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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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!

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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a month 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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As a pitiful excuse for a man whose only contributions to the world are an endless mountain of social media posts largely made up of completely false disinformation, it’s not surprising to see a recent photo from the joke infesting the office of National Institutes of Health Director posing with a fake golden championship title around his belt alongside a flat earther, AJ Styles (who has interesting thoughts about “The Gay Community”) among others. It’s worth noting that here is a federal agency leader making a public endorsement of a corporation that is currently engaged in a legal brawl over vile sexual abuse on location at their corporate headquarters. Jay Bhattacharya and World Wrestling Entertainment are truly a match made in heaven, in more ways than one.

Most notably, how they’re obsessed with having an overwhelming presence in the public’s eye one can’t seem to get away from.

The Parasocial Nightmare

When we think of a parasocial relationship, we often think of incidients where a random stranger develops an unhealthy obsession with a social media personality. Most typically this happens when a random schmuck decides a woman who livestreams videogames is actually the love of his life. Yet this can work in reverse as well, as World Wrestling Entertainment tried in the 2010s to try and expand on their monopoly of the professional wrestling industry.

Attempting to expand upon their dominance in the social media era, World Wrestling Entertainment unintentionally began to create a backlash amongst many diehard wrestling fans. Every week, WWE puts on a leviathan of programming:

• Monday Night RAW (Netflix)

• RAW Talk

• Main Event (YouTube)

• NXT (The CW)

• Evolve (Tubi)

• Smackdown (USA Network)

• Talking Smack

• Lucha Libre AAA (YouTube)

This makes up around a dozen hours of programming a week, and a multi-hour Pay-per-View at the end of the month, as well as a bounty of social media video content. It doesn’t matter how many writers you lock in a room, (including former 24 star Freddie Prinze Jr.) this is a nigh-impossible feat to maintain quality programming. Dedicated wrestling fans began to look for alternatives, especially after WWE agreed to a deal to produce propaganda for the Saudi royal family.

Why were these fans staying up into the early hours of dawn to watch livestreams of New Japan Pro Wrestling and other foreign promotions? Truth be told, the corporate brand of WWE (an extension of the McMahon family) had become so obsessed with itself that it began to overshadow the wrestlers themselves. An ambitious young talent who made a big impression with fans would find themselves punished for interrupting corporate’s plans. Fans would be shrouded in red and blue spotlights and branded as the “WWE Universe;” essentially property of the company.

A wrestling promotion’s purpose is to serve as a platform to elevate the talent, not the other way around. In the same way, Jay Bhattacharya has abused the office of NIH Director to promote nobody but himself, instead of taking a back seat to celebrate the great work of American research scientists and doctors. In a now infamous commercial for Hulu, one superfan brandishing a WWE logo tattoo exclaims, “I’m not a wrestling fan. I’m a WWE fan:”

If you spent any time between 2020-2024 hunting for accurate or reliable information about COVID-19, it was not hard to find Jay Bhattacharya’s smugly, willfully ignorant face spouting off nonsense, peddling disinformation, and making childish insults. He sold himself to the public as a heroic crusader for freedom, while deep in the pocket of creeps like a literal cape-wearing neo-Confederate champion of teen smoking and child labor. Even a skilled reporter like Walker Bragman of Important Context struggles to keep up with every obscene bit of nonsense Jay has spewed without an ounce of self-reflection.

It’s important to remember that Bhattacharya did nothing except talk throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, showing no remorse when this contributed to needless deaths of many Americans. His sole priority was promoting himself as some sort of wise sage, regardless if he was giving his “fans” harmful medical advice. So yes, Podcast Jay truly earned his WWE branded “championship.”

As NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya has made it his mission to make his smug grin inseparable from the National Institutes of Health. Sharing the same overzealous ambition of the WWE to become an inescapable part of your daily life. Neglecting his duties as a civil servant, “Podcast Jay” has recorded so many hours of blathering in front of one camera or another that he’s become woefully unaware of how inconsistent his ramblings are, much akin to the nonsensical storylines of the worst of WWE.

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Podcast Jay Talks Too Much

Just recently, Jay Bhattacharya said he seeks to make the NIH the “research arm of MAHA,” an explicitly ideological brand that demonizes vaccines, gives handouts to wellness grifters, and seeks to make it easier for tech companies to use the general public as lab rats for unproven, often utterly broken “artificial intelligence” devices. There is absolutely nothing scientific about any of this by any rational standard - it’s purely ideological.

Yet, weeks later on a separate podcast with notorious anti-vaccine quack Sharyl Attkisson, he claims that he is “removing ideology from science.” Don’t get confused, this is merely an evolution of an argument from those who demonized masks & other non-pharmaceutical interventions: that their opponents are dangerous irrational political radicals seeking to corrupt your children by establishing a “Covidian” biomedical security state - and that people like Jay who championed COVID-19 in the unvaccinated, especially children, are purely apolitical, evidence-based rational thinkers with no ulterior motives. This is manipulative language, and Jay is doing it again to sell himself as this neutral arbiter of “non-ideological science.”

On top of this, the ideology behind the current demolition of the National Institutes of Health is that these research scientists should be working at private companies, and only corporate CEOs should be dictating what research happens in America.

Congress needs to be dragging this NIH Director (and acting CDC Director) before them and giving this obnoxious brat a stern reminder that the American taxpayer isn’t paying him to promote himself on social media. The agency is in major disarray, and the budget wasn’t passed to fill the campus with extra podcast microphones. This obnoxious parasocial assault against the American public’s psyche must end.

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What’s worse is that after this second ousting, Prasad is being welcomed back with open arms to the University of California San Francisco and his former Substack, Sensible Medicine. It’s as if nothing happened, as if Prasad shares no responsibility for his actions as head of FDA’s CBER division. Prasad’s Sensible Medicine co-conspirator John Mandrola foolishly claimed on Twitter:

“It shocks me that those who holler about disparities of US healthcare and its outlandish costs are happy that pharma $$ ousted a person interested in preserving value. Just shocking. [Vinay Prasad] we are happy to have you back at [Sensible Medicine.] -@drjohnm via Twitter, 3/6/2026

This is quite a hilarious rewriting of history, as happens with all of the COVID Disinformation Brigadiers. Whether it was refusing to review a new Moderna flu vaccine (not simply approve it, just review it) or attacking an experimental treatment for Huntington’s disease, a rare but devastating condition, Prasad proved himself to be completely out of his depth. When Donald Trump of all people has tell you how to do your job and is bizarrely on the right of the issue for once? That’s truly embarrassing.

The Purpose of the FDA

We can sit here and debate who should control the means of production for the research and development of vaccines and pharmaceuticals. The opinions are irrelevant to the facts of today: here in America, not the fictional nation of Prasadia, private companies are tasked with developing new drugs. FDA regulators are tasked with reviewing these drugs for their safety and efficacy, and either grant or deny approval to be sold on the open market.

Regulators must provide transparency and consistency in order for these companies to justify investing in the development of the next generation of lifesaving medications. Not blanket approvals, but instead a reliable process that is not governed by irrational, chaotic, and completely unprofessional antics. Vinay Prasad already established himself to be completely unqualified to handle this responsibility based upon years of rants and raves on social media.

In 2024, Prasad tweeted that had he been in charge of the pandemic response, the government would have done nothing beyond giving a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to uninfected elderly. Preventing mass graves from being erected in every major American city wasn’t something he was concerned with:

Had John Mandrola truly been a friend of Vinay Prasad, he would have pulled his friend aside and advised him to leave the childish antics at home before joining the FDA. The responsibilites of a civil servant are far different from that of a social media troll. For one thing, you are now working on the behalf of all the people you spent years attacking on social media. Instead, Mandrola let his “friend” make an absolute fool of himself in the public square for all to see.

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The Death of Professional Standards

It’s undeniably clear now that the Administration of the University of California San Francisco does not seem to care for upholding professional standards from their faculty, if they’re choosing to welcome Prasad back with open arms. They didn’t care about years of vulgar insults and smears on Prasad’s social media, and they don’t care that an outside firm was brought in to investigate Prasad’s abusive harassment of FDA staff. Prospective students looking to attend UCSF should seriously ask themselves if this is the academic culture that will best serve their career pursuits.

For pete’s sake, we are talking about a crank who exploited his position at the Food & Drug Administration to falsely claim in a deranged memo (designed to be leaked to the press) that the COVID-19 vaccine killed numerous children, based off of unverified VAERS reports, as a handout to his favorite anti-vaccine buddies on Twitter. On top of all of this, here’s a tweet from Congressman Jake Auchincloss:

“This ‘senior official’ was Vinay Prasad. Disclosing trade secret information without legal authorization is a prohibited act under the FDCA & a criminal violation under the Trade Secrets Act.” -@RepAuchincloss via Twitter, March 6th, 2026

These are incredibly serious allegations. How can you possibly expect someone like this to be able to reliably teach the next generation of doctors and scientists? What is UCSF teaching these students, when this is the sort of highly unethical misconduct they are permitting of their faculty?

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Personal Thoughts

All of the serious business out of the way, I would like to now offer my thoughts on this recent news, as someone who has been reporting on Prasad’s antics for years now. This was an entirely predictable outcome, and I do believe I am entitled to one (1) singular sensible chuckle. So, here we go.

