyramid are “systematic reviews” and “meta-analyses,” followed by randomized control trials (RCTs). While EBM sounds reasonable enough on paper, it’s rather easy to take it too far - as we’ve seen with numerous academics on social media, it takes no effort to jump on Twitter to demand absurd RCTs.

As Dr. Jonathan Howard noted in his recent article for Science Based Medicine, Prasad spent years demanding RCTs on social media while failing to design, perform, or even participate in any RCTs. (Howard & myself are both COVID-19 vaccine RCT veterans. You may thank us for our service, and we want the 10% discount.) At the Food & Drug Administration, Prasad also facilitated zero RCTs. This is because EBM Zealotry is opposed to doing actual work; tearing down others for clout is much easier.

On March 5th, after reportedly attacking AMT-130 as “snake oil” and revealing trade secrets on a press call, Vinay Prasad then demanded that uniQure perform a double-blind randomized control trial for their treatment of a disease which has, in case you forgot, a 100% fatality rate. Who in the hell would volunteer their child for a trial in which they might wind up in the control group? Nobody was happy, and Prasad had finally drawn the last straw: His second departure was announced the very next day.

Share

So What Really Happened Here?

At this point, we’re left with informed speculation. What we do know is that a willingness to openly participate in financial crimes and naked corruption is essentially a requirement to work in the Trump Administration. So just what is the nature of the relationship Arnold Ventures has with their COVID disinfo artists?

On July 8th, 2025, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary (with Prasad in tow, no doubt) met with Arnold to discuss “Items of Mutual Interest.” uniQure would publish the positive results of AMT-130 to treat Huntington’s Disease just months later. On March 3rd 2026, just days before Prasad’s smears of uniQure and his second ousting, Makary & Prasad attended a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland with Arnold to discuss... “Collaboration Opportunities.”

The minutes of these meetings have not been disclosed to the public. Makary and Prasad sure do love their closed door meetings with private interests, where they can freely whine about “misleading media narratives.” You know, the sort of above-board conduct that non-corrupt civil servants regularly engage in.

On March 6th, the same day Prasad’s second ousting was announced, Republican Representative Jake Auchincloss calls Prasad’s misconduct “a prohibited act under the FDCA & a criminal violation under the Trade Secrets Act.” Gee whiz, isn’t the timing of all this quite suspicious? With just a hint of ass-covering on top?

Well class, we’ve already established that John Arnold is a morally depraved financial crook. The real PAI-heads will remember that Vinay Prasad previously lent his credentials to produce anti-vaccine propaganda for RFK Jr.’s “Children’s Health Defense” and the “Brownstone Institute,” helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, Jeffrey Tucker. A fellow libertarian billionaire like Arnold, Tucker wants to take your teenage daughter out of public school and give her a pack of Virginia Slims to go with her new Hooters uniform.

To understand John Arnold’s play in all of this, remember that Enron is the precursor to the 2008 financial crisis. Short selling is essentially a form of gambling, betting that a company will fail. even made a whole movie about it. Now what if you had the influence to ensure that a certain company might fail & that their stock price would crash almost overnight? Perhaps through newly appointed government officials you have generously lined the wallets of and maintain a relationship with?

The stock ticker for uniQure speaks for itself.

Subscribe now

A Deadly Cocktail of Corruption and Cowardice

This is speculation, not a confirmation of guilt. However, it certainly warrants a serious investigation. It should already be a national scandal that the leadership of the federal agency entrusted with ensuring your children’s food and medicine are safe are all in the pocket of a single billionaire. What many Americans may not be aware of, however, is that our favorite ex-Enron crook has also been developing an “abundance” of influence over the opposition party:

After the humiliation of the 2024 election, liberal pundits Ezra “MAHA is a Bad Answer to a Good Question” Klein and Derek “School Closures Were a Failed Policy” Thompson wrote a silly little fantasy titled Abundance. They foolishly claim that climate collapse can be magically handwaved away with mass desalination, vertical farming, and “sustainable jet fuel.” They claim the genAI scam “is built on the collective knowledge of humanity” (instead of theft) and thus, “its profits are shared.”

These are not smart people.

Abundance also features a chapter on COVID-19 and the National Institutes of Health! They argue that masks & other NPIs don’t work, the NIH should be run like a business and cites Jay Bhattacharya as their “expert.” This is the now the basis for a major billionaire-backed lobbying effort to dictate the Democrats’ policy platform going forward.

Many respectable doctors and scientists are rallying behind the banners of pop-up activist groups such as “Stand Up for Science” and “Defend Public Health,” trying to rally the public to come out & support Democrat candidates. One has to ask: just what is their plan for when it comes time to write the party platform, and they’re quietly hushed out of the room so anti-vaccine crooks like John Arnold and their pet pundits like Ezra Klein can dictate Democrat policy? These billionaire creeps like what RFK Jr. and his cronies are doing to federal public health agencies. This is a conflict that cannot be handwaved away; not when the nation is besieged by a legislative war of hundreds of bills on state & local levels to eradicate public health.

MAGA-billionaire backed disinfo peddler Emily Oster is still widely respected in liberal circles. Liberal influencers such as Pete Buttigieg, Scott Galloway, & Ashish Jha are on the record saying that schools should have been fully in-person in 2020. This would have achieved absolutely nothing except killing & disabling many more teachers, parents, and kids. Billionaires like Arnold would just demand even more.

With mentalities like these and the influence of billionaires like John Arnold, we run the risk of public health repeating one of the greatest mistakes of 2009: The cowardice of the Obama Administration to reverse the damage and punish the crimes of Wall Street, and normalization of corruption: a full surrender to reactionary billionaires and their obscene propaganda in exchange for…nothing. This time, it’s not just millions of Americans losing their homes. It’s more children dying of vaccine-preventable causes. It’s a rising tide of pestilence making us all sicker.

This fight won’t be won by simply telling people to blindly vote Democrat and casually shrugging in utter humiliation after the anti-vaccine friendly billionaires tell activist doctors & scientists to go kick rocks. Cowardice is complacency. Complacency is an endorsement. Shying away from taking on the “Abundance” agenda is letting corrupt billionaires like John Arnold profit from playing games with the public’s health.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Over at the Counter Disinformation Project, Karam Bales assembled and mapped out an incredible timeline of how a series of well-funded yet completely fraudulent astroturf organizations that did not exist prior to 2020 completely dominated the “debate” around the COVID-19 pandemic:

Counter Disinformation Project

How the Covid Disinformation Ecosystem was established

When covid first emerged into our consciousness at the start of 2020 information was limited, guess work was rife but educated guesswork was the best we had. Then the data started coming in, small scale with many factors and variables to consider. Calculating fatality rate, incubation time, infectiousness, hospitalisation rate, proportion of asymptomati…

Read more

3 months ago · 116 likes · 24 comments · Counter Disinformation Project

This section from April 2020 is worth highlighting:

“Toby Young announced the founding of Lockdown Sceptics (now Daily Sceptic) at the start of the UK lockdown having argued that letting up to 250,000 vulnerable people die from covid was a price worth paying to protect the economy. Lockdown Sceptics became a media hub for alternative experts and was thanked by AIER in their defence of the Great Barrington Declaration.”

What CDP leaves out, and what should enrage every American, is that Toby Young is a depraved crank with no medical or scientific credentials. His Twitter account is followed by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and other leaders of our federal public health agencies. What’s notable about this is that Toby the crackpot loves to post one catchphrase, over and over, year after year:

The singular most effective public health intervention of all of human history, and Young is claiming it’s merely an “era” that is “over?” This is the sort of depravity that is holding influence over taxpayer funded civil servants. Instead of condemning such obvious quackery and all those who chose to associate with it, our universities and media chose to legitimize such an obvious coup of the public sphere in a time of crisis. This is indefensible, and many lost their lives and their health as a result of this overwhelming barrage of disinformation.

