On Oct 4, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford, held a symposium at his university. Titled “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” it was marketed as an open-minded series of panel discussions involving a range of experts to debate and discuss the efficacy of Covid mitigation techniques.
In reality, it was a collection of mostly anti-vax and definitely anti-lockdown contrarians that tried in vain to bait people like Dr Peter Hotez to attend in order to give the event an air of legitimacy. Held on the anniversary of the “Covid is bad for business” doctrine, The Great Barrington Declaration, the day presented an opportunity to air supposed “censorship” grievances and demands that the public should have a say in the science of future pandemics.
The rub: most everyone involved is invested in the economics of public health, not the science, though those lines were freely and falsely blurred throughout the day. Considering Stanford’s new president, economist Jonathan Levin, gave the opening remarks, the Covid contrarians took one more step into the mainstream with their business-first, science-whatever attitudes.
Show Notes
Pro-COVID UK Charity With Anti-Vax Ties Behind Controversial Stanford Health Policy Conference
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says a failing economy is worse than coronavirus
Dr. Vinay Prasad: “Public Health’s (Mis)Truth Problem”
Can Stanford Tell Fact from Fiction?
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Conspirituality 229, Stanford has fallen.
On October 4th, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford, held a symposium at his university titled Pandemic Policy, Planning the Future, Assessing the Past.
It was marketed as an open-minded series of panel discussions involving a range of experts to debate and discuss the efficacy of COVID mitigation techniques.
In reality, it was a collection of mostly anti-vax and definitely anti-lockdown contrarians that tried in vain to bait people like Dr. Peter Hotez to attend in order to give the event an air of legitimacy.
Held on the anniversary of the COVID is bad for business doctrine, the Great Barrington Declaration, the day presented an opportunity to air supposed censorship grievances and demands that the public should have a say in the science of future pandemics.
The rub, most everyone involved is invested in the economics of public health, not the science, though those lines were freely and falsely blurred throughout the day.
Considering Stanford's new president, economist Jonathan Levin, gave the opening remarks, the COVID contrarians took one more step into the mainstream with their business-first, science-whatever attitudes.
This week in Conspiratuality.
Okay, Derek, Julian, Charles Eisenstein, I think, has completed the last leg of his full-circle journey from New Age influencer to RFK Jr. political.
political consultant and back again.
Is that like a double satin return?
I might be.
About five weeks ago, we did a whole show running down how the wellness world's most prolific pseudo-intellectual was navigating the fact that Bobby, his boss and political messiah, this is the man he said could repair the American timeline through a quantum-style intervention.
Why was he now cheerleading the IDF and endorsing Trump?
Did that mean that Charles II would be endorsing Trump?
Well...
He was too spiritual and non-dual, maybe too demure, too mindful to say, but he did manage to point out that everyone has Trump wrong, that Trump is really not what anyone thinks he is.
He's not a strategic genius, a Mussolini figure.
He's not even right-wing, really.
And Trump told Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
that Project 2025 was written by assholes, so Charles was going to take his word for it.
And ultimately, Trump is just whatever anybody thinks he is.
He's a cipher, an empty screen, and we took that to be a soft, non-dual, rising above the battleground endorsement of Trump, and so did a ton of his outraged readers.
And so we wondered, naturally, where he would be going next.
Well, he's told everyone now with two new posts to his 80,000 subscribers on Substack, The first is a kind of free-at-last post in which he realizes with palpable relief that he was just casting his pearls before swine.
Julian?
I'm very happy to be out of politics.
In the beginning, it seemed that the Kennedy campaign was wide open to the perspectives, ideals, and approaches I aspired to bring.
to bring, the unwinding of American empire and neoliberal economics, radical peace and consciousness, deep ecology, paradigm shift in medicine, healing the political divide through the practice of the transcendent center, and a political campaign based on authenticity, kindness, and civility.