All of the years of tearing down others, making absurd accusations, casually ripping others apart. Given his first ever big boy job with real-world responsibility, Prasad completely failed. Getting ousted not once, but twice from Trump Administration alongside other incompetents like Jim O’Neil and Ralph “Measles is the cost of doing business” Abraham, completely humiliated. Not even Marty Makary running on cable news professing Prasad’s love of Trump could save him:

Now, I doubt that Prasad’s return to Sensible Medicine is going to feature a longform 5,000 word apology about the lessons learned from his faceplanting at the FDA. While it’s easy to tear others down from behind the safety of a keyboard or podcast microphone, it turns out it’s a lot harder to be an effective federal regulator. Prasad wasted such a great opportunity to separate his online persona from the real oncologist, and prove his doubters wrong. Much like Andrew Wakefield, Prasad will most likely paint himself a victim of a grand conspiracy organized by “Big Pharma” and play upon the sympathies of his beloved anti-vaxxers on Twitter like sadistic misogynist Alex Berenson.

That’s the problem of centering your whole life around your social media presence. You start to become a predictable creature of habit. You begin to lose sight of what’s truly important, getting your priorities all mixed up. This isn’t “Evidence-Based Medicine,” but instead nothing more than a pitiful performance for a limited, statistically irrelevant audience.

Thankfully, the world does not revolve around Vinay Prasad. In an ideal world, every last penny the American taxpayer paid Prasad, including $65,000/yearr in travel expenses, would be clawed back. This would include severe financial penalties for accepting a job Prasad knew he was completely unqualified for.

The American taxpayer shouldn’t be bankrolling a clown show.

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, published by Penguin Random House in 2018 and can be found wherever books are sold.

Well, here’s a hot take to kick off an article!

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by Wall Street Journal investigative journalist John Carreyrou is the definitive work telling the tale of the failed blood testing scam-up Theranos, and its eccentric CEO Elizabeth Holmes. For the unfamiliar or those who need a refresher, Holmes’ claim to fame was that she would revolutionize medical testing. Holmes was a Stanford dropout with no medical or scientific experience. She promised to replace drawing multiple vials of blood and the large machines with a compact device known as the “Edison,” and later the “MiniLab,” that only required a single drop of blood to run over 70 different blood tests simultaneously.

Being a female CEO in the highly male dominated Silicon Valley, mainstream media quickly rushed to make her a star. Not just in finance media like Forbes and CNBC, but across mainstream outlets like USA Today, NPR, CBS and CNN as well. There was one small problem, however: the revolution she promised was physically impossible. Literal Star Trek tricorder fantasies.

The vast majority of journalists refused to bother with doing their due diligence and call up anyone with hands-on experience in medical testing to ask just why you cannot run dozens of tests off a single drop of blood. Neither did many early investors, made up of former statemen, congresspeople, and military officers such as Henry Kissinger and General Mattis. Holmes was also cozy with Democrat leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, whose staff did not bother to verify her outlandish claims. Predictably, this would end in a great deal of suffering and tears.

A great deal of embarrassment could have been spared if people possessed an ounce of scientific skepticism. Instead, our problems have only grown worse, leading to a national crisis of anti-intellectualism. Now what?

The reason to revisit Bad Blood in 2026 is that, as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade again modern medicine, Elizabeth Holmes has yet again began to pop up in the news. As easily misled sheep who struggle to maintain a grip upon reality, “MAHA” considers Holmes to be a sort of martyr; a victim of beauracratic tyranny. On Twitter, Holmes maintains her innocence:

It would not be completely unreasonable at this point to see the Trump Administration pardon Elizabeth Holmes. In truth, the Theranos saga became a model for much of “Make America Healthy Again.” So just what exactly did Holmes do? Let’s review!

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The Holmes School of Innovation

The one thing you need to understand about Theranos is that it was always a scam, from the very beginning. A Stanford dropout with nothing but two semesters of chemical engineering under her belt, Elizabeth Holmes prioritized figuring out how to mislead investors & circumvent FDA regulations over figuring out how to make her Star Trek fantasies come to life. Instead of bothering to produce a finished prototype that reliably delivered accurate results, Holmes figured the best way to develop the “Edison” was to test it on terminally ill cancer patients, or even on swine flu patients in Mexico. Holmes thought the epidemic was “a great opportunity to showcase the Edison.” This did not end well:

Corporate partners terminated their relationship with Theranos, after it was clear Holmes was all talk. This didn’t cause her to rethink her plans, however. Instead of listening to the engineers & scientists who actually did the work of building these prototypes, she frequently insulted and denigrated them:

These consistent failures (which Holmes often concealed from her own staff) didn’t dissuade retail chains Walgreens and Safeway, however. Both gave Theranos major contracts to bring the Edison - still a non-functioning prototype - to their stores. One might consider this to be highly unethical, but this is 2010s-era Silicon Valley we’re talking about, where at one South by Southwest conference, the homeless were recruited to become walking Wi-Fi hotspots, paid only in tips.

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Vinay Prasad: A Graduate of the Balwani School of Management?

In the past year of reporting on the melodrama at the Food & Drug Administration, it is impossible not to see paralells between CBER head Vinay Prasad and Theranos’ second in command, Sunny Balwani - who was also Holmes’ romantic partner. Balwani made his money from the dot-com bubble, and somehow assumed this made him a genius. In reality, however:

When he was still a UCSF professor, Vinay Prasad made a name for himself by making obnoxiously incorrect and ridiculous statements about entire medical and scientific fields he knew nothing about. When those with the relevant experience pointed out his frequent errors, he would simply block them. He clearly prioritized ranting and raving to his captive audience of anti-vaxxers, exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic for personal profit, over his professional responsibilities.

It was clear to anyone with sense that Prasad was a power-hungry narcisscist obsessed with promoting himself, having little respect for his professional colleagues and the general public. You don’t need a Master of Business Administration to figure out that he would clearly fail in any sort of leadership role. Balwani’s obnoxious antics at Theranos would become the blueprint Prasad would bring to FDA’s CBER:

As recent headlines have shown, Prasad has brought the same frequent f-bombs and demands for resignations to his role as a civil servant at the Food & Drug Administration. In leaked e-mails to staff, Prasad has made it clear that he considers Balwani to be a role model worth emulating. This goes so far as to when Balwani would order his employees to engage in fraud:

Compare this to when Prasad falsely claimed in an intentionally leaked internal FDA memo that the COVID-19 vaccine had killed ten American children. Throwing red meat to his fellow anti-vaccine grifters on social media, Prasad shares Balwani’s belief that outright lying is acceptable conduct.

They also share a mutual hatred of Personal Protective Equipment:

Woefully out of his depth, proving himself to be completely unqualified and incompetent, Prasad is merely covering for his own failings just like his hero Balwani. Firing experts who actually know what they’re talking about, threatening & cursing out staff, and showing a total disregard for basic ethics, it’s evident that Prasad is not taking his duties as a civil servant seriously. If one wanted to compromise the Food & Drug Administration to a permanent end, staffing the leadership with abrasive cranks such as this is one way to do it.

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The Great Humiliation

When John Carreyrou finally started his investigation of Theranos, one wouldn’t be out of line to think that the startup had become “too big to fail.” No amount of obvious fraud was enough to halt the gravy train. Elizabeth Holmes was becoming a household name, who relished the spotlight at every turn as a “role model” for young girls. Cozy with the Obama Administration, the company even entertained a visit from former Vice President Joe Biden:

The same cheerleader who rallied Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq based on obviously fraudulent claims of “weapons of mass destruction” called this obviously fake carnival “the laboratory of the future.” Apparently, not a single White House staffer bothered to evaluate the validity of Theranos’ outlandish claims. None the less, this stunt only furthered the brand’s credibility.

As Carreyrou’s investigation into Theranos ramped up, Balwani began to behave more like a lowlife mafiaoso than a tech executive. Intimidating current and former employees was not enough. At one point, Balwani was having the reporter tailed and then driving around Arizona, personally threatening the doctors and patients who spoke with him.

Even through Theranos executives and their hotshot legal team pulled out every stop to silence the story, The Wall Street Journal published John Carreyrou’s atomic bombshell explosing the company’s deliberate fraud. Many wealthy and powerful people suddenly had a rotten egg on their faces. Not all would admit the shame of having been bamboozled, however:

Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen (interviewed above) is a Trump-supporting maniac with all sorts of nasty ties, including to Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” propaganda rag, and has produced all sorts of morally depraved rants. One doesn’t have to think too hard about what his feelings about federal regulatory authority might be. This same federal regulatory authority would inevitably be what brought an end to Theranos:

Holmes and Balwani’s response was to lead the company in “Fuck you, Carrey-rou!” chants. This did little to turn their fortunes around. The chief regulator of clinical laboratories, a federal organization now helmed by a man who invited a convicted pedophile to his Valentine’s Day party in 2016, found upon inspection that Theranos posed an “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” It wasn’t hard to see why:

CMS would ban Holmes and her company from the laboratory business. Theranos came under criminal investigation as well as a civil probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Holmes continued to parade in the spotlight none the less, hosting fundraisers for Hillary Clinton’s failed Presidential campaign and making more outlandish claims about the miniLab, claiming that it could test for viruses such as Zika. Just imagine if they had survived to 2020!

In the years of lengthy litigation which followed, which saw Elizabeth Holmes sent to Club Fed for screwing with rich people’s money, the real victims of Theranos began to emerge. This included over 75,000 Arizona citizens as part of their deal with Walgreens. In November 2021, a CNBC headline read: “Former Theranos patient testifies that a blood test at Walgreens came back with false positive for HIV.”

Holmes and her MAHA fans don’t consider what Carreyrou writes as “the emotional and the financial toll of a health care brought on by inaccurate results” to be a crime. Those who received inaccurate test results often had to pay out of their own pocket to finally receive accurate results. Heck, that’s not even what Holmes eventually went to jail for.

Now keep this in mind as we look at the current leadership philosophy of the Food & Drug Administration.