If you asked the average person off the street who should direct the response to an infectious disease pandemic, they would likely say doctors who actually treat patients and scientists with relevant experience should hold the greatest influence. This clearly did not happen. Instead, well-funded disinformation campaigns in many forms overwhelmed the public with elaborate fables, weaponizing social media to spread falsehoods like a highly contagious virus. All the while, the ever-growing mountain of research showing the harms of COVID-19 across the body has been effectively shut out of the national conversation.

Shouldn’t this be considered a form of censorship?

A Modern Definition of Censorship

The traditionally held definition of censorship is when The State suppresses or silences speech it doesn’t like. This is considered a no-go in a civic democracy, and a great deal of classical fiction such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 has correctly demonized such behavior. The term “censorship” is highly emotionally charged and disproving such an accusation can prove difficult.

The problem we now face is that we live in a wildly different media environment from the days of Orwell and Bradbury. Economic disparity, social media, and unchecked corporate power have totally upended the discourse environment. The digital apocalypse of “junk data” that Hideo Kojima warned about in 2001 has been realized. It’s now much harder to find reliably factual information than ever, and this is by design as a form of political control.

If I can control what you believe, totally disconnected from tangible reality, then I wield great power over you. I can radicalize you into violence based upon complete falsehoods wrapped in emotionally manipulative language. The mind becomes trapped in a prison of shadows and spectacle. When you look at the moral depravity of the corporate executives who dominate our economy, why wouldn’t they seek out & abuse this sort of power?

One might be inclined to ask: Why do this?

Subscribe now

The Motivation for Contamination

Let us think back to 2020 for a moment. We saw massive government interventions on behalf of everyday working Americans including financial aid, which cut child poverty in half, and people taking measures to protect the health of one another - which were actually quite effective! This meant that the irrational whims of tech billionaires were not the center of the universe or the first priority of elected officials, and that had to come to an end.

Whether it was Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya for conservative audiences, or Brown’s Emily Oster for liberal audiences, there was an overwhelming flood of billionaire backed disinformation to downplay the threat of COVID-19. Now tens of millions are disabled (even going by the HHS’ lowball rate of 7%) and Long COVID has become the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma. What the public is being taught is that they should consider their health & their lives disposable; that they should turn a blind eye to the suffering of their community.

Purely isolated individuals, free from any sort of community so that they may be exploited for the profiteering of their economic betters. Widespread infectious disease outbreaks are a disciplinary measure to fortify political control, and enabling them with a flood of disinformation to legitimize absurd falsehoods aligns perfectly with this larger agenda. Unfortunately, too many think there is some sort of “common ground” to be found with these petty tyrants.

Share

When Billionaire-Backed Censors Play the Victim

One of the common calling cards of COVID disinformation artists is that they are the victims of a grand conspiracy of censorship. Over at Dr. Jonathan Howard’s Youtube channel, you will find countless examples of Jay Bhattacharya falsely claiming that he is a victim of censorship. From Twitter to Youtube to FOX News, if you were looking for reliable information about COVID-19 and what to do to protect the health of you and your loved ones, you were much more likely to see Podcast Jay’s smug grin rambling nonsense. Podcast Jay even went so far to take this claim of censorship to the Supreme Court.

This was a total lie, as Mike Masnick reports for Techdirt (emphasis mine):

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the original individual plaintiffs who claimed he was censored by the Biden administration, had to drop out of the case because he was confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health — the agency he claimed (without evidence) had “censored him” even though his lawyers somehow forgot to add NIH as a defendant … The supposed victims of government censorship are now running the very agencies they accused of censoring them. And, again, I have to reinforce, that the Supreme Court called out the lack of actual “censorship” for either of these guys.

…

But the real tell is what’s happening right now, while MAGA is celebrating: the Trump admin is doing far worse than anything Biden was even accused of. Yes, while the Trump administration and its gullible friends are busy patting themselves on the back for supposedly defending free speech from the horrors of the Biden administration sharing information with social media companies, it is engaged in conduct that is far, far worse than anything alleged in Missouri v. Biden.

Jay & his ilk refused to accept the court’s ruling and continued to double down on his gimmick. This had nothing to do with censorship. It was all about advertising their message: we have the real science that the government doesn’t want you to know! We’re heroic crusaders for truth, science, and American freedom! Whatever you do, don’t look behind the curtain and notice the cape-wearing neo-Confederate champion for teen smoking and child labor!

The constant stream of podcasts from the NIH Director is, in itself, a form of censorship by drowning out those pointing out Jay Bhattacharya’s constant errors and fictions. Here is a civil servant paid by the American taxpayer who refuses to engage with criticisms from the public he is supposed to be working on behalf of. Claiming that he is merely “getting the ideology out of science,” Podcast Jay is actually involved in the ideological project of ending federally funded science - that only corporate executives should be dictating what research & innovation happens in America.

In other words, private censorship of actual science is the goal.

How Legitimate Science About COVID-19 Was Censored

Credible scientific, and especially medical research, takes a great deal of time to realize. The precautionary principle of public health emerged to prevent needless harms caused by new and emerging threats. Many in 2020 sought to obscure this reality by insisting we already knew all there was to know about a new SARS virus and the disease it caused. Sadly, too many saw fit to legitimize their obscene antics.

As Counter Disinformation Project has well documented, wealthy billionaires like Peter Thiel exploited the legitimacy of respected universities such as Oxford, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, etc. by propping up credentialed academics who were more than happy to offer up opinions about matters of life and death way out of their wheelhouse. These utterly fraudulent propaganda outlets that never existed prior to 2020 spewed all sorts of nonsense across social media and mainstream news outlets. Sadly, experienced journalists let themselves be hoodwinked by such blatant deceptions, and failed in their obligations to the public.

Narratives rooted in fantasy overwhelmed hard scientific fact. Death was the only negative outcome that mattered, and somehow we could magically identify “the vulnerable,” who were essentially told to fend for themselves. The public’s conception of the virus, and what it is capable of, became a complete distortion of reality. The censorship of real science had won out, and the only result is very real, tangible harm.

Share Pandemic Accountability Index

So Now What?

It should be obvious at this point that private interests, including morally depraved tech billionaires, sabotaged that COVID-19 pandemic response by flooding the public discourse with highly unscientific propaganda. This caused a great deal of physical harm to the public, and “the economy” these human sacrifices were supposed to serve has never recovered. Legitimate science that should have informed COVID-19 policy was shut out of the room for embarrassing nonsense.

Our universities, journalism outlets, and other essential institutions need to re-establish professional standards, and that means cranks like Emily Oster getting kicked to the curb. You simply cannot “compromise” in “good faith” with credentialed ventriloquists who are peddling fictions on behalf of wealthy interests. They are bludgeoning the public with an unyielding torrent of unscientific nonsense and fictional narratives as a form of political control - and we should all be able to come together and oppose them on behalf of science, democracy, and human decency.

Do you really think the same corporate executives who are in the middle of triggering a new financial crisis are really the people who should be dictating the government’s response to a national disaster? This is a long & bloody fight we need to be having now, while this country is being driven off the edge of a cliff and experiencing an anti-intellectual brain drain. The whimpering cowards who keep legitimizing the lies of Jay Bhattacharya and the rest of the Pro-SARS Brigade aren’t going to save us.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

With the debut of the Department of Health and Human Services’ new “Long COVID” website (a total sham, as covered here) it’s time to review what doctors and scientists have actually learned about this condition. What follows is an organized compilation of peer-reviewed medical research to better inform medical professionals, patients, and others on how COVID-19 can cause serious long-term health issues across the body, in what is known as Post Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), Post COVID-19 Condition, or most commonly referred to as Long COVID.