The unwinding of American empire and neoliberal economics, radical peace and consciousness, deep ecology, paradigm shift in medicine, healing the political divide through the practice of the transcendent center, and a political campaign based on authenticity, kindness, and civility.
These ideas found deep resonance in early campaign meetings, colored the policy platform, and found their way into some of the speeches I wrote for the candidate early on.
These ideas found deep resonance in early campaign meetings, colored the policy platform, and found their way into some of the speeches I wrote for the candidate early on.
But over time, my influence in the campaign steadily diminished.
But.
Over time, my influence in the campaign steadily diminished.
It wasn't because of office politics or anyone working against me.
It was that the campaign and more importantly, the surrounding political culture could only accommodate only a very diluted version of what I hoped to bring.
Toward the end, I was doing very little.
But despite speaking out publicly against the candidate's position on Israel and Palestine, everyone on the leadership team still wanted to keep me around.
I kept trying to quit.
But every time I consulted an astrologer, a mentor, or the I Ching, I got unequivocal advice to stay.
The reason Bobby and the leadership team and the I Ching wanted me to stay wasn't that they were afraid I'd made them look bad by leaving.
It was that I was performing an indispensable task.
It was, I think, that the ideals I came in with were still alive, however dormant, frustrated, or stifled in the others on the team.
And my presence was a kind of lifeline.
I reminded them of the unfulfilled possibility of a different kind of politics.
But as the campaign became more and more conventional, I sometimes wondered whether I'd become a token, a decorative philosopher in an organization that embodied ever fainter echoes of my philosophy.
It really could be parody.
It's amazing.
But what stands out here is that he doesn't really explain what mystical advice he received to change his mind and give it all up.
Like, just wondering what could be higher than astrologers or the I Ching.
I mean, maybe his sub stack metrics, because then he goes on to talk about his readership and how he bypassed with some regrets, some apologies, all of the criticism that poured in over his increasingly incoherent work for Bobby and soft endorsement for Trump.
And then he ends with a note of gratitude for everyone who's still subscribed.
So based on helping the most bizarre political candidate run one of the most dysfunctional campaigns in recent memory, this has given Eisenstein all the information he needs to proclaim the corruption of the political endeavor generally.
But in the second post, he takes this hard-won wisdom farther to say that he was engaged in a form of political bypassing, which he defines by remixing a few graphs from John Wellwood's definition of spiritual bypassings.
So you'll probably find this familiar.
He says,"...political bypassing is the tendency to use political narratives and framing in order to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks, or to assert social dominance." Political bypass politicizes emotional, relational, and spiritual issues, viewing them all through a political lens.
Often the bypasser will steer conversation into a political arena in which he or she enjoys a social advantage and or psychological comfort.
So very, very clever.
Wellwood was saying that if you default to spirituality in the midst of psychological or political complexity, you're bypassing.
But Eisenstein flips it to say that if you concentrate on in-real-life problems through a political lens...
Only you will bypass necessary spiritual challenges.
And he tries hard to give an example of this.
Next, by outlining how the liberal center's position on the so-called immigration crisis is focused on the presumed racism of the MAGA movement.
He says that this misses the fact that neoliberal and imperial policies are driving migrations in the first place.
So actually, he's really just talking about the difference between superficial and better informed political positions.
And ironically, he's on the verge of conflating basic left wing anti imperialism with a spiritual view.
And maybe it is, according to him.
He argues that our political bypassing on issues like climate would be eased if we had more Amazonian shamans doing protection rituals for the forests.
Or more artists and musicians tackling our problems.
But then it's almost as if he realizes that he's red-pilling his red pill because then he pulls back and he says that, you know, quote, if I were to advocate ignoring politics and placing our attention and trust in the power of indigenous rights or the other causal networks I didn't elaborate on, this article would indeed be a kind of spiritual bypass or at least a separating of two aspects of what is actually an unbroken reality.
He really is good at covering all bases in many instances Yeah, well, that's his practice of the transcendent center.