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Rise of the Fully Automated Malpractice

On January 6th of this year, Food & Drug Commissioner Marty Makary announced at what Better Offline’s Ed Zitron would call the “Anti-Consumer Electronics Show,” or CES, that the Food & Drug Administration would “cut unnecessary regulation and promote innovation” with regards to “artifical intelligence.” This is a dishonest framing for what is actually automated remixing largely based upon stolen work made by actually intelligent humans.

One might remember that last year, Makary promised to fast-track drug approvals by “unleashing” an in-house “AI” tool named “Elsa,” and that did not end well. Marty never acknowledged the error, because this was yet another taxpayer-funded government handout to yet another scam artist. Doubling down on this “AI” scam, Makary is going all in on making “AI-enabled wearables” an essential requirement of the agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.” His boss RFK Jr. has said as much:

Now, no serious physician will tell you that having an electronic device recording your health metrics 24/7 is going to magically improve your health. More data does not necessarily translate into better outcomes. However, if you were part of an authoritarian regime that wanted to massively expand the surveillance state, encouraging this in one form or another would be a great way to do so. We’ve already seen federal agencies abuse this.

Many express concern that this would enable insurance companies to jack up rates or deny coverage to people not deemed to be “Making America Healthy.” Worse, it might become a requirement for Medicaid/Medicare eligibility. It also lines the pockets of wellness grifters, such as selling glucose monitors to people without diabetes.

What these scam startups at the Anti-Consumer Electronics Show are pitching to the public is that if you purchase their “AI-enabled” wearables, the onboard artificial intelligence will analyze your day-to-day health metrics and provide “personalized” recommendations for your exercise and diet. This all sounds very impressive, sure. Yet when you put the glossy advertising to the side, the reality of what “artificial intelligence” has demonstrated in the real world is quite concerning:

• The federal government’s “Eat Real Food” website features a chatbot which generates detailed, unsafe guides on inserting various foods up your rectum.

• Multiple children have been “coached” into taking their own lives by chatbots.

• Patients are turning up in the hospital with organ damage after following diet guides produced by ChatGPT.

• FDA-Authorized medical AI devices are recalled at double the standard rate

• An AI-enabled sinus surgery system has been linked to skull punctures, major arterial damage, and strokes

This is the “technology” that the federal government wants surveilling your health at all times and is dismantling regulatory safeguards for. The same disregard that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani had for the public’s health has now become the standard of the Food & Drug Administration. How is this anything but a federal handout to lowlife scam artists and grifters? As John Carreyrou wrote in 2018,

Emphasis on “was,” as it’s clear now that Theranos walked so “Make America Healthy Again” could run. Treating patients as lab rats for non-functional garbage to mislead investors is not “promoting innovation.” This is not only an insult to patients who are entitled to safe & competent care, but also to the hardworking doctors and nurses who rely upon effective technological innovation to save lives. What “MAHA” is doing is criminally indefensible.

This is a federal handout to scam artists.

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Closing Thoughts

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is phenomenal (and my personal favorite) roller coaster of arrogant incompetence. Cursed to fail from the beginning, Holmes and Balwani could do nothing for Theranos but double down on fraud in a masturbatory reign of terror over their employees. The filmed adaptations and documentaries fail to truly highlight the depths of absurdity all involved found themselves in, as well as the exploitative suffering visited upon the general public.

Our legal system did not punish Elizabeth Holmes for the trauma her fraudulent testing inflicted upon the public, but for humiliating wealthy investors and corporate partners. Political leaders such as Joe Biden never apologized or suffered consequences for lending credibility to such obvious fraud. Now, the story told in Bad Blood has become a blueprint for widespread fraud on an unprecedented scale.

It’s clear what the endgame of “MAHA” is: The dismantling of federal regulatory safeguards so that scam artists and grifters may exploit the public, for profit guaranteed by the government. They see Elizabeth Holmes as a victim of tyranny, as their vision of “medical freedom” is the freedom to hurt others for personal gain. This is the enemy of all decent people, and there is no “middle ground” or “compromise” to be made, lest they enslave and kill us all to serve their perverse fantasies.

“Bad Blood,” indeed.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, published by Penguin Random House in 2018 and can be found wherever books are sold.

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When you agree to work for an Administration helmed by a such a vile excuse for a man, whose history of vile racist & misogynistic deeds - including rape & pedophilia - looms beyond measure, it speaks volumes about the moral depravity of one’s own character. Your soul becomes stained irrevocably. No matter your imagined grievances about the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there can be no justification to rally behind someone who has utterly nothing to offer the world but death & suffering. “That way, madness lies,” as The Bard of Avon warns us.

The Department of Health and Human Services, an umbrella for multiple essential agencies such as the Food & Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, has chosen to unify under a banner of misogyny. Across the board, the leadership of our federal public health agencies has embraced an anti-culture that has created a hostile work environment for the doctors and scientists tasked with protecting the American people. While a war on vaccines & other ridiculous antics have dominated the headlines, a dark shadow now looms over the Department of Health and Human Services.

The rot starts at the very top: As I have said before and will repeat until I am blue in the face: the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a scam artist who drove his wife to suicide after she uncovered a “little black book” rating his affairs by the explicitness of the sex acts performed. University administrators did nothing and cowardly stayed silent as members of their faculty publicly endorsed this exploitative crank, many of which left to go enlist in his war against the public’s health.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this malignant infection would spread across our most essential federal agencies in rapid fashion.

Section I. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary had already established himself to be an obnoxious, misogynistic fraud long before joining the Trump Administration. He would frequently attack the existence of Post-Acute COVID Syndome, or “Long COVID,” a disabling chronic illness which disproportionately affects women. Going on FOX News in 2023, he proclaimed “There is no Long COVID, there is only long anxiety,” in a revival of the long disproven and deeply misogynistic “hysteria” trope dating back centuries. Johns Hopkins did not consider this an offense worth termination of his employment.

At the Food & Drug Administration, Commissioner Marty Makary has championed menopause hormone therapy (MHT) through a series of stacked and biased “panels” which feature a number of unscientific quacks. (I am largely paraphrasing Dr. Jen Gunter of The Vajenda, who has done excellent reporting on the matter.) Makary has claimed that MHT is just as good as antibiotics, suggesting every woman should be taking MHT, which he insists on misrepresenting as “hormone replacement therapy.”

Championing MHT, Makary has pathetically and completely unscientifically claimed that this will help protect women from cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s. Marty has also blamed menopause for divorce and claimed that MHT cures depression. After getting everything wrong on COVID-19, Makary has made it blatantly obvious to everyone with sense that he knows utterly nothing about women’s health. Marty is simply exploiting a very serious set of issues to manufacture a spectacle in which he and his fellow ignorant misogynists are the real heroes of women’s health.

Marty Makary would also be instrumental in bringing UCSF’s Vinay Prasad, who made himself an outcast in medicine for social media clout, to the FDA to become the nation’s top vaccine regulator. This was a disastrously pathetic and utterly predictable mistake. However, both shared in mocking those infected and disabled by SARS-CoV-2, and this took precedent over relevant knowledge or experience.

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Section IA. FDA CBER Director Vinay Prasad

In the process of destroying his professional reputation amongst his colleagues in medicine, Vinay Prasad’s social media antics frequently involved vicious attacks on women in journalism, science, and medicine. He incited abuse and harassment by his anti-vaccine followers against those who tried to prevent COVID-19’s harms. The administration of UCSF chose to turn a blind eye to these antics, even after it was brought to their attention on multiple occasions.

It was obvious that if given power, Vinay Prasad would exploit it as an opportunity to abuse, as he himself openly fantasized about firing thousands upon thousands of federal employees prior to joining Makary’s FDA. Now in power, Prasad has consistently appeared in the headlines for his unprofessional antics and inappropriate misconduct, including sexual harassment. It should surprise no one that the same misogyny Prasad brought to social media would be expanded upon in the Food & Drug Administration.

The only difference is, the American taxpayer is now footing the bill - including over $65,000 a year in travel expenses so Prasad may work remotely from San Francisco, something he considers to be a fireable offense. When he’s not acting a fool at the FDA, Prasad has become another common slimeball preying on women - first on dating apps, and now at the Food & Drug Administration.

As Dr. Angela Rasmussen has reported, Prasad has been concealing his marriage status to dates and lying about his age: great foundations for the start of any healthy relationship. The same general disregard and disrespect he has shown for women in medicine also applies to his personal life. It should now come to no surprise that recent reporting shows him engaging in sexual harassment of FDA employees, amongst other abuses. This is an established pattern of misconduct.

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Section IB. FDA CDER Director Tracy Beth Hoeg

A completely unqualified sports physician, Tracy Beth Hoeg has a long history of misrepresenting herself as an expert on masks, vaccines, and all things related to COVID-19 in order to profit on social media, frequently writing fraudulent “scientific papers” alongside Vinay Prasad - published in open access journals not subject to peer review, in order to farm outrage and build her following.

As reported by Lizzy Lawrence in STAT News, Tracy announced to the FDA her plans to go after RSV shots and SSRIs in pregnancy; further fearmongering about medical interventions she clearly knows nothing about that will result in dead babies and traumatized mothers if successful. As part of her speech, she included a quote from Ayn Rand. What many aren’t familiar with is that Ayn Rand’s first love was William Richard Hickman, a serial killer who enjoyed murdering and dismembering little girls. Tracy’s hero found this quite intoxicating:

“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should…no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman.”

This is the guiding philosophy Tracy Beth Hoeg is bringing to the Food & Drug Administration as part of the war against the health of American women and children.