Subscribe now

While federal public health leaders and corporate media outlets continue to deny or downplay the condition, millions of Americans are still suffering today. The Pandemic Accountability Index is the freely available public resource that stays on top of these matters and desperately needs your support to keep going. Please consider taking out a paid subscription or making a one-time donation via Paypal to support an independent journalism outlet. Thank you for your support.

Share

Here is what we know about Long COVID:

• Overview and Pathophysiology of Long COVID (Elisa Perego)

• Long COVID clinical evaluation, research and impact on society: a global expert consensus (Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials)

• Long COVID Is Not a Functional Neurologic Disorder (Journal of Personalized Medicine)

• “Long COVID is a common and disabling condition” (International Journal of Infectious Diseases)

• The Current and Future Burden of Long COVID in the United States (IDSA Journal of Infectious Diseases)

Brain

• Novel MRI reveals brain changes in long-COVID patients (Radiological Society of North America)

• Blood–brain barrier disruption and sustained systemic inflammation in individuals with long COVID-associated cognitive impairment (Nature Neuroscience)

• Blood Markers Show Neural Consequences of LongCOVID-19 (Cells, MDPI)

• “Patients with post COVID-19 condition exhibited significant deficits of attention, executive functions, phonemic and semantic fluency, verbal learning and episodic and visuospatial memory” (Brain Communications)

• “…pronounced cognitive slowing in people with [Long COVID]” (eClinicalMedicine)

• Long-COVID cognitive impairments and reproductive hormone deficits in men may stem from GnRH neuronal death (eBioMedicine)

• Psychological factors associated with Long COVID: a systematic review and meta-analysis (eClinicalMedicine)

• Structural MRI correlates of cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Long COVID: a pilot study (Frontiers Psychiatry)

• Neurologic Manifestations of Long COVID Disproportionately Affect Young and Middle-Age Adults (Annals of Neurology)

• A systematic analysis of neurologic manifestations of Long COVID in Nigeria (Journal of NeuroVirology)

• “Abnormal intrinsic electrophysiological brain activity, such as slowing of EEG, reduced alpha wave, and epileptiform are characteristic findings in COVID-19 patients” (Alzheimer’s & Dementia)

• Executive function deficit in patients with long COVID syndrome (Heliyon)

• Distinct Transcriptomic Biomarkers and Pathways Associated with Cardiovascular and Neurovascular Dysregulation in Long COVID-19 Brain Fog (bioRxiv)

• SARS-CoV-2 damages cardiomyocyte mitochondria and implicates long COVID-associated cardiovascular manifestations (Journal of Advanced Research)

• Neuroimmune pathophysiology of long COVID (Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences)

• Persistent neurocognitive deficits in long COVID: Evidence of structural changes and network abnormalities following mild infection (Cortex)

• Systemic increase of AMPA receptors associated with cognitive impairment of long COVID (Brain Communications)

• Choroid plexus alterations in long COVID and their associations with Alzheimer’s disease risks (Alzheimer’s & Dementia)

• “Individuals with long COVID may experience a deterioration in their quality of life due to mental health issues, even if they have recovered from the initial COVID-19 infection for over 24 months.” (Discover Mental Health)

• “Long COVID is a major health concern because many patients develop chronic neuropsychiatric symptoms…MMP-9 can disrupt neuronal connectivity and be elevated in patients with long COVID.” (Translational Neuroscience)

• Long COVID “was associated with reduced cognitive processing speed compared to fully recovered controls with those infected early in the pandemic having greater deficits.” (Infectious Diseases)

• Neuropsychiatric symptoms cluster as primary drivers of Long COVID complexity (Sec. Neurorehabilitation)

• Long COVID: lung pathophysiology and its relationship with cognitive dysfunction (Nature Scientific Reports)

Children

• Characterizing Long COVID in Children and Adolescents (JAMA Network)

• Long COVID is here to stay—even in children (The Lancet Infectious Diseases)

• The double invisibility of Long Covid in children (Social Science & Medicine)

• Post acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 in Children (American Academy of Pediatrics)

• Millions of US Children Experience Range of Long COVID Effects (JAMA)

• “Greater than one-fifth of NZ children reported persisting symptoms after Covid-19 infection. Post-Covid-19 symptoms impacted the quality of children’s day-to-day lives.” (Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health)

• “Over 80% of children with [Long COVID] reported impaired [quality of life]” (Communications Medicine)

• Autonomic cardiac function in children and adolescents with long COVID: a case-controlled study (European Journal of Pediatrics)

• “7.2% of [children and young people] consistently fulfil the [Long COVID] definition at 3-, 6-, 12- and 24-months.” (Nature Communications Medicine)

• Long COVID in pediatrics—epidemiology, diagnosis, and management (European Journal of Pediatrics)

• “Persistent symptoms of [pediatric] long COVID were reported in 85.8% of patients at 3 months…most common long-term symptoms included fatigue (52.0%), reduced physical activity (44.1%), and headache (35.3%).” (Sec. Pediatric Infectious Diseases)

• Children and young people with long COVID: overlooked and neglected (Child & Adolescent Health, The Lancet)

• “Imaging shows significant lung injury in kids with long COVID” (RSNA Radiology)

• Long COVID syndrome in children: neutrophilic granulocyte dysfunction and its correlation with disease severity (Nature Pediatric Research)

• “a notable subset of children and adolescents experience prolonged and diverse symptoms following COVID-19 infection” (American Journal of Medicine Open)

• A 24-month National Cohort Study examining long-term effects of COVID-19 in children and young people (Nature Communications Medicine)

• Distinct pro-inflammatory/pro-angiogenetic signatures distinguish children with Long COVID (Nature Pediatric Research)

• “Children and adolescents face a significantly higher risk of various PASC outcomes after reinfection with SARS-CoV-2.” (The Lancet Infectious Diseases)

• “…double the prevalence of functional limitations in the learning, cognition, relationships, accepting change, and psychosocial domains among children who had experienced long COVID” (CDC)

• “Pediatric long COVID is marked by prolonged, multisystem symptoms.” (Frontiers in Pediatrics)

Disability

• Long COVID and new onset disability nearly two years after initial infection (American Journal of Preventive Medicine)

• Long COVID and Chronic Conditions in the US Workforce: Prevalence, Productivity Loss, and Disability (Occupational and Environmental Medicine)

Heart & Cardiovascular Health

• “Patients with long-COVID had lower upright high frequency heart rate variability (p = 0.04) and low frequency blood pressure variability” (Springer Nature)

• Persistent clotting protein pathology in Long COVID/Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) is accompanied by increased levels of antiplasmin (Cardivascular Diabetology)

• Differential Cardiopulmonary Hemodynamic Phenotypes in PASC Related Exercise Intolerance (ERJ Open Research)

• “Post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS) has been linked to microvascular endothelial dysfunction as a potential underlying pathomechanism and can manifest even following a mild course of the initial infection.” (American Journal of Medicine)

• SARS-CoV-2 damages cardiomyocyte mitochondria and implicates long COVID-associated cardiovascular manifestations (Journal of Advanced Research)

Immune System

• Immunological profiling in long COVID: overall low grade inflammation and T-lymphocyte senescence and increased monocyte activation correlating with increasing fatigue severity (Front Immunology, PubMed)

• Enough already: T cell inflammation and SARS-CoV-2 virus persist in Long Covid (Science Immunology)

• Long COVID involves activation of proinflammatory and immune exhaustion pathways (Nature Immunology)

• Distinguishing features of long COVID identified through immune profiling (Nature)

• Immunological and non-immunological features specific to Long-COVID: multiple overlapping aetiologies and potential biomarkers (medRxiv)

Impact on Healthcare Workers

• Long covid: the doctors’ lives destroyed by an illness they caught while doing their jobs (British Medical Journal)