He's an expert.
Right.
He then concludes by saying he's going to turn his writing attention to this non-dual investigation, a continuation, really.
So I think we have to hand it to him for consistency.
You know, you minimize COVID so you can argue we need a more non-dual holistic approach to disease.
Sure.
You work for RFK Jr.
as a non-dual commitment to post-polarized politics.
Check.
Check.
Soft-endorse Trump as a non-dual gesture at the virtue of political disruption?
Check.
And now, climbing the mountain again to proclaim the non-dual communion of the politics he can't really succeed in with the spirituality he's going to continue to monetize?
Check.
Founded in 1885, Stanford University is renowned as a premier research university as evidenced by its prestigious Stanford University is renowned as a premier research university as evidenced by its prestigious Carnegie classification as
The school boasts of 58 Nobel laureates, 33 MacArthur fellows, and has the largest number of billionaire alumni of any American university.
So when it was announced that they would be hosting a conference titled Pandemic Policy, Planning the Future, Assessing the Past, at which its freshly minted president, Jay Levin, would deliver the opening remarks, many journalists and scientists were alarmed by the roster of speakers. many journalists and scientists were alarmed by the roster of
Because anyone familiar with the cluster of COVID-contrarian anti-vax-adjacent doctors who rose to fame by minimizing the pandemic and decrying quarantine measures on social media and right-wing news networks instantly recognized that Stanford had fallen prey to platforming conspiracy theories and medical disinformation in the name of academic freedom.
The first clue was that following Jay Levin's remarks, the welcome and introduction to the event would be handled by Jay Bhattacharya.
Now, It's true that Jay Bhattacharya works as the professor of health policy at Stanford School of Medicine, but he was also one of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Which we'll get into shortly.
But that's red flag number one.
He's also terribly confident about all kinds of things.
He's still coming across my feed praising the peaceful quote-unquote trucker convoy as though he knows anything about it.
Yeah.
And other speakers in the lineup for the conference included Monica Gandhi, Alex Berenson, Vinay Prasad, Sunetra Gupta, Alex Washburn, Anders Tegnell, and many others.
Mostly for a series of panel discussions during the 8.30 a.m.
to 5.15 p.m.
schedule.
Closing remarks were handled by John Ioannidis.
Listeners who followed pandemic contrarianism will recognize most of the names I just listed.
Several are main characters in the book, We Want Them Infected, by Dr.
Jonathan Howard, who I interviewed for episode 155 and who I consulted with in preparing for this episode.
Now, Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who practices out of the teaching university at Bellevue in New York City, which was on the front line of COVID's devastation in the spring of 2020.
His book chronicles the timeline of callous denialism, minimization, conspiracism, and grandiosity of a group of doctors who, as he tells it, endangered lives through their reckless misinformation.
Now, two of those doctors, Bhattacharya and Gupta, who I listed a moment ago, were central to the Great Barrington Declaration, a name which perhaps underlines the grandiosity that we've been talking about.
Others who took the stage were allies who co-signed.
That document.
And this was an open letter drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in early October of 2020.
And that's about seven months into the pandemic with vaccines still not yet available.
It recommended an end to COVID quarantine measures for the broader public, claiming that pandemic-ending herd immunity could be achieved that way within three months.
People most at risk should be kept protected by maintaining quarantine, while COVID swept through everyone else and provided natural immunity.
In addition to Jay Bhattacharya and Sunitra Gupta, Martin Koldorf, who's not at this conference, was the third author.
All three are doctors and academics from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard, respectively.
Julian, I don't know if you can answer this, but this idea that if you keep everybody at risk in quarantine while COVID sweeps through the population and provides natural immunity, when those people go back out into public, aren't they going to be as vulnerable as they were before us?
I don't really understand that.
Am I missing something there?
Well, we'll get into this because it turns out that for a limited period of time, the country of Sweden actually applied many of these ideas.
And so we have data on how that works.