Section II. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz

Another longtime scam artist and grifter, abusing his slot on daytime television to peddle all sorts of wellness grifts, Mehmet Oz fit right in with RFK Jr.’s gang of goons. Seeking to privatize Medicare for his own personal profit, Oz has made a number of horrendous and indefensible statements upon joining the Trump Administration. He clearly sees his fellow American citizen as mere cattle to be bled dry by his rich buddies and fellow scam artists.

So, it should come as no surprise, just hours after Biden’s former COVID Czar and Brown University Dean of Public Health Ashish Jha endorsed Oz’s performance as CMS Director, that it would be revealed Mehmet Oz considered a convicted pedophile a dear friend. In 2016, Oz even went so far to invite this convicted pedophile to his Valentine’s Day party. Are we really supposed to believe that someone who hosts pedophiles at his Valentine’s Day parties is capable of “good leadership,” according to the Brown University Dean of Public Health?

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Section III. National Institutes of Health Director & Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya also engaged in childish antics on social media, including petty insults and absurdly unscientific proclamations. As covered before, Podcast Jay refused to acknowledge when female doctors who actually treated COVID-19 patients pointed out his frequent errors, outright denying their hands-on experiences. This unprofessional disrespect should have seen him terminated from Stanford, instead of rewarded with a pathetic excuse for a “pandemic policy” conference.

Completely unqualified and inexperienced for the role of NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya’s tenure has been utterly disastrous. Willfully neglecting his duties to go around podcasting on the taxpayer’s dime, the stain of misogyny has infected what was once the world’s leading hub for medical research. Now, you can’t even get a research grant funded if it dares to mention “women” or “female,” that elusive minority which makes up only half of the population. Pledging to remake the NIH into the “research arm of MAHA,” it’s clear that women’s health is not a priority to the chronic podcaster.

This “choice” is essentially condemning countless American women to death by compromising their medical care, something Jay gleefully considers a “MAHA Win” by “curing DEI.” The depravity doesn’t stop there, however. Jay Bhattacharya has now gleefully embraced the brand of a sadistic rapist.

During the 2026 Super Bowl, the Department of Health & Human Services burned millions of taxpayer dollars to unveil a new “Eat Real Food” advertising campaign as part of the “beef & dairy industry federal handout” dietary guidelines endorsed by Thiel-backed Emily Oster, which features a chatbot that generates detailed instructions on how to shove assorted fruit and vegetables up your ass. The mascot for this campaign is the former boxer Mike Tyson, whose career ended after he bit off the ear of a competitor live on pay-per-view. Tyson now sells weed edibles which come in the shape of human ears, making a joke and a quick buck out of his violent sadism.

On top of this, Mike Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992. Afterwards, he said he would rape his victim and her mother, and also bragged about beating his wife with “the hardest punch I’ve ever thrown.” This is the “mascot” for the Department of Health and Human Services’ “Eat Real Food” campaign. Taking a break from his exhaustive podcasting schedule, Jay Bhattacharya decided to get in on the “fun:”

“Be like Mike Tyson. Eat real food.”

This includes a photoshopped image of the NIH Director wearing the facial tattoo of a sadistic rapist upon his own. Jay Bhattacharya is a father of two children, and he is telling them that a vile, abusive rapist is a role model to take after. Whatever criticisms one might have of previous NIH leadership, there is absolutely no defending this. Why would any young girl in America risk going into STEM when this is the culture they’ll be subjected to?

Jay Bhattacharya is no man, but a vile narcissistic worm who, knowing nothing about science or medicine, instead spouts off an endless stream of nonsense and now waves pom-poms for rapists. While it was a simple Photoshop edit, Jay will never wash off the brand of the rapist he has gleefully embraced. Nor will it ever wash off those who publicly endorsed this utterly useless and willfully ignorant podcaster for the role of NIH Director.

Final Verdict

It is now undeniable that the Department of Health and Human Services, and its underlying agencies, has become a hostile and unsafe working environment. A workplace in which its leadership engages in abuse and sexual harassment, while embracing pedophiles and celebrating rapists, is completely unacceptable. This is nothing more than the Department of Hating Women now.

All of these charlatans leading our federal public health agencies established a pattern of completely unacceptable behavior in the years leading up to their joining the Trump Administration. Those of us who tried to sound the alarm were mocked and ridiculed, while the actual villains saw their misconduct grossly rewarded. Across the board, from journalism to academia, our institutions have completely failed in responding to this depravity.

We will see more stories of unprofessional misconduct against women at HHS emerge in the coming years; it is inevitable. If we are ever to restore science and medicine in America, it must begin with a complete and total eradication of this “culture,” instead of cowardly trying to negotiate some sort of “middle ground” to “restore trust” with those who celebrate pedophiles & rapists. Accept nothing less.

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It has been over three years since I started this series of research updates on COVID-19’s impacts, primarily designed as a resource for physicians. Naively, I had hoped this would help dispel the common myth that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is merely a respiratory virus, that simply goes in one lung & out the other, without any lingering effects. Unfortunately, the population-wide disease burden of COVID-19 has continued to grow, and the American federal government is doing everything in their power to sweep this under the rug. COVID-19 is still a disease worth preventing, and the bottom of this article again includes a section on the topic.

Even in the face of federal censorship of science, the work continues. Nearing a thousand studies across 10 editions, organized by topic and organ, What COVID-19 Does to the Body has hopefully proven itself to be an essential resource in dispelling the myths of the anti-vaccine war on science. I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank everyone for their support over the years, and if you’ve appreciated this work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription (25% off!) or leaving a few bucks in the tip jar:

This time around, the biggest insights can be found in COVID’s impacts on children, the immune system, and the elephant in the room that is Post-Acute COVID Syndrome, better known as Long COVID.

You can find the previous edition of What COVID-19 Does to the Body here:

• Why covid-19 is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one” (BMJ)

Children & COVID-19

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

• “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)

• Long term cardiovascular effects on COVID-19 infection in children (International Journal of Cardiology)

• Fatigue in children and young people up to 24 months after infection with SARS-CoV-2 (Nature Scientific Reports)

• Neurological and neurodevelopmental effects of Covid and MIS-C on children (Nature Pediatric Research)

• “Children and young people have higher risks of rare vascular and inflammatory diseases up to 12 months after a first COVID-19 diagnosis” (The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health)

• Increasing Numbers of Children Aged 5-19 Years with Memory Problems in Sweden and Norway (Archives of Clinical and Biomedical Research)

• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children is a SARS-CoV-2 triggered Kawasaki disease (Nature Pediatric Research)

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

Cognitive & Neurological Impairment (Brain)

• Synergy of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 Infections in the Human Brain (Pathogens)

• COVID-19 infection associated with increased risk of new-onset vascular dementia in adults ≥50 years (npj Dementia)

• Distinct brain alterations and neurodegenerative processes in cognitive impairment associated with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (Nature Communications)

• “SARS-CoV-2-human protein interactions may lead to the development of delirium, psychosis, seizures, encephalitis, stroke, sensory impairments, peripheral nerve diseases, and autoimmune disorders.” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience)

• The compounding roles of gut-immune-brain axis and COVID19 in manifestation of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (Discover Immunity)

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

• Exploring Alice in Wonderland syndrome in adults with persistent headache after COVID-19 (BMC Neurology)

• 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)

Eyes, Ears & Nose

• “COVID-19 has been associated with high prevalences of retinal diseases in humans.” (PNAS)

• Kinematic handwriting impairments in olfactory dysfunction-related post-acute covid syndrome: short and long-term neurophysiological considerations (Brain and Cognition)

• “…improvements in olfactory performance occur only after 20 months following COVID-19” (Brain, Behavior, & Immunity - Health)

Heart, Lungs, and Cardiovascular Health

• SARS-CoV-2 reshapes m6A methylation in long noncoding RNAs of human lung cells (NAR Molecular Medicine)

• “The risk of developing cardiac arrhythmias is increased after COVID-19 infection in the long term.” (Journal of Arrhythmia)

• Paternal SARS-CoV-2 infection impacts sperm small noncoding RNAs and increases anxiety in offspring in a sex-dependent manner (Nature Communications)

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

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

Immune System & Cancer

• T-cell exhaustion in COVID-19: what do we know? (Frontiers in Immunology)

• COVID-19 is “Airborne AIDS”: provocative oversimplification, emerging science, or something in between? (AJPM Focus)

• Low CD3+ and CD4+ T cell levels predict need for ventilatory support and in-hospital mortality in patients with COVID-19 (Frontiers in Medicine)

• SARS-CoV-2 peptide fragments selectively dysregulate specific immune cell populations via Gaussian curvature targeting (PNAS)

• “SARS-CoV-2 infection increases the risk of autoimmune diseases, particularly those affecting vascular and connective tissue.” (Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology)

• “SARS-CoV-2 causes lasting immune dysregulation for over 20 months.” (International Journal of Infectious Diseases)

• Post-COVID impairment of memory T cell responses to community-acquired pathogens can be rectified by activating cellular metabolism (bioRxiv)

• Dysregulated IFN-γ, IL-6 and TNF-α after COVID-19 is suggestive of lowered innate immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 and MTB (Tuberculosis)

• T cell-driven sustained inflammation and immune dysregulation mimicking immunosenescence for up to three years post-COVID-19 (Immunity & Inflammation)

• “SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with elevated risks of HPV-related carcinoma in situ and cancer” (Discover Oncology)

• Baseline Dysregulation in B, T, and NK Cells in COVID-19 Predicts Increased Late Mortality but Not Long-COVID Symptoms (Viruses)

• Oncogenic potential of SARS-CoV-2—targeting hallmarks of cancer pathways (BMC Cell Communication and Signaling)

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

Livers, Kidney, and the Gut

• COVID-19-induced gastrointestinal autonomic dysfunction: A systematic review (World Journal of Clinical Cases)