• “PASC symptoms persisted up to four years after aSCV2 infection in a substantial proportion of HCWs” (Infection)

• “…prevalence of long COVID among HCWs who had SARS-CoV-2 infection was 40%” (BMJ Public Health)

• In a survey of 350 Iranian healthcare workers, “results showed that 75.7% of HCWs experienced symptoms of long COVID-19.” (BMC Nursing)

• “Long-COVID should be recognized/compensated as an occupational disease.” (BMJ Occupational & Environmental Medicine)

• Long-term symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection in a cohort of hospital employees: duration and predictive factors (BMC Infectious Diseases)

• “…a third of HCWs reported prolonged COVID-19 symptoms consistent with [Post-COVID Syndrome]” (BMJ Occupational & Environmental Medicine)

Kidneys, Liver, & the Gut

• Kidney Outcomes in Long COVID (American Society of Nephrology)

• Clinical features and inflammatory signatures of patients with persistent gastrointestinal long COVID two years after severe SARS-CoV-2 infection (Nature Scientific Reports)

• Elevated Liver Damage Biomarkers in Long COVID: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (medRxiv)

• Oral and Gut Microbiota Relate to Symptom Subphenotypes in Long COVID, Independent of Viral Persistence. (iScience)

• “People with long-term COVID experienced substantial decline in eGFR (kidney function) within one year from the infection date” (Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Oxford Academic)

ME/CFS & PEM

• “The prevalence of ME/CFS in the long COVID patients was 8.4% (62 of 739 cases; female: 51.6%) and factors related to ME/CFS were severe illness, smoking and alcohol drinking habits, and fewer vaccinations.” (PLOS ONE)

• “ME/CFS is a diagnosable sequela that develops at an increased rate following SARS-CoV-2 infection.” (Journal of General Internal Medicine)

• Incidence and Prevalence of Post-COVID-19 Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (Journal of General Internal Medicine)

• Integrated immune, hormonal, and transcriptomic profiling reveals sex-specific dysregulation in long COVID patients with ME/CFS (Cell Reports Medicine)

• Oxidative stress is a shared characteristic of ME/CFS and Long COVID (Immunology and Inflammation)

• Skeletal muscle adaptations and post-exertional malaise in long COVID (Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism)

• Muscle abnormalities worsen after post-exertional malaise in long COVID (Nature Communications)

Overall Mortality

• Long covid: Damage to multiple organs presents in young, low risk patients (BMJ)

• Long COVID Has Caused Thousands of US Deaths: New CDC Data (Medscape)

• “Post-COVID conditions contributed to a substantial number of deaths in Italy.” (Frontiers)

Prevalence of Long COVID

• “The global pooled long COVID prevalence was 36%” (Open Forum Infectious Diseases)

• “…prevalence of post-COVID symptoms is 30% two-years after COVID-19…Fatigue, cognitive disorders, and pain…prevalence of anxiety, depression and sleep problems…” (Journal of Infection)

• “Between 2021 and 2023, 23% of infected subjects developed long-COVID symptoms.” (BMC Medicine)

• “Of 1359 COVID-19 survivors who completed 2-year and 3-year follow-up, 728 (54%) had at least one sequelae symptom at 3 years after symptom onset” (Respiratory Medicine, The Lancet)

• “…females had a significantly higher risk of long COVID compared with males” (JAMA Network Open)

• [In Africa] “The incidence of any long COVID symptomatology was 48.6% (95% CI 37.4–59.8) as psychiatric conditions were the most frequent, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder reaching a cumulative incidence of 25%” (Scientific Reports, Nature)

• Over 41% of COVID patients in Palestine report symptoms over next 3 months (Nature Scientific Reports)

• “About 3.5 million Canadian adults reported experiencing long-term symptoms following a COVID-19 infection; 2.1 million reported they were still experiencing those symptoms as of June 2023.” (Statistics Canada)

• “Long coronavirus disease (COVID), which affects an estimated 44.69–48.04 million people in the United States” (Journal of Infectious Diseases)

• “[In the United States] 14 percent reported suffering long COVID at some point.” (PLOS One)

• “A total of 475 (prevalence = 18.9%) [Long COVID] patients were identified.” (The Lancet Regional Health Americas)

• Nearly 25% of Iowans with COVID had “long-haul” symptoms (Iowa Department of Health & Human Services)

• “By 2023, 1 in 7 adults in New York City had experienced long-term health effects of COVID-19, half of whom reported current activity limitations.” (medRxiv)

• “Long COVID affects 8% of those with COVID-19, is more common in women” (European Society of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases)

• “Of the 312 [cancer] patients, 188 (60%) reported long COVID-19 symptoms with a median duration of 7 months and up to 14 months after COVID-19 diagnosis.” (eLife Sciences)

• Adults aged 25-39 had the highest rates of long COVID symptoms, followed by adults aged 40-54 (CDC)

• “Long COVID (LC) remains common, even after mild acute infection with recent variants and it is likely LC will continue to cause substantial long-term ill health” (Nature Immunology)

• “Nearly one in seven adults (~35 million) and working-aged adults (~30 million) reported having a history of long COVID by late 2022 and late 2023” Nature Communications Medicine)

• “Nearly 29% of post-acute COVID-19 patients developed long COVID-19” (BMC Infectious Diseases)

Quality of Life & Economic Impacts

• “Individuals with long COVID may experience a deterioration in their quality of life due to mental health issues, even if they have recovered from the initial COVID-19 infection for over 24 months.” (Discover Mental Health)

• “People with long COVID earned an average of 25% less than before they had the condition” (National Institute for Health and Care Research)

• The Economic Cost of Long COVID: An Update (Harvard University)

• The Economic Impact of Long Covid on American Families (Medriva)

• “average annual burden of $1 trillion globally and $9000 per patient in the USA” (NPJ Primary Care Respiratory Medicine)

• Long COVID, Long Consequences: Financial, Employment and Social Security Impacts in Scotland (The Poverty Alliance)

• Work Productivity Loss in People Living with Long COVID Symptoms over 2 years from Infection (Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine)

• Long COVID, Long Consequences: Financial, Employment and Social Security Impacts in Scotland (The Poverty Alliance)

• Impacts of Long COVID on workers: A longitudinal study of employment exit, work hours and mental health in the UK (PLOS One)

• Long COVID-19 is costing Americans money (University of Georgia)

• Psychosocial Aspects of the Lived Experience of Long COVID (Health Expectations)

• Dealing with the fallout: Post-COVID Condition and its continued impact on individuals and society (Government of Canada)

Reinfection

• “…COVID reinfections are associated with greater chances of reporting Long COVID, severe fatigue, symptoms in multiple body systems and limitation in physical function” (ResearchSquare)

• “…risk of [Long COVID] was significantly higher among individuals with multiple COVID-19 episodes” (The Lancet Regional Health Americas)

• “Reinfection was associated with milder symptoms but led to a higher incidence and severity of long COVID” (The Lancet Regional Health)

• “COVID-19 reinfection resulted in a roughly 35% increase in the incidence of long COVID” (medRxiv)

• Every COVID Infection Increases Your Risk of Long COVID (Uni. of Nebraska)

Recovery

• The Rehabilitation and Management of Long COVID: A Handbook for Clinical Practice (Book edited by Danielle Hitch & Joanne Wrench

• “More than 50% of long COVID patients failed to improve using any outcome measure.” (International Journal of Infectious Diseases)

• Pulmonary rehabilitation in follow-up and inpatient rehabilitation for Long COVID: twelve months of follow-up (European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine)

• “In the largest long covid cohort from a single specialist post-COVID service to date, only one-third of individuals under follow-up achieved satisfactory recovery” (BMJ Infectious Diseases)

• Long COVID and recovery from Long COVID: quality of life impairments and subjective cognitive decline at a median of 2 years after initial infection (BMC Infectious Diseases)