And let's just say you're not wrong.
Okay.
All right.
So, who are these people?
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics and health research policy, whose research focuses on the economics of healthcare.
He got many things wrong about the pandemic, which we'll get into in more detail later, but for now...
Convinced from the beginning that quarantine measures were an unnecessary overreaction, he co-authored a serology study as early as April of 2020 claiming widespread infection was already the case in Santa Clarita.
The paper was widely criticized for statistical and methodological errors, and later on was shown to have undisclosed funding from an airline company, Jet Prophecy.
What, did they want the airline restrictions to be lifted or something?
But of course.
So Netra Gupta is a zoologist, an infectious disease epidemiologist who works on theoretical epidemiology.
She predicted in May of 2020 that because natural post-infection immunity was durable and long-lasting, the pandemic was already on its way out.
She said that the infection mortality rate would be 1 in 10,000, which was a massive underestimation.
The third author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Martin Kulldorff, is a biostatistician who worked at Harvard Medical School until he was dismissed in 2024 for refusing the COVID vaccine and for what he described as clinging to the truth about COVID.
He incorrectly predicted that herd immunity would arrive without any need for vaccines three to six months after lockdowns ended.
And referring to the cost of quarantine measures, Kulldorff also posted pictures of guillotines to social media asking in the caption, who will be held accountable for this devastation?
Wow.
So besides being prestigious academics, their credentials are impressive, right?
Their COVID recommendations represented a fringe perspective, and they got everything wrong.
Far outside the scientific consensus at the time, the Great Barrington Declaration was harshly criticized by multiple bodies, including the WHO, American Public Health Association, British Academy of Medical Sciences, as well as Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci in their professional capacities at that time.
With the benefit of today's hindsight, we know that the realities of COVID variants and long COVID alone would have seriously complicated this simplistic strategy if it had been allowed to play out here.
The WHO also pointed out that we already knew from other infectious diseases that without vaccination, recurrent epidemics were highly likely and the duration of post-infection immunity was unpredictable.
Well, Gupta is saying that post-infection immunity is going to be stable and long-lasting, but she's saying that in May of 2020.
It seems so reckless.
The Great Barrington Declaration was also undermined by overblown claims that they made on their website and on social media, saying that hundreds of thousands of scientists and doctors agreed with them and had signed on.
Through that list, which has since been made private for this reason, the list that was generated by their completely unvetted online sign-up form that anyone could enter data into, there were many fake and even joke names, names like Dr.
Dr. Johnny Bananas from the University of Your Mom apparently was a big supporter of the Great Boundary Declaration.
There were also a lot of homeopaths and psychotherapists and energy healers who are included in the list of luminaries and doctors and scientists who agree.
Well, energy healing is an ancient science, Julian.
Ah, yes, that's right.
I also want to point out that the Great Barrington document originated in a conference at the American Institute for Economic Research, which is a libertarian think tank that was founded in 1933 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
So that's where the name comes from.
The organization also owns an investment arm that's valued around $564 million, according to their latest SEC filings.
And if you go to their website, you see that their mission is the promotion of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money.
They're proponents of free trade and deregulation, and they have a long history of climate change denialism.
There are articles on the website like, Brazilians should keep slashing their rainforest.
Oh.
And I should also note that 5% of their investment portfolio is in fossil fuel companies.
There's also a section that's called Combating Collectivism, and a recent article is called The Bipartisan War on Credit Hurts the Poor, in which the author argues that we can't cap credit card interest rates at 30% because the poor have trouble in which the author argues that we can't cap credit card interest rates at 30% because the poor have trouble securing loans, so we should let them rack up debt Wow.
Incredible.
That is actually how these people think.
They've also advocated for overseas sweatshops because how else would those poor people work?
They also want to reform social security.
Yeah, exactly.
And as an opportunistic spin-off from the Great Barrington Declaration, AIER, the American Institute of Economic Research, spawned another group called the Brownstone Institute, which is a think tank specifically dedicated to opposing COVID quarantine measures.