• COVID-19 and chronic liver disease (Nature Scientific Reports)

• Levels of circulating kidney injury markers and IL-10 identify non-critically ill patients with COVID-19 at risk of death (JCI Insight)

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

Long COVID & Disability

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

• “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)

• “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)

• Experiences and coping strategies among patients with mild COVID-19 who develop post COVID conditions (Nature Scientific Reports)

• Long COVID in the context of driving styles: An empirical study employing connected vehicle trajectory data (Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering)

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

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

• Fatigue in Post-COVID-Condition is accompanied by hypoperfusion of right-occipital areas (PLOS One)

• Important Long-COVID Lessons From AIDS Researchers (Medscape)

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

• Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence and prevalence of [POTS] (European Heart Journal - Quality of Care & Clinical Outcomes)

• Persistent neuromuscular disorders associated with changes in tibialis anterior and gastrocnemius lateralis muscle architecture in long-covid: an observational longitudinal study (Nature Scientific Reports)

• Exploring the Role of Race/Ethnicity, Metropolitan Status, and Health Insurance in Long COVID Among U.S. Adults (Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities)

Overall Mortality

• “…from October 2022 to September 2023, there were an estimated … 101 300 deaths. From October 2023 to September 2024, there were an estimated … 100 800 deaths.” (JAMA Internal Medicine)

• “COVID-19 survivors had a 69% higher mortality risk over 3.5 years.” (International Journal of Infectious Diseases)

• “COVID-19 is associated with markedly higher short-term mortality than influenza” (International Journal of Infectious Diseases)

Pregnancy

• “Maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection in pregnancy was associated with increased risk of adverse neurodevelopmental diagnoses by age 3 years” (Obstetrics & Gynecology)

• Presence of SARS-CoV-2 in fetal organs via intraamniotic infection (Nature Communications)

Reinfections of COVID-19

• Distinct characteristics of T cell receptor repertoire associated with the SARS-CoV-2 reinfection (Frontiers in Immunology)

Reproductive Health

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

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

Viral Persistence

• “…SARS-CoV-2 sequences can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the DNA of infected human cells” (PNAS)

• “…persistent viral replication in the presence of weakened immune responses is thought to be a major driver of the emergence of highly divergent immune escape variants that can cause waves of infection in the broader population.” (Communications Biology)

• Extensive evolution and T cell escape by SARS-CoV-2 in a 2.5-year persistent infection of an immunocompromised host (iScience)

COVID-19 Prevention & Transmission

• Intranasal administration of broad-spectrum macrocyclic peptide inhibitor protects against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants (Nature Communications)

• WHO urged to make respirator masks the standard for workers in “all healthcare settings” (BMJ)

• “…PPE is effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection among HCWs.” (Journal of Korean Medicine)

• “COVID-19 vaccination is associated with a lower risk of severe disease and preterm birth regardless of variant time period.” (JAMA)

• “…vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality” (JAMA Network Open)

• “Among the vaccinated population, additional doses were associated with added protection against long COVID” (Nature Communications)

• COVID-19 vaccination carries no association with childbirth rates in Sweden (Nature Communications Medicine)

• Indoor air: The science of indoor air and pathways to improve indoor air quality in Australia (Australian Academy of Science)

• A novel aerosol induction-removal system for mitigating airborne disease transmission in shared indoor environments (Building and Environment)

What COVID-19 Does to the Body will continue as long as people still develop serious health issues from repeated bouts with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Make sure to subscribe and support the Pandemic Accountability Index as the federal war on science and public health continues in 2026 and beyond. Stay safe, protect yourself and your loved ones, and share this widely!

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You have almost certainly heard this refrain in one form or another from pandemic commentators such as Emily Oster, Leana Wen, Vinay Prasad, Jay Bhattacharya, and others about how “trust in public health was lost during the COVID-19 pandemic,” or the importance of “restoring trust.” Here is a well-documented scam artist & abusive creep insisting that he is “building trust” by attacking vaccines:

Before Congress just the other day, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya lazily threw out MAHA’s latest meme, “bu-buh...but Denmark!” No, seriously:

“Denmark has strong trust in public health. That’s what we’re trying to do. Re-establish that public trust.”

Denmark is a nation of 6 million people, largely homogenous, and has a universal healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt its citizens or drive them into the arms of wellness grifting scam artists. What Denmark certainly lacks is a constant stream of headlines of childish, unprofessional antics at the leadership of their equivalents to the FDA, NIH, and CDC. You know, the sort of reporting you would see if someone was acting in an untrustworthy manner.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch of Misleading Narratives

What Podcast Jay & the COVID Contrarian ilk don’t want you to know is that the vast majority of Americans didn’t think too much about public health as a whole prior to 2020. COVID-19 was the first infectious disease pandemic for nearly all of us. There was hardly blind trust, but more of a collective apathy beyond getting kids routine vaccinations. What these commentators are really doing here is a manipulative refrain that borders on cartoon logic.

You’re meant to believe that clumsy scientists engineered the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that mustache twirling doctors sought to corrupt an entire generation of children by advocating for masks and vaccines, and public health officials sought to seize political power by exploiting an imagined crisis. There’s a ridiculous double standard at play here. Doctors, scientists, and public health officials all need to be viewed with suspicion, constantly looking over their shoulder out of fear, while those who casually throw out these sorts of allegations and regularly get basic facts wrong are to be blindly assumed as noble and trustworthy truth-tellers.

You’re supposed to ignore an overwhelming torrent of well-funded propaganda designed to mislead the public and instead blame doctors and scientists for being targeted by much of these bad-faith attacks. Forget civic democracy and open debate, we should let lecherous billionaires influence and dictate the nation’s response to a generational crisis. Who know who truly needs an advocate in America? The viruses that can make us very sick, disabled, and even kill us.

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Just Whom Among Us Is Trustworthy?

Those who pretend to be “restoring trust” by attacking American science and medicine imply that they are arbiters of what is trustworthy behavior. What do their own records have to say about this?

• When Leana Wen granted legitimacy to the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 deaths were being overcounted in the Washington Post, instead accurately reporting how they were actually being undercounted at 15-30%, was she acting in a trustworthy manner?

• When Emily Oster profited by falsely claiming that COVID-19 wasn’t transmitted in schools, or foolishly telling parents to merely treat it was just another flu or cold, is this the words of a reliable judge of what is trustworthy?

• When NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya spent years childishly branding so many as “Covidian” cultists, is that how trust is earned?

• When FDA Commissioner Marty Makary insisted that the COVID-19 vaccines killed countless children based on anecdotes, is that to be considered trustworthy behavior from a public official?

• Was the constant stream of expletive-filled outbursts by the FDA’s Vinay Prasad at dozens upon dozens of targets anything more than obnoxious social media antics?

Back in 2013, as Emily Oster was making the rounds to promote her book claiming that a drink a day during pregnancy was perfectly safe, she was confronted by Susan Astley Ph.D, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics and... director of the Washington State Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Diagnostic & Prevention network of clinics. Astley walked Oster through the data and explained her numerous errors. Now, the trustworthy thing to do would be to acknowledge the mistake and try to pull the book from publication until the text could be revised.

Oster did no such thing, only to double down on frequent interviews and podcasts, and go on to make numerous serious errors regarding the COVID-19 pandemic that certainly contributed to much preventable death and disability. Yet her and her ilk see fit to hold everyone else to some ridiculous standard, while never admitting to their own errors. This is because “restoring trust in public health” is a rhetorical feint.

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Don’t Feed the Vultures

No amount of scientific arguments made in good faith or supported by mountains of hard evidence is ever going to placate the howling jackals of reactionary mythology, much less force them to admit their frequent errors. Why give up such a lucrative grift spouting nonsense, whether it’s on Twitter or the pages of America’s leading newspapers? What is really meant by “restoring trust in public health” is by simply abandoning all scientific rigor and blindly adopting an absurd platform of demands, regardless of who suffers as a result. These saboteurs demand blind trust in their proclamations, while casting doubt and suspicion upon everyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

To supposedly “restore trust,” this means turning a blind eye to patients dying of viruses transmitted in the hospital. It means shrugging when schools are drowning in outbreaks of preventable illness. It means not investing in the development of new vaccines that would save lives. It means writing off preventable deaths as those who simply failed to become “metabolically healthy.” Instead, you are supposed to trust a “Nutrition Chatbot” which will generate potentially dangerous guides for inserting various “real foods” up your rectum.

Any credible doctor or scientist will tell you that they don’t expect blind trust from the public. A healthy dose of skepticism and an open mind are for more valuable, especially when navigating a national crisis. On the other hand, those who insist these doctors and scientists need to “restore trust in public health” insist on dedicated faith in their proclamations, while turning a blind eye to their many errors.

When you see this sort of rhetoric in opinion-editorial columns, Senate hearings, or otherwise, you can rest assured that this is not an argument worth taking seriously. They’re demanding that others be held to a standard they refuse to hold themselves to, and this is not the behavior of a trustworthy person. Blaming doctors and scientists for the intentional sabotage by an outspoken few is utterly absurd.

It’s long past time for the general public to stand up and start pushing back.

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Notes on Hospitals is public domain and can be found for free on the Internet Archive.

In a recent profile of economist Emily Oster, we compared her sloppy COVID-19 “data-driven” minimizing to the legendary nurse Florence Nightingale and her 1859 book Notes on Hospitals. I figured it was worth taking a deeper look at through the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notes on Hospitals is essentially a 19th century technical manual on the design, construction, and administration of hospitals. Nightingale’s premise that the hospitals of the time were failing in their mission of the treatment and care of patients, and she supports this hypothesis with a mountain of actual data, as well as a series of proposals to dramatically improve patient outcomes instead of simply shrugging her shoulders and denying the problem.