Reproductive Health

• Female reproductive health impacts of Long COVID and associated illnesses including ME/CFS, POTS, and connective tissue disorders: a literature review (Frontiers Rehabilitation)

• “COVID-19 infection is associated with impaired sexual function in cisgender women…women with long COVID experienced incrementally more impaired sexual function” (Journal of Sexual Medicine)

• “Women have reported menstrual changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection and variation in long COVID symptoms across the menstrual cycle.” (Nature Communications)

Symptoms & Severity

• “The most frequently reported post-COVID-19 symptoms were fatigue (44; 69.8%), cognitive impairment (41; 65.1%), anxiety (33; 52.4%) and depression (25; 39.7%).” (Nature Molecular Psychiatry)

• Internal tremors and vibrations in long COVID: a cross-sectional study (American Journal of Medicine)

• “…most frequent long COVID symptoms include fatigue (30.53%), memory decline (27.93%), decreased exercise ability (18.29%), and brain fog (16.87%)” (The Lancet Regional Health)

• Differences in Long COVID severity by duration of illness, symptom evolution, and vaccination (The Lancet Regional Health Americas)

• Long-Term Sequelae of COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Symptoms 3 Years Post-SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Journal of Medical Virology)

Share

We still have a lot more to learn about Long COVID, including finding a treatment and/or cure in our lifetimes. Hopefully this guide is helpful for medical professionals, patients, and the general public as a whole. The Pandemic Accountability Index is a freely available public resource that compiles and organizes this sort of information, and we would greatly appreciate your support to keep this project going.

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

According to recent reporting by Bloomberg, Baltimore-based cardiac electrophysiologist Joseph Marine, also a Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, is on the shortlist to be nominated as the next Director of the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention. While Marine has no experience or qualifications to lead such an essential federal institution, he did make a public endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Substack “Sensible Medicine.” This would be the third RFK Jr. endorsing “superstar” from “Sensible Medicine” to make a fool of himself on the national stage, after Vinay Prasad disgraced himself by being ousted from the Food & Drug Administration twice in less than a year, and Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer’s CDC-backed attempt at reviving the Tuskegee experiments was shut down.

Marine has spent years on social media eroding his critical thinking skills by indulging in a steady diet of absurd conspiracy theories. This lack of professionalism permanently disqualifies him from any sort of role in medicine, especially the responsibility of running a critical federal agency. It’s clear that public displays of fealty to a depraved anti-vaccine crank, not relevant experience and qualifications, are the new criteria for serving in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Marine’s extensive Twitter history contains all sorts of evidence that he is a completely inappropriate choice to run the CDC. In his own words, you will see that Marine struggles to discern fantasy from reality, and were he to be confirmed for CDC Director, would completely fail. Joseph Marine genuinely believes:

• Doctors should “Love MAHA”

• COVID-19 was no big deal

• Terrain Theory is a viable pandemic preparedness strategy

• The CDC should be subjected to mass layoffs

• Hospitals should not protect patients from nosocomial infections

• Mask mandates are merely a form of “population control”

• Public health mandates should not exist in any form

• Universal vaccination is a sham

• New Yorkers are docile sheep

Unless stated otherwise, quotes are taken directly from Joseph Marine’s Twitter account, “DrJMarine.” If you’re an American taxpayer, feel free to reach out directly and let him know just what an “excellent” job you think he’d do as CDC Director.

Joseph Marine Thinks Doctors Should “Love MAHA” and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

On November 16th, 2024, Joseph Marine published a now-infamous opinion piece to Sensible Medicine titled “Why Doctors Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love MAHA.” What Marine doesn’t seem to understand is that the original Stanley Kubrick film this pun is based off of was a satire about the horrors of nuclear war, and how obnoxious, narcissistic leaders can drag their people into catastrophe. It also shows that Marine is a terrible judge of character.

The overwhelming consensus of doctors, especially pediatricians, correctly recognize that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a depraved anti-vaccine scam artist who profits from sabotaging the hard work of medical professionals. Gleefully embracing disgraced crank Andrew Wakefield, who abused young children only to produce fraudulent study results claiming that the MMR vaccine caused autism, RFK Jr. has made it clear that he sees nothing wrong with profiting from sick and suffering children. By extension, Marine doesn’t see anything wrong with performing unnecessary and highly invasive colonoscopies & lumbar punctures on kids to profit from fearmongering about lifesaving vaccines.

On Twitter, Marine defended his opinion editorial by claiming:

“MAHA is more than RFK and has little to do with vaccines. The thesis that corporate interests have captured most elements of the US healthcare system and are failing to improve health is compelling and needs a response from the medical profession.”

This is laughable and pretends that we all have goldish brains. First off, RFK Jr. has shown in the past year that “MAHA” is primarily dedicated to ensuring that American children die of vaccine preventable causes. Secondly, MAHA-adjacent wellness grifting companies (a multi-billion dollar industry) are apparently not “corporate interests.” Marine is either willfully ignorant or blatantly lying to the public; both of which are disqualifying.

Share

Joseph Marine Believes COVID Was No Big Deal

In a tweet from late December 2025 misrepresenting a vaccine efficacy study, something he should not be doing as a Professor of Medicine, Marine proclaims:

“In December 2020, we were being bombarded with messages from all the world’s public health ‘experts’ that we were in the throes of an existential global health crisis, and that normal life on earth could not return until every one of its 7.8 billion people had been injected with this magic shot...covid, which a serious health problem, was not the existential crisis that the ‘experts’ claimed, and that all of the collateral destruction caused by the greatest episode of mass psychosis in human history was entirely unjustified.”

COVID-19 is responsible for the largest mass death and disability event in American history, and continues to kill and disable a significant number of Americans every year. The vaccines have undeniably saved millions of lives. Marine was thankfully spared from the collective nightmare faced in cities like New York and London, with overwhelmed ICUs, mass graves, healthcare workers taking their own lives, and a constant stream of sirens. Ungrateful for the public health mandates that prevented this nightmare from occurring just 192 miles from New York City, Marine seems to believe that his professional colleagues collectively hallucinated their experiences in the hospital and that governments shouldn’t have lifted a finger.

In another tweet from February 15th, 2026, Marine posts two random photos with the caption:

“Here is some pictures of our ‘overwhelmed’ ER waiting room and passenger drop off area in January 2022 when we were ‘overwhelmed’ with the omicron wave.”

Apparently, this is considered “evidence” that overrules the record hospitalizations and the well-documented experiences of his professional colleagues treating patients in the ICU. January 2022 is also the month when the highest number of pediatric COVID-19 deaths was recorded, a fact Marine has never cared about. As CDC Director, Marine will prioritize his personal feelings over scientific facts.

Share Pandemic Accountability Index

Joseph Marine Believes “Terrain Theory” is a Valid Pandemic Response

In a December 2024 tweet highlighting his appearance on the libertarian crackpot podcast “Free the People,” Joseph Marine lays out his ideal pandemic response:

“Imagine if...instead of telling people to hide in their homes, cancel their gym memberships, stay away from their doctors, order Grubhub, binge-watch Netflix, cover their faces with cloths, and ‘socially distance’...We had told people to get outside, breathe fresh air, walk ten miles per day, lose weight, eat healthy fresh food, see your doctor more often to get your diabetes and blood pressure under better control, drink less alcohol, make more social connections...We would be a healthier society today. And fewer people would have died from covid.”

As a Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, Marine did none of these things since 2020, outside of whining on social media. What he’s doing is endorsing a form of the long-debunked “Terrain Theory,” something we previously covered when NIH Director & Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya indulged in when writing for the white nationalist rag City Journal. It’s a childish worldview that is completely detached from reality, suggesting that every American has the time to “walk ten miles per day.” Essentially, Marine and Podcast Jay are engaging in a form of victim blaming that dates back centuries.