And a man named Jeffrey Tucker is at the heart of these overlapping groups and initiatives.
He's that lovely brand of extreme libertarian who proposes ending child labor laws and age limits on who can buy cigarettes.
He goes so far as to say that not letting children work and teens smoke robs them of the good life.
And I got to thank Derek for showing me that quote.
Well, just to add a little color here about his relationship with children.
I actually interviewed Jeffrey Tucker's daughter for our listener story series on Patreon.
And Julia had a lot of really interesting and moving things to say about growing up homeschooled in their TradCath household.
So there's also this kind of Catholic, traditional, probably integralist view to things that's not just about libertarianism, but, you know, libertarianism that is guided by God.
And, you know, she was fully expected to adopt those views.
But ironically, you know, because they shared this love of liturgical music that exposed Julia to all kinds of progressive Catholic artists and ideas because Catholic musicians, especially organists, which she became an organist, they're famously religious rebels.
And another funny thing is that, you know, the Tuckers tried to homeschool everybody.
And that meant that as a girl, Julia got parked at the local library every day, which gave her access to the entire world beyond the house.
Don't libertarians want to defund libraries, though?
Well, they do, but not if they're homeschooling and overworked.
They would really prefer that those libraries are there and ready to sort of babysit well-behaved children.
Well, hopefully their work with Moms for Liberty will help make sure that the libraries only have the right books.
Yes, yes.
Children sitting with empty shelves, I think, is probably the ideal, and maybe icons of the Virgin Mary or something.
So I want to point out that the Great Barrington Declaration doesn't explicitly mention things like masking and social distancing, but the AIER did pay for Facebook ads against both of those things.
During panels at the conference that we're discussing today, people like Scott Atlas explicitly stated that masks don't work, which is We're good to go.
Which all three Gray Barrington Declaration authors were involved with as far back as 2020.
And I'll link to his reporting in the show notes, but Bragman shows how Collateral Global both mimics the Heritage Foundation's anti-lockdown pro-business messaging and also has ties with many anti-vax groups.
And one group, which is called Panda, has gone so far to claim that there was never any pandemic.
I love Collateral Global as a charity name.
It's kind of like the mergers and acquisitions charity.
I have to just warn listeners in advance here, we may sound like conspiracy theorists on this particular episode more than others, because if you follow the money on this stuff, it's like, yeah, these people are all paid.
they actually are the paid shills you've been looking for.
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Lately we've been pointing out how MAHA, which is Make America Healthy Again, is basically a front for MAGA under the guise of health.
So the stated goal is making people healthy, but when you dig a centimeter below the surface, you discover that all the policies that MAGA are interested in involve deregulating the very agencies that MAHA claims it will use to affect change.
This framework works very well for understanding the Great Barrington Declaration and this event at Stanford.
So let's start with two clips from the opening remarks.
And the first is from Stanford President Jonathan Levin.
Some critics have rightly pointed out that it's problematic that he appeared at this event at all, which...
As has been noted, is an anti-vax seminar masquerading as a town square.
But there is a layer deeper here.
Levin teaches in the Department of Economics, not public health or anything health-related.
Now, he often writes about healthcare, but from an economic perspective.
And he's published three economic papers and received two research grants alongside Jay Bhattacharya in the past.
And these all have to do with We're good to go.
plays a role in healthcare, but one thing that people like Bhattacharya has been doing for years is blurring the lines between things like vaccine science, which he is not trained in, and the financial implications of healthcare and mitigation measures, which he is.
And that blurring, I think, is intentional.
So we're going to start with Levin, and you'll hear him make a joke of I have that in air quotes in the script because you'll hear.
But he jumps ahead to where he discusses just how disappointed he is that people like Dr.
Peter Hotez didn't show up.
Now, Hotez isn't mentioned by name, but Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad and others stalked him on Twitter trying to get him to attend.