In Nightingale’s time as a nurse in the 1800s, hospitals were often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and rather unhygienic. These could be gloomy, depressing places where your chances of survival as a patient was fraught with risk. Transmission of diseases between patients and healthcare workers was rampant, with doctors and nurses taking a rather apathetic attitude for what often contributed to poor outcomes, including death. Attitudes of the general public towards doctors & hospitals at the time were…not great, Florence writes:

Let us compare this to the state of American public schools prior to 2020: Teachers nationwide struggled with their goal of educating students in overcrowded and poorly ventilated classrooms. Often, they must dedicate time and resources to provide for the essential needs of students in a nation where child poverty is rampant. These were not pleasant places; pediatric suicide rates actually decreased when remote schooling was implemented in 2020, much to the chagrin of cranks like Jay Bhattacharya & those making up the “Urgency of Normal,” who pretended that repeatedly infecting children with COVID-19 was the best thing for their mental health. Medical research has proven otherwise. This collective apathy over both the state of European hospitals in the 1800s, and the American schools of today to fulfill their essential functions, is quite woeful and indefensible.

Nightingale’s writing is incredibly firm: the collective apathy around hospital-acquired (nosocomial) infections is completely unacceptable. The justifications for irresponsibility will sound hauntingly familiar to some of you: that infection is merely “inevitable.” Florence is having none of this:

Over 150 years later, with all the rapid advances in science and medicine we’ve made, surely, we would be all the more prepared to mitigate an airborne pandemic such as COVID-19, right? Surely, there could be no controversy about the importance of infection control measures in healthcare settings, yes? Alas, the media often platformed doctors such as Tufts’ “Chief Infection Control Officer,” Shira Doron, who spent years rallying against mask mandates in hospitals, claiming that “seeing smiles” was more important than preventing patients from getting sicker, developing chronic illness, or even dying as a result of contracting COVID-19 in the hospital. Research from Australia found that hospital-acquired COVID-19 had a much higher fatality rate than in the general population.

Before joining the Food & Drug Administration, University of California San Francisco’s Vinay Prasad even went so far as to tell his rabid, anti-vaccine fans to “resist” mask mandates on his YouTube channel, in a deeply embarrassing and pathetic display of indignant ignorance:

One might be led to think that some form of collective amnesia seemed to sweep over much of the medical profession in 2020, as Florence Nightingale clearly refutes this over a century and a half prior:

This is all quite disturbing, to see certain individuals who wish to enjoy the wealth and societal prestige shy away from the professional responsibility that comes with their role. This isn’t simply about mask mandates in hospitals, either. A large part of Notes on Hospitals is centered around the need of improved ventilation, as Florence writes extensively. Here the aggressive apathy of frauds like Prasad & Doron laid bare:

Obviously, our collective understanding of medicine has advanced a great deal since the 1850s. On top of this, we have great advances in the ventilation and filtration of our air, thanks to engineering science. You can read the science for yourself:

Before joining the Biden Administration, the Brown University Dean of Public Health Ashish Jha advised his childrens’ private school on measures to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks. Upon joining the Biden Administration as COVID Czar, Jha abandoned sharing this guidance with America’s public schools in deference to Biden & Zients’ failed pandemic response of indifference to preventable suffering.

He would later collect an award from ASHRAE upon the development of a new indoor air quality standard, of which no attempt was made to implement in schools. While certain grifters like Emily Oster will insist that the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions is responsible for “learning loss,” it’s clear now in 2026 that the normalization of unmitigated diseases outbreaks as “inevitable” has had a serious negative impact on the American education system.

The principles of Florence’s Notes on Hospitals can be readily adapted to other essential institutions like public schools and improved upon, as Nightingale writes:

For what is a supposed “post-pandemic” era, we see a constant stream of schools shutting down due to outbreaks of illness alongside a steady rise in chronic absenteeism. It’s quite simple, really - if we as adults carelessly choose to fail to provide a safe and healthy environment for children to learn, then just why should they dedicate themselves to their studies? We are choosing to imprint upon them the values of apathy and ignorance. Nightingale expands upon this further when dismantling the apathy around “inevitable” infections, in which she exposes the willfully incurious of today:

“Have those who put forward this doctrine of ‘inevitable infection’ among washerwomen ever examined the process of washing, the appliances by which it is done, and the place where the women wash? If they will do so, they will very generally find a small, dark, wet, unventilated, and overcrowded little room or shed, in which there is hardly space to turn about - so full of steam loaded with organic matter that it is hardly possible to see across the room. Is it surprising that the linen is badly washed, that it is imperfectly dried, and that the washerwomen are poisoned by inhaling organic matter and foul air?”

Let us compare this to the countless attacks on all manner of engineering tools to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, from N95 respirators to Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to HEPA filtration to farUVC lighting:

A total lack of curiosity as to the basic mechanics and principles as to how such technology works, willfully refusing to grow one’s knowledge and understanding, all so that one may make smug and snarky remarks. Over a century and a half apart, and the same challenges Nightingale faced in Europe are happening today with COVID-19. Florence has little patience for it, and neither should you:

Had social media existed in 19th Century Europe, there would be no shortage of tweets, vlogs, and other such garbage assailing Nightingale’s position. She would be harassed and threatened by the fans of her professional colleagues in an attempt to hound her into silence. Economists such as Jay Bhattacharya or Emily Oster would try to denigrate her proposals as ineffective and overly costly with junk “data.” Conservatives would demonize and vilify Florence as some sort of perverse villain.

The beauty of human history and the written word as a portal to the past is that it liberates us from having to repeat the same mistakes, but we must actively make a commitment to do so. How shameful that many credentialed academics at multiple universities, of which young students pay a great deal of tuition to learn from, have been so dutifully exposed by a book written well over a century and a half ago. So much needless suffering and death could have been prevented, and can be prevented now, if we unite under the principle Nightingale established: “Ignorance and mismanagement lie at the root of all such presumed cases of infection.”

Closing Thoughts

As Levar Burton always said on Reading Rainbow, don’t take my word for it. Even if you’re not interested in pouring over architectural diagrams and detail medical statistics from the 1800s, it’s worth skimming over the mountain of evidence contained within Notes on Hospitals that supports Nightingale’s thesis. Compare her mastery of the subject matter to many of the credentialed academics who have done their best to sabotage the COVID-19 response, and the sloppy work they have produced and misrepresented in order to bamboozle the public.

If a doctor today is repeating the same unscientific myths that were debunked well over a century ago, it should be a stain upon their credibility. Now in modern America, it gets you jobs in the federal government. We have a great deal of work to do as a nation if we are to ever right this ship, and it starts with a revival of the principals Nightingale established over a century and a half ago.

Notes on Hospitals is public domain and can be found for free on the Internet Archive.

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The history of American economic theory has long struggled with basic ethics. Milton Friedman argued against food safety regulations on the basis that if children died from eating contaminated food, then consumers can simply stop shopping from that brand, and they’ll go out of business. If a factory is poisoning the local drinking water supply, then people will simply stop doing business with them. The very idea of government regulation simply preventing such needless suffering is considered a grave violation of “economic freedom.”

As a Harvard graduate turned Brown University economist, Emily Oster is a proud student of this tradition. Rationalizing preventable deaths as “the cost of doing business,” a line now aped by senior CDC official Ralph Abraham in defense of unmitigated measles outbreaks. Oster quickly became very popular with conservative billionaires. Instead of identifying Oster as their political enemy, American liberals have embraced her as a household name with important insights.

Now in 2026, Oster has firmly established herself as a cheerleader for the “Make America Healthy Again” war against vaccines and the public’s health. This profile serves as a chronicle of Oster’s long history of wildly unethical misconduct and blatantly incorrect proclamations. Unless stated otherwise, quotes are taken from her Twitter account “ProfEmilyOster.

Pre-COVID Pandemic: The Birthplace of Osterism

On February 5th 2005, Emily Oster kicked off her Harvard grad student career by attacking Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen, claiming Hepatitis B caused women to give birth to boys, and was soon forced to redact her paper in shame after kicking off a media firestorm. What should have been a lesson in humility was soon forgotten.

In July 2005, Emily Oster writes in Forbes an attack on the “President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” or PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives. She claimed that “treating HIV doesn’t pay…it isn’t economical.” Sorry if you were born in Africa and contracted HIV/AIDS, but this American economist has appointed herself the arbiter of whose lives have value and which are financially disposable - with these lifesaving drugs exceeding the “value of a statistical life” Really making the vile racist Milton Friedman proud! She would be rewarded with a TED Talk for this vile screed, only to be completely eviscerated in Asterisk Magazine by Justin Sandefur in 2024:

In 2013, Emily Oster publishes Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong, in which she declares that letting pregnant women drink alcohol is a feminist issue - that the precautionary principle of public health is what’s truly keeping women down. Thinking she knows better than the overwhelming consensus of doctors, including obstetricians & gynecologists, this economist decides that pregnant mothers should just roll the dice on fetal alcohol syndrome.

These sorts of statements should have seen Oster quietly dismissed from any sort of serious policy debate. Instead, she would go on to experience professional success, writing parenting books such as 2022’s The Family Firm; arguing that you should manage your children’s growth & development like a “data-driven” business. This insistence on assigning a dollar value to every aspect of the human existence can easily lead you to rather questionable moral beliefs & unethical practices, as we will soon see in 2020.

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2020: The Full Automated Osterism Opinion Editorial Factory

In the Spring of 2020, dozens of New York City educators died of COVID-19 in a matter of weeks, with many more winding up disabled by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This forced American schools to institute assorted “remote learning” programs in order to facilitate some form of education in the chaos of the Trump Administration’s willful mismanagement. It’s a simple matter: if educators are dying by the dozens, and kids are too sick to pay attention, then students aren’t learning a darned thing.