History shows that populations can never predict just when a pandemic can strike. Should the doctors of 14th century England have wagged their fingers at the peasants dying of the plague because the malnutrition caused by years of famine left them more vulnerable to disease? This is antithetical to effective public health practices.

In the mid-1300s when the “Black Death” ravaged Europe, it was widely believed that the catastrophe was the divine wrath of God casting down judgement upon sinners. Lacking the technology we take for granted today, they were unable to comprehend that this calamity was actually the result of a deadly pathogen from Asia, spread by fleas travelling in the fur of rats. Several hundred years of advances in science and medicine later, Marine has no excuse. It shows that even though it’s Marine’s job as a Professor of Medicine to study and understand new diseases such as COVID-19, he has chosen to reject reviewing the latest medical research and instead replace it with a steady diet of anti-intellectual garbage posted to a website regularly used to generate CSAM: Child Sexual Abuse Material.

Subscribe now

Joseph Marine Wants to Carry Out Mass Layoffs as CDC Director

On November 7th, 2024, Joseph Marine tweeted out in celebration of Trump’s victory:

“Hoping that first order of business for the new [CDC] Director will be to dismiss the geniuses that advised masking 2-year olds. Fortunately, the US has plenty of universities that will be happy to give them endowed professorships.”

This was followed up with a quote tweet from his fellow crank Vinay Prasad, who fantasized about firing “at least ~10000 (1/4)” employees of the CDC. While COVID-19 has killed thousands of American children and is now responsible for the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma, Marine and Prasad do not believe American children should have been protected from a new SARS virus in any way. If a new pandemic threat such as H5N1 were to emerge while Marine is CDC Director, he has made it clear that he is more than happy to sacrifice your child’s life in service of a broken economy that benefits only a select few.

Joseph Marine is Against Preventing the Spread of Viruses in Hospitals

On October 15th, 2024, Joseph Marine wrote an opinion piece for Sensible Medicine titled “Masking Mistakes - Fall 2024 Edition.” Would you like to guess what he believes the “mistakes” are? Well with an endorsement from fellow crank Vinay Prasad, I’m sure you can guess:

“Forced masking creates an inhospitable environment for workers, patients, and visitors alike … Forced masking sends a false signal to the public that health care facilities are “dangerous” … Forced masking will exacerbate the health workforce crisis … Forcing people to mask in health facilities sends a message that doctors and hospitals don’t know what they are doing … Forced masking undermines medical-scientific progress … It would be sensible for public health officials to throw in the towel on the face rags”

As we learned from Australia, hospital-acquired COVID-19 kills a significant number of patients. Marine believes it’s “sensible” to “throw in the towel” on preventing patients from dying of nosocomial infections caused by airborne viruses. It has also been well established that N95 respirators such as the 3M Aura 1080+ are effective at preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other airborne pathogens and are designed to allow users to speak clearly. As Director of the Centers for Disease Control and… Prevention, Marine will do everything in his power to undo all the progress modern medicine has made since the times of Florence Nightingale.

Prioritizing your feelings over scientific fact is an immediate disqualification from serving as CDC Director.

Joseph Marine Thinks Mask Mandates Were “Population Control”

A long-running meme in anti-vaccine circles on Twitter is that mask mandates were actually a nefarious form of “population control” by the evil globalist cabal that harvests the adrenochrome of children. In a March 17th, 2026 tweet Joseph Marine endorsed this absurd conspiracy theory popular on Twitter:

“The mask mandates were a useful system of population control, even if they were useless in controlling the virus. Suggest this excellent book.”

Attached is a picture of the cover of Mattias Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism,” where Mattias endorses the “mass formation psychosis” ramblings of depraved crank Robert Malone, who openly hallucinates the mass graves of millions all caused by the COVID-19 vaccines. Clearly, Marine has no place in medicine if these are the sorts of delusions he publicly supports.

While blue surgical masks are inadequate PPE for an airborne virus, they were not completely ineffective. I would certainly be first in line to point out the WHO’s failure to downplay the “airborne” properties of SARS-CoV-2 as simply a “military term,” as well as the failures of public figures such as Zeynep Tufekci to interrogate such dishonest language. The appropriate response is to correct these errors; not dive into conspiratorial thinking.

Joseph Marine Rejects Public Health in its Entirety

One of the reasons that Marine is on RFK Jr’s shortlist for CDC Director is that, as a self-proclaimed “rugged individualist,” he fundamentally rejects the very concept of “public health.” While research shows that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask mandates saved over half a million lives in 2020, Marine believes that vulgar Twitter trolls such as failed medical student Kevin Bass know better. In a December 2024 Twitter argument with Trump’s former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Marine whined about the tyranny of preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2:

“It’s all about the mandates, [Jerome Adams] - if there had been no mask mandates, no one would mind what you wear or advise others. I support the right to wear as many masks as one would like so long as that includes the number zero. Please join me in renouncing the ineffective public mask mandates (esp. for children) that so frustrated and divided the public! It would help to heal our society.”

This is a childish rewriting of history on all counts; literally every sentence here is wrong. Grifting arsonists who reject aerosol physics, germ theory, and other entire scientific fields are responsible for the death and harm done to society by peddling lies for profit. Marine believes that nothing should have been done to prevent this harm, even if it resulted in hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths.

As CDC Director, Marine will prioritize the freedom of viruses over the health of you and your loved ones, informed by obnoxious Twitter trolls instead of hard science.

Subscribe now

Joseph Marine Doesn’t Understand Vaccine Trials

It’s quite shameful for a Professor of Medicine to publicly declare his willful ignorance about a disease that has killed and disabled millions. As research from Sweden and Africa has shown, COVID-19 can have devastating effects to the health of supposedly “low-risk” unvaccinated populations. It’s even more embarrassing for a Johns Hopkins Professor of Medicine to display his ignorance about how vaccine clinical trials are performed. (Science Based Medicine) As part of an extended January 2026 Twitter meltdown, Marine proclaims:

“If [vaccine scientists] were interested in saving lives, they would have studied their lifesaving vaccine in a population that was actually dying from covid.”

Of the thousands of recorded pediatric COVID-19 deaths, they are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. Marine does not consider these young lives worth even trying to save. This moral depravity and willful ignorance immediately disqualifies him from the role of CDC Director.

Joseph Marine Imagines New Yorkers to be Docile Sheep for Not Embracing COVID in 2020

Further reviewing his pitiful worldview in a January 1st tweet, Marine bellows out an extended rant which suggests New Yorkers such as myself, Dr. Jonathan Howard, and Dr. Stephen W. Thrasher all collectively hallucinated our experiences in 2020:

“In 2020, we did not think for ourselves, we took lots of s--t, we were ruled and told what to do by public health bureaucrats. And we did it. Nowhere more so than New York. New Yorkers embraced the warmth of collectivism (”We are all in this together” “No one is safe until everyone is safe”). They embraced the warmth of lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, and vaccine passports. They embraced the destruction of thousands of small businesses run by rugged individualists for the collective good. They embraced the ostracization of any rugged individualists who disagreed. Covid has revealed a truth about America that we cannot look away from. A critical mass of us will trade freedom for the illusion of safety promised by demagogues and charlatans.”

What Marine is saying is that if he is confirmed as CDC Director, he will do everything in his power to surrender American lives to the tyranny of viruses. Marine believes more New Yorkers should have embraced their pinebox coffins in mass graves with a smile on their face, in this misguided belief that their pointless, humiliating death caused by SARS-CoV-2 was safeguarding the freedom of their fellow citizen. Marine’s primary goal as CDC Director will be to drive Americans to celebrate preventable deaths as a patriotic sacrifice.

Subscribe now

Final Verdict

The Johns Hopkins Professor of Medicine and cardiac electrophysiologist Joseph Marine has thoroughly proven in his own words that he is woefully unqualified to serve as Director of the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention. Considering himself a “rugged individualist,” Marine lets random Twitter trolls inform his thinking over credible medical & scientific research. Marine is only being considered for the role of CDC Director because of his public displays of fealty to lecherous scam artist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - instead of professional experience or meaningful achievements.

If brought before the Senate, one would reasonably fear that Marine would exploit the legitimacy of his Johns Hopkins credentials to fast-track his confirmation to lead an agency he himself does not believe should exist. We have already seen the devastating results of placing obnoxious Twitter trolls in charge of essential federal agencies. The American taxpayer should not be bankrolling the paychecks of emotionally stunted brats hiding from accountability behind the credibility of prestigious institutions.

It should be obvious by now that the current philosophy of the HHS Secretary & his supporters is to introduce trojan horses to leadership roles in critical federal public health agencies in order to destroy them from within via sheer incompetence. By confirming Joseph Marine as CDC Director, Congress would be surrendering American families to the tyranny of pestilence. This is a grave betrayal of the American taxpayer and must be explicitly rejected.

Share

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox is written by William H. Foege and was published by University of California Press in 2011. You can find it wherever books are sold.

The Millennial generation was born into a world of which they owe a great deal to those who came before: Just years earlier, a massive international coalition had come together to finally eradicate smallpox from the world. They will never know or see this horrible virus beyond what is read in history books and old photographs. The horrible puss-filled sores, the permanent scarring, the blindness, and death that smallpox left in its wake is now but a distant memory.

On the other hand, the generation being born today is inheriting a world in which a rising tide of unchecked pestilence threatens us all. Reactionary arsonists spewing dangerous myths have compromised the public square, fooling adults into turning a blind eye towards widespread disease outbreaks amongst children, starting with COVID-19 and moving on to measles, as well as other diseases. In response, liberals and progressives have offered little more than a collective shrug.

The optimistic ambition that drove William H. Foege and his colleagues in a massive international coalition to eradicate smallpox from the Earth is long forgotten. The measures that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and others deployed in the 1960s and 70s are now totally unthinkable if they were needed today. Childish arsonists are gleefully celebrating the smoldering embers of what it took to save millions.

House on Fire is an incredible globe-spanning adventure, featuring motorcycles, political intrigue, civil war, and all the other elements of a grand Oscar-winning blockbuster. It’s also an enlightening look at the traditions and attitudes that we need to return to if we are to beat back the larger anti-vaccine war against science and the public’s health. We owe Foege and his compatriots, heroes to the world, a great deal of gratitude. Instead, our culture celebrates posting garbage to social media.

While smallpox and COVID-19 are obviously two very different diseases, it’s worth reading House on Fire to compare and contrast the attitudes between the two responses. How did one succeed in eradicating the virus from the world, while another has the public shrugging their shoulders as the virus became responsible for what is now the leading chronic illness in children? Does collective apathy serve any benefit beyond preserving our fragile egos?

Everything Old is New Again

You can go back centuries and find political cartoons demonizing Edward Jenner’s revolutionary smallpox vaccine, as well as vaccine mandates. These reactionary myths followed us all the way on to the COVID-19 pandemic and the mRNA vaccines which saved millions of lives. As the campaign to eradicate smallpox began to come together in the 1960s, Foege notes that there were many doubters, who insisted such a goal was impossible and a waste of money and time.

Here in America from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no shortage of voices telling people to just give up and surrender to the virus. In a 2023 Time magazine editorial, a former Exxon executive writing for the “COVID Collaborative” (featuring Chris Christie, Tom Ridge, Ashish Jha, and Monica Gandhi) insisted that we need “New courageous “accept exposure” policies” targeting the last third of Americans still protecting themselves from a virus that had killed and disabled so many. Many are still sick with Long COVID, suffering with no treatment or cure. Reactionary attitudes, driven by an uncaring wealthy elite, became tragically endemic amidst a torrent of epidemic waves.

When we contrast the attitudes of COVID-19 disinformation artists like Vinay Prasad, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and others with the writing of Foege on his smallpox experiences, you notice a number of things missing from House on Fire. William doesn’t engage in childish name calling or expletive filled rantings, instead dedicating his literary real estate to heaping praise upon so many of his colleagues and their important contributions. Instead of minimizing or misrepresenting the virus, Foege calmly walks through an explanation of how smallpox functions and what it’s capable of. Whereas the former celebrated the apathy and impotency of the individual, the latter believes in our collective potential for great achievement.

You might be shocked to learn that at no point does the great labors Foege and his team embarked upon in their global crusade feature writing a useless online petition. They didn’t advise young people to seek out the virus or celebrate outbreaks amongst schoolchildren. They didn’t produce media mocking and insulting those who sought to protect themselves or their loved ones from the virus. This coalition vaccinated millions, treated patients in the hospital, and placed the infected under mandatory quarantine. Y’know, actual work.

Share

Aspirational Defeatism

Had the reckless saboteurs of the COVID-19 response been in charge, the world would likely still be facing the threat of smallpox while these frauds paraded themselves in the media as heroes of “medical freedom” or some other garbage. They would continue to blather nonsense minimizing the virus as simply a bad rash, while refusing to admit when their obvious errors are pointed out by scientific research. Unfortunately, the dominant attitudes of our federal public health agency leadership is to celebrate nonsensical blathering over tangible achievement as “MAHA Wins.”

It’s worth restating that smallpox and COVID-19 are two wildly different diseases, yet both are caused by viruses transmitted from person to person. Foege and his colleagues’ goals were highly ambitious, with victory far from guaranteed. Was the answer to simply throw their hands in the air and give up at the first sign of difficulty? History clearly proves not.

The half century between the 1970s and the 2020s saw the rise of the home computer, dialing into a BBS, the World Wide Web, and soon social media. The engine of disinformation that had been attacking public health for centuries found itself supercharged, with mainstream media outlets all too eager to help pour the kerosene. A whole field of journalists who never considered pandemics or public health prior to 2020 became overnight epidemiologists yet found themselves too paralyzed to inquire as to the validity of absurd claims.

Fearmongering about “ZeroCOVID” caricatures, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and the precautionary principle of public health ran abundant, while not nearly as much energy was spent decrying the minimizing rebranding of SARS-CoV-2 with terms like “inevitable seasonal yuck,” as coined by Emma Green in The New Yorker. Many don’t want to admit they were bamboozled by the same Biden who said Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and claimed Theranos was the “laboratory of the future.” Siezing upon this moment of weakness, the anti-vaccine war on science laundered their talking points into the more liberal mainstream. Now we are left totally unprepared should another public health crisis emerge on our shores.

Can you even begin to imagine the CDC of today sending officials overseas to fight infectious disease outbreaks abroad? Dedicated surveillance systems, often going door to door delivering vaccines, and mandatory quarantines to contain & prevent said outbreaks should they happen here at home? These are massive government interventions. Howling jackals would be screeching bloody murder! Worse yet, with the demolition of the Environmental Protection Agency and the acceleration of climate collapse, of which pandemics such as COVID-19 are a side effect of, we are left much more vulnerable than before.

We see the beginnings of it now as schools across America regularly shut down due to infectious disease outbreaks, many of them caused by airborne viruses. While the anti-vaccine war on science cheers and profits from sick and suffering children, the liberal principles that contributed to the global effort to eradicate smallpox have largely been abandoned. Meanwhile, the already developed & effective solutions to prevent transmission of airborne viruses in schools and other public places lay sitting on a shelf, unused and collecting dust:

Moving Forward Together

It wasn’t simply the vaccine that defeated smallpox (of which it was highly effective and played a major role), but the combination of the vaccine and non-pharmaceutical interventions including mandatory quarantines. The vaccine-only strategy for COVID-19 failed millions of Americans who were led to believe they’d done everything right: they’d gotten vaccinated, they quit masking, they got infected, and they either died of a breakthrough death or developed Long COVID induced disability and/or chronic illness. This needless sacrifice conferred no meaningful electoral success to the Democrat Party and failed to placate the anti-vaccine war on science. Can we finally go back to practicing the humility shared by William H. Foege and his fellow public health heroes now?