Brown University Economist Emily Oster decided that she magically knew better, and became a multi-millionaire as a tireless advocate on behalf of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In a February 2021 episode of the “People I Admire” podcast for Freakonomics, she explains her origin story as a mother who despised being asked to raise her own children in the midst of a national crisis:

“And like, to be totally frank, my children were at my house all the time and I was eager to dispense with them to an outside location. I just put up a Google form in my newsletter.” -Feb. 26, 2021 Freaknomics “People I Admire” Podcast

This is jaw-dropping for someone who claims to promote “data driven” parenting. This Brown University economist casually omits the fact that she has no way, nor interest, of verifying the accuracy of these Google Form responses. She has no way of knowing if some random shmuck in the Eastern European countryside is submitting fictional reports while pretending to be an Atlanta, GA based mother. Even if this Atlanta-based mother is real, Oster has no way of verifying if her Google form submission is accurate.

This makes the collected “data” unreliable at best, and utterly fraudulent at worst. By any academic or professional standard, you can’t present unverified survey responses as hard, scientific data. It is completely unethical to influence policymaking in a crisis with this sort of chicanery.

Journalists at America’s leading news outlets found themselves completely unable to ask a simple question: Just what does an economist know about managing an infectious disease pandemic? Perhaps the front-page real estate would be better spent asking scientific & medical experts who have worked in relevant fields prior to 2020, over the uninformed ramblings of an economist. When children started winding up hospitalized by COVID-19 in serious numbers, did the hospital assign an economist to care for these children in the ICU? No?

May 10th, 2020: Emily Oster publishes in the billionaire owned Washington Post “Opening Schools Might Be Safer Than You Think,” not even a month after the devastating headlines from New York City. Well, “might” doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in parents and teachers in the early months of a crisis.

July 7th, 2020: For Johns Hopkins Univeristy, Emily Oster appears in a video titled “COVID-19 explained.” She is not a medical doctor and can’t possibly know much of anything about a new SARS virus worth explaining.

July 28th, 2020: Oster publishes in the New York Times “What Will Schools Do When a Teacher Gets COVID-19?” Well, you don’t need to rattle your brain all that hard to make a relatively informed guess in June 2020: Some teachers will die, many more will develop chronic illness & become too disabled to work, and children’s education will be negatively impacted by widespread outbreaks. This ended up being exactly what happened, and Oster never apologized for making such an obvious error. Her only suggestion was to say that schools needed a “concrete plan.”

August 25th, 2020: Oster publishes in Washington Post another editorial (she’s really cranking these out, gee whiz) titled “How the Media Has Us Thinking All Wrong About the Coronavirus” in which she compares COVID-19 to…shark attacks. No, really.

September 23rd, 2020: Emily launches a “National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard” with funding from… numerous right-wing billionaires. In the past quarter century of American politics, have these people once shown genuine concern about the health and well-being of children?

Now ask yourself, should someone whose company promoted a genocide (Zuckerberg), or someone who harvests the blood of young people out of a delusional belief this will extend his lifespan, (Thiel) or someone whose oil dynasty is rendering the planet uninhabitable for future generations (Koch) be influencing policy decisions that impact the health of your child? Who all agree that public education should be abolished for their own personal profit? Through Emily Oster, they did.

October 09th, 2020: Oster publishes in The Atlantic another opinion editorial titled “School’s Aren’t Super Spreaders,” cited by Betsy DeVos and other conservative politicians. This editorial heavily relied upon her own poorly assembled “Dashboard” as a source, with massive gaps in data falsely claiming there were zero COVID-19 cases in numerous schools. At this point, Brown University should have terminated her employment for unprofessional and unethical misconduct in a crisis.

A year later, it would be revealed that hundreds of thousands of American parents were dying of COVID-19, many because their child brought the virus home from school. CIDRAP would later publish in 2023 that “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child.” Oster never apologized for this obvious error.

October 10th, 2020: Brown University Dean of Public Health & Biden’s Second COVID-19 Czar Ashish K. Jha endorses Emily Oster with a tweet:

“I’ve been particularly squared by the work of the brilliant @ProfEmilyOster. She brings evidence, not bluster, to this topic. Its inspiring. She’s actually tracking data (!!). Yup, it’s not perfect. But its the best we have.”

Literally every sentence here is wrong. This is a university Dean of Public Health claiming a newsletter survey with no method to verify reports is somehow “data.” Liberal voters in 2020 were promised by the Biden campaign that his Administration would “follow the science,” not dictating policy based on fraudulent propaganda bankrolled by conservative billionaires. This was a grave betrayal that served up the nation on a silver platter to the anti-vaccine crusade against modern medicine.

December 27th, 2020: It’s found that Emily Oster and Ashish Jha both blocked a Twitter account tracking educators who died of COVID-19.

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2021: Screw Them Kids!

March 19th, 2021: In one of the worst opinion editorials of the COVID-19 pandemic, Oster publishes in The Atlantic “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma,” which draws wide backlash from actual medical and scientific professionals. Only the genius of an American economist would reason that because most of the COVID-19 deaths were in older people, this somehow makes the deaths of unvaccinated children from COVID-19 somehow acceptable.

April 6th, 2021: Emily Oster decides to launch a “COVID Risk Calculator,” which is a total mess of a Google Spreadsheet that exists solely to minimize the impacts of COVID-19.

May 26th, 2021: On Twitter, Emily Oster endorses an opinion editorial in the Washington Post by fellow COVID-19 cheerleaders Lucy McBride, Monica Gandhi, Allison Krug, and Tracy Beth Hoeg titled “It’s time for children to finally get back to normal life,” saying “It’s time,” attacking mask mandates and other NPIs in schools, well before all kids could be vaccinated. Hundreds of American children would die of COVID-19 in 2021, with many more hospitalized or disabled by the virus. This useless opinion editorial, like so many others Oster published, offered no solace to the parents who had to watch their kids suffer and die.

July 17th, 2021: Cherry-picking a single study, Emily Oster tweets out:

“For parents worried about long COVID in kids, this study from Switzerland is reassuring. Low overall rates, and the long COVID symptoms as common in kids with no evidence of past infection.”

The study she cites has an incredibly small sample size and no control group. Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children.

September 15th, 2021: Oster launches a “COVID-19 School Data Hub” with another round of funding from numerous right-wing billionaires. This did nothing to keep schools open, teachers & students healthy, or anything through a brutal fall and winter for COVID-19. Oster couldn’t care less.

Emily Oster appears on the program of anti-vaccine scam artist Mehmet Oz to give her totally uninformed opinions about vaccinating children against COVID-19. Oz would later join the Trump Administration to spew a bunch of eugenicist garbage and try to privatize Medicare & Medicaid.

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2022

January 04th, 2022: On the deadliest month for pediatric COVID-19 deaths recorded, Emily Oster tweets out this gem:

“Shutting down schools is a mistake...the risk of getting COVID may well be higher out of school than in.”

…May? For someone who claims to be an expert on child health & development, Oster is apparently completely ignorant about the state of American public schools: Overcrowded classrooms with poor ventilation, and it needs is one reckless parent (possibly a fan of Oster’s) to send their child sick with COVID-19 to school. The child then exhales SARS-CoV-2 into the shared air for several hours, which infects teachers and other children. This was figured out over 150 years ago when nurse Florence Nightingale published Notes on Hospitals, detailing how overcrowded, poorly ventilated wards made hospitals an incubator for infectious disease outbreaks. Hey, Flo only treated patients across Europe. What the heck could she know compared to an economist?

January 13th, 2022: Emily Oster puts out a series of tweets promoting her COVID School Data Hub, in which she claims:

“…the funders of this -- who played no role in the research or data creation beyond generous support -- including Arnold, Walton, Mercatus and Chan-Zuckerberg.”

You have to be an incredibly gullible person to think that all of these right-wing billionaires, united in destroying public education & teachers’ unions, only provide “generous support.”

January 21, 2022: Emily Oster goes on to CNN to whine about schools returning to remote learning as unmitigated COVID-19 outbreaks overwhelmed teachers’ ability to educate.

January 24, 2022: Emily Oster and Ashish Jha are interviewed by a sycophant for fascist tech billionaires (Kara Swisher) in the New York Times for a piece called "How Did We Fail So Badly? Emily Oster and Ashish Jha on America's Covid Response."

Februrary 2022: Oster publishes on her Substack “ParentData” a rant titled “Lots of Studies Are Bad: Problematic new work on masks and lockdowns is just the beginning,” as a growing mountain of scientific research exposed Oster’s ignorance about all things COVID-19. You can find a compilation of many of these studies here:

Of course, when you’ve got conservative billionaires lining your pockets, that’s going to take priority over your professional responsibilities as an academic to acknowledge error. As an economist, Oster not only imagines herself to be a scientist (economics is not a scientific field, sorry!) but also, that an economist rests above all other fields as the final arbiter of what is and is not “real” science. Because these studies invalidated her uninformed opinion, Oster publicly denounced them instead of asking herself if she might not be providing reliable or accurate information.

March 09th, 2022: Oster publishes in The Atlantic “Masking Policy Is Incredibly Irrational Right Now,” right after a brutal winter COVID-19 wave that saw schools and hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 outbreaks, with pediatric COVID-19 deaths surging to over 1,000. Here in New York City, students were shuffled into crowded gymnasiums to watch Marvel films, as there were no healthy teachers available to educate kids. Nationwide, sick teachers were replaced with police officers, National Guardsmen, and other unqualified schmucks unable to actually teach. Oster decided that the real problem was anyone trying to prevent this.