With the reckless demolition of our federal public health agencies, whatever comes into power after Trump is going to have to have a serious plan to rebuild, and I don’t mean “restoring trust” by kotowing to the screeching and hollering of ignorant jackals. A great first step would be a public commitment to prevent the transmission of viruses in our schools and hospitals. Second, a renewed pledge to crack down on the crooked charlatans that make up the anti-vaccine war on science. Thirdly, an understanding that do-nothing yappers are not a role model to aspire to. Most important of all, we can’t let crooked billionaires sabotage public health initiatives.

We can only turn the tide by reviving the principles that brought about real positive change to the world. William H. Foege’s House on Fire is essential reading if you truly want to understand just how much we’ve lost in just a few short years and how can begin to rebuild. The alternative is surrendering to a reactionary apathy to the infectious viruses which offers us nothing but needless suffering.

House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox is written by William H. Foege and was published by University of California Press in 2011. You can find it wherever books are sold.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.

Recently I had the honor of recording my first ever podcast episode, guesting on We Want Them Infected with Dr. Johnathan Howard and Wendy Orent. It was a wonderful experience and I highly recommend you check it out. When I speak on the episode, I mention that many of the villains Jonathan and I have written about considered the disaster of the pandemic to have been a brand building opportunity, exploiting social media to raise their profiles and mislead the public for profit.

In my spare time, I’ve also been enjoying the Dark Horse run of Conan comics, adapting the classic works of the late author Robert E. Howard. Across many tall tales of adventure fantasy, as we watch Conan grow from thief to pirate to general to king, the wandering brute frequently brushes up against villains inspired by the real-world nasties of 1930s’ America. Dark Horse’s trade paperbacks end with a series of essays about Robert’s life and philosophy shining a light on this.

This began to light a spark in my mind.

In his written debates with fellow author H.P. Lovecraft, Howard lashes out against the excesses of modern civilization: police brutality, corrupt politicians, and capitalist exploitation as a whole. Robert considered “civilization” to be an inherently corrupting influence, with Conan frequently taking matters into his own hands to avenge matters of grave injustice:

It’s hard to not find some sympathy with Howard’s views, when we compare the brutality of 1930s America to the nation of today. Mothers struggle to feed their babies, protestors are cut down in the street, and hard work doesn’t pay - while scam artists prosper, given special privileges by a corrupt government. In the news today, we are learning more and more about a billionaire pedophile who was embraced and defended by many seemingly respectable men in our most prestigious institutions.

How can anyone begin to defend such a “civilization?”

Before we can connect this to COVID-19, we need to outline the terms of two defining narratives: “Barbarism” versus what we will call “Posterism,” the guiding philosophy of modern America’s public health leadership.

Read more

In what should be the leading headline in mainstream media, the Department of Health and Human Services has published a new website dedicated to Long COVID. This is a remarkable development, after years of disinformation and a blanket slashing of all federal research funding for COVID-19 related topics, and the closing of the Office of Long COVID. In what should come with a series of formal apologies for years of misleading the public by those who are now the leaders of our federal public health agencies, there is silence. It’s as if we are all expected to quietly forget what we were told with our own eyes and ears.

To which I can only say: Nah.

Faceplanting Into a Shameful Legacy

Let us flash back to fall 2020 and the publication of a useless online petition known as the Great Barrington Declaration, written by Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya. Clinking champagne glasses on behalf of wealthy billionaires, they promised “herd immunity” within “3-6 months” by demanding hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans embrace a new SARS virus they knew nothing about. This was a radically new proposal unprecedented in the history of pandemics and public health, completely unsupported by evidence.

Now there are a lot of sharp, well-read scholars who subscribe to the Pandemic Accountability Index, and I’m grateful for your support. I have to ask, because memory seems to fail me, but what section of the Great Barrington Declaration told the public to expect that a significant percentage of these unvaccinated millions embracing a new SARS virus would go on to develop serious health complications, including disability & chronic illness that can end their careers, their dreams, and even force them into homelessness? This was a risk that was understood looking at research from the original SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, published a full decade prior.

How morally depraved do you have to be to demand your fellow citizen roll the dice on this sort of life-upending risk?

Before becoming FDA Commissioner, Marty Makary ran around conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and FOX News like a chicken with his head cut off, screeching that Long COVID was no big deal or even loudly declaring “There is no Long COVID, there is only ‘Long Anxiety.’” The Department of Health and Human Services just admitted that he was completely wrong. His lackey Vinay Prasad (who is leaving the FDA again in April) also shared sentiments that those suffering from Long COVID are simply “lying fake disease grifters,” and that it was “invented” by journalist Ed Yong.

As wildly inappropriate and rife with disinformation the HHS’ website is, even going so far as to label Long COVID as merely an “invisible illness” after many afflicted have developed serious physical changes, the HHS’ website is a staggering admission that their leadership was completely full of it. Either they were too incompetent to realize that a SARS virus contained serious potential for long-term harm, or they simply never cared, relishing in all the money and attention. Most likely, it was some combination of the two.

The liberal public health influencers who spent years downplaying Long COVID when Biden was President, suggesting such ridiculous myths like that it would magically go away after enough waves of reinfection through the population, and went on to endorse RFK Jr’s picks to lead these essential agencies as “reasonable” and “surprisingly strong,” have some serious egg on their faces.

Share

The Greatest Offense of All

Let’s move on to this HHS “Long COVID” website itself. The listed prevalence of “5%-7%” is a significant undercount, aided by years of disinformation and political meddling. This isn’t unusual - we know that COVID-19 deaths were undercounted by 15-30% and even going so far back to 1892, Hamburg was intentionally underreporting cholera deaths as the city’s Chief Medical Officer claimed, “there’s no way to prevent cholera outbreaks.” No, seriously!

We currently don’t have a treatment or cure for Long COVID, and the ongoing demolition of the National Institutes of Health means that America likely won’t be discovering one in the future. Podcast Jay admits as much, falsely equating Long COVID with “vaccine injury,” a far rarer condition exploited by disinformation artists:

What Bhattacharya is really doing here is legitimizing a myth peddled by the worst of the worst depraved Twitter trolls that he follows on his personal account, “DrJBhattacharya:” That “Long COVID” is actually just “vaccine injury;” that COVID-19 is not responsible for the disabling of millions - in line with the CDC’s quack-ridden Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. Frankly, there’s likely a significant number of people who have been misled into blaming Long COVID on the vaccine thanks to social media disinformation. HHS leaders should be setting an example. Instead, they feed off the sadistic depravity of all their favorite trolls and even encourage it.

Worse yet, with no treatment or cure, this HHS website pledges to provide a “Clinician Locator” who will likely share a great deal of overlap with the same scam artist quacks who raked in the big bucks peddling random nonsense to treat COVID-19. In other words, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services are serving up the Americans they hurt with their disinformation on a silver platter to a bunch of crackpot vultures. A federal handout to the lowest of the low.

This is a horrific chapter in the long history of American medicine’s failures to treat and manage post-viral chronic illness. While Long COVID emerged in 2020 under Trump, the vast majority became disabled under the Biden Administration’s mismanagement of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Abandoning these millions of newly disabled Americans to scam artists, quacks, and wellness grifters handpicked by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. & co. is utterly indefensible.

If you want to be the leader, you have to take responsibility - not run away from it.

Subscribe now

Follow us over at Bluesky and consider subscribing! We are entirely 100% reader supported.