March 22nd, 2022: For Protean Mag, Justin Feldman and Abby Cartus dismantle Oster’s sham with an article titled: “Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster’s COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education,” which connects both Oster’s sloppy mishandling of “data” to her right-wing billionaire backers & their crusade against public education & teachers’ unions.

May 5th, 2022: Knowing nothing about airplanes or aerosol transmission, Emily Oster appears on Washington Post Live to say the risk of COVID-19 infection on airplanes is “minimal.” One year later, a study finds that over 96% of flights had COVID-19.

October 31st, 2022: For The Atlantic, Oster publishes an opinion editorial titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” Conservatives, anti-vaccine quacks, and other cranks who spent years calling for public executions of doctors and scientists have a public meltdown over an article they clearly did not read. What Oster actually proposes is “amnesty” for parents and children who wanted to protect children from COVID-19 in any way. If we had all simply submitted to the virus in 2020, everything would be just swell now, and she forgives you. She also brags that she’s teaching a class on COVID-19 at Brown University, as if an “economist” is at all qualified to teach students anything about the matter.

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2023

February 20th, 2023: Oster publishes on her Substack “ParentData” an editorial titled “COVID-19: Where to Go from Here?” which she instructs her followers to treat COVID-19 as merely another cold or flu, an anti-vax meme originating from 2020, because “COVID-19 specific policies...make getting COVID very disruptive.” At this point, there was already a mountain of medical research showing that COVID-19 caused much more harm than the cold or flu, including widespread disability. An article from that same week posted by the American Heart Association titled “Much has been learned about long COVID – and much remains to be learned” states:

Oster doesn’t think this is “disruptive” at all.

February 21st, 2023: On Twitter, Emily Oster Endorses a Bret Stephens Opinion-Editorial titled: “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing, Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Bret Stephens is a New York Times pundit most notable for being a climate science dying cheerleader for slaughtering Muslim families, with such depraved rants like “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War,” in which America slaughtered, kidnapped, tortured and raped countless innocent people based on completely false pretenses. His pitiful rant cites the comically incompetent “Cochrane Review of Masks,” an embarrassing piece of propaganda. If this is the sort of junk that Oster is willing to endorse, then it calls her entire credibility into question.

Important Context

Michelle Obama and COVID-Minimizing Economist Hawk Kids' Drinks

Former First Lady Michelle Obama has teamed up with a controversial economics professor, who downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 in schools, to hawk nutrition products for kids.WAIT!!! Before you continue reading this free post, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…

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3 years ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Walker Bragman

May 11th, 2023: Emily Oster teams up with Michelle Obama to join the board of the “PLEZi Nutrition company,” as covered by Walker Bragman of Important Context. Clearly, being an advocate for pediatric COVID-19 had become quite financially lucrative for Oster. The experts Bragman quotes are quite devastating in their critiques, and it shows how little Oster truly cares about pediatric health.

October 17th, 2023: Oster appears on The Daily Show with zero pushback or inquiry as to her expertise, credentials, or dark-money billionaire funding. She tweets it out that this was an “incredibly fun” experience.

November 28th, 2023: Taking her victory lap as a newly crowned celebrity, liberal economist Justin Wolfers sees cause to celebrate: “Holy mole, economist Emily Oster has her own fashion line....I love this so much....Congratulations, @ProfEmilyOster!” for the brand M.M. Lafleur. Oster had become a celebrity thanks to her advocacy for a virus that has killed, orphaned, and disabled countless American children. Something is deeply unwell in American culture. When people pointed this out to Wolfers, he whined “I’m here to celebrate the success of my friends.”

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2024: The Transition to MAHA Cheerleader Begins

November 13th, 2024: Emily Oster tweets her latest New York Times opinion editorial, claiming “There’s a better way to do public health messaging.” The “Guest Essay” is titled “There’s a Better Way to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk,” a lukewarm mental gymnastics display trying to eke out some sort of centrist “middle ground” between medical doctors and the ramblings of RFK Jr. attacking very basic public health interventions. At this point, I lay blame at the feet of the management of The New York Times:

This could have been a simple, short article that explained there’s zero nutritional benefit to unpasteurized milk, foodborne illness continues to kill Americans, the number of acceptable vaccine-preventable pediatric deaths is zero, and that fluoride in the drinking water supply is a harmless net-positive public health intervention. Instead, Oster brands unpasteurized milk consumption and refusing to vaccine your kids as “a reasonable choice.” Again, this is the person that Brown University’s Emily Oster is insisting we treat with kid gloves:

November 11th, 2024: Emily Oster and her fellow COVID Cheerleader ilk, including Leana Wen and Vinay Prasad, is utterly dismantled by UC San Diego’s Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra in a piece titled: “Influencer intellectuals,” in which he writes:

All of Emily Oster’s schtick for the past five years has been exploiting a pandemic and sabotaging the response to build a highly profitable brand on social media. It’s truly shameful and utterly repulsive misconduct.

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2025

November 20th, 2025: Oster revises a previous ParentData editorial titled “Should You Be Concerned About COVID in Pregnancy?” in which she attacks studies showing negative long-term impacts of COVID-19 during pregnancy that completely invalidate her years of advocacy for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whining about “scary headlines about short- and long-term impacts of COVID-19,” “pandic headlines about COVID in pregnancy,” and she proclaims “I do not believe the best data shows COVID-19 infection causes differences in neurodevelopment in children.” Medical research scientists are all incompetent frauds, and only this economist with zero medical or scientific credentials can decide what is true or not.

This seems like it should be obvious, but if you are pregnant or a parent, do not seek out medical advice from Substack economists.

December 13, 2025: Emily Oster shares a guest article on ParentData on Instagram, titled “Living With Long COVID: What having a chronic illness has taught me about navigating the health care system,” as if her years of disinformation minimizing the impact of COVID-19 was not a major contribution to the author’s ongoing struggles.

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2026: Emily Oster, MAHA Cheerleader

January 8th, 2026: Oster publishes a new article to ParentData titled “What Changed in the Childhood Vaccine Schedule?” which, surprising nobody, is yet another lukewarm mental gymnastics display trying to eke out a centrist position between pediatricians and RFK Jr.’s war on behalf of all infectious disease:

“The vaccines removed from the schedule are generally those for diseases that are less common and usually less serious.”

This includes Hepatitis B, which can cause children to suffer a painful death from liver cancer. Instead of deferring to the outspoken pediatricians who will be left to clean up this mess, Oster decided that the man who drove his former wife to suicide, after she found a journal rating his affairs by the explicitness of sex acts performed, is a reasonable man to take seriously. One has to ask Oster the question: Why are you publicly simping for an abusive creep who considers you subhuman for the crime of being a woman? Do you really think this man cares about kids’ health?

Emily Oster, with all her economist genius, also does not suggest what number of vaccine-preventable deaths of American children she considers acceptable. The American parent needs to start asking themselves if this is truly someone who cares about the health and safety of your children, and why this woman is so insistent on defending a lecherous misogynistic creep. When is enough going to be enough, and we can finally stop pretending Oster has any credibility?

That same day, Emily Oster also publishes an editorial in The New York Times titled Kennedy Is Telling Americans How to Eat. It’s Not Crazy Advice. Two RFK Jr. defenses in one day, wow! One has to ask why the management of the New York Times wasted money on this uninformed screed, instead of simply assigning an intern to buzz out a few phone calls and e-mails asking actual nutritionists as to what an effective set of dietary guidelines would actually resemble. Sometimes, the most effective & important journalism is simply writing up basic facts.

January 28th, 2026: For the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Oster will be joining a “Virtual Q&A” on Zoom where she will speak about “How to Communicate About Science,” something she very clearly is incapable of doing with any honesty or reliability. I highly recommend you take this opportunity to ask her about the many years of getting basic scientific facts wrong in a public forum, refusing to acknowledge her long history of errors, and why she thinks legitimizing “Make America Healthy Again” eugenics is a worthwhile pursuit.

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Closing Thoughts

In 1863, the nurse Florence Nightingale publishes a seminal work on the importance of preventing the transmission of diseases in hospitals, including airborne viruses. These same principles could have been readily adapted to schools, especially with all the modern advances in science we’ve made. Over a hundred and fifty years later, the American economist Emily Oster raked in millions pretending her total ignorance was a useful contribution to a national crisis. How this university professor is unaware that her place of employment contains something called a “library,” in which tomes of knowledge on all manner of medical and scientific topics are loaned out, is quite extraordinary.

Emily Oster went from being a vocal advocate for SARS-CoV-2 to becoming a cheerleader for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s war on America’s health. The American liberal needs to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that they’ve been bamboozled by an unethical fraudster, bankrolled by their political enemies. Anointing herself the supreme authority on all matters of medical science from infectious diseases to vaccination, to pediatrics, to nutrition, she never acknowledged her constant, basic errors. It’s impossible to be an expert on all of these fields at once. She has zero credibility on these topics and is not reliable expert on serious matters of life & death.

If this is what is considered intellectualism in America, then we are in for a very rough road ahead. Our journalists need to do a better job of interrogating bold claims to verify their accuracy and putting their foot down when a supposed “expert” repeatedly blows their credibility on serious matters. If a crooked billionaire starts astroturfing certain voices which align with their policy demands, then those voices should be subjected to even greater scrutiny.

As this profile shows, Emily Oster did little more than produce a mountain of worthless opinion editorials & media appearances coming from a vast chasm of willful ignorance. This prevented zero COVID-19 deaths, stopped zero schools from shutting down due to outbreaks, and this disinformation stream contributed to a nationwide chronic illness crisis in Long COVID affecting millions. The only grade this Brown University professor has earned is an F.

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