I'll unpack this a little more later, but it's akin to creationists who try to get evolutionary biologists to debate, so it gives their platform an air of legitimacy.
Now, you might wonder, why is John Levin opening this conference on pandemic policy?
You might say, John is not a public health expert.
And of course, I might say, well, I did run a business school during the COVID pandemic, so I do have some experience making COVID policy decisions.
And they also say that making mistakes is the best way to learn.
And so I can tell you that I have at least 1,000 Stanford MBAs who will tell you that by that measure, I'm basically a world expert.
Because when I was invited, I asked around, and indeed the organizers were in discussions with a whole array of people with quite different views who were likely to speak.
But it proved not so straightforward to...
Execute on that agenda.
Some of the invitees weren't able to make it.
Some of them withdrew.
some of them didn't want to participate in an event with other speakers whose views or behaviors they claimed were attacking or abhorrent.
And when the initial agenda, a partial agenda was posted, it was immediately perceived as one-sided, and I'm sure you all noticed, became the subject of op-eds and social media attacks.
I'm not an expert, but really...
I am an expert, because public health and running a business school during COVID are basically the same thing, and he's right.
They got a lot of criticism from scientists and journalists who were like, whoa, what kind of conference is this?
And so they added a couple token people who came in and actually did deliver some legitimate perspectives, but they were also pretty get-along-to-go-along kind of figures.
You know, our title is Stanford Has Fallen, but I think, and this might be obvious, but I want to underline it, that this opening joke, not joke, establishes the theme of the foundational logic of neoliberal COVID response generally, that business concerns are health concerns and vice versa.
And that argument is only coherent to the extent that how businesses operate and how we're all employed and how we get paid in our society is just baseline normal.
Like, of course, your freedom to work or to keep your business open during the plague is the fundamental right at stake because that's all that's standing in between you and destitution and a meaningless life because we're not set up to really provide welfare when the shit hits the fan.
And we don't really want to be, I think, is the conclusion.
It's also the president of a highly prestigious university basically giving the rubber stamp to a kind of populism that says, well, what is an expert anyway?
Yeah, right.
So you probably noticed Levin framing it as the conference being under attack, which plays into the victimization side of people who have been spreading pseudoscience around COVID, which...
Reiterate your point there, Matthew.
And these people very much are, but we'll get to that.
Let's just move on to a brief remark from Bhattacharya, who frames the event in much the same way.
And like John Levin, his area of expertise is government programs and economics, not public health.
And again, just to reiterate, this does dovetail with public health, but not from the medical or vaccine side, which is really the issue here.
Rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you, what universities can do, and I hope in the future will do, Universities like Stanford, that I love so much, is to model the kind of dialogue that you're going to see today among people who differ very, very sharply on their views about what went wrong and what we ought to do next.
And it's in the middle of that dialogue, I think, where we start to understand what really ought to be done.
Because nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
Yeah, nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
That's interesting coming from someone talking about science.
Derek, you called this an anti-vax seminar masquerading as a town hall.
It's also masquerading as an academic conference for the reasonable minority of academics unafraid to buck the consensus.
What he refers to as the goal of destroying people who disagree with you is It's more of the censorship martyr stuff that we've talked about so much.
It's just the scientific consensus pointing out that your fringe perspective is at odds with existing evidence and policy.
The difference, though, over these last few years is that this type of fringe perspective has a megaphone.
And it can go on alt-media podcasts to cry censorship while reaching millions of people who don't know any better.
And this leads to the same kind of phenomenon in which, say, climate science or evolution seem in the public mind to somehow be on equal footing with denialists and creationists.
You know, one thing I feel is going on with that destroying people comment is that COVID gave professionals like this a permission structure to vent whatever grievances they already had against their entire discipline.
And then to equate like a lack of confirmation from their colleagues with a kind of politically motivated cancellation.
Like if you went into medicine or epidemiology with a really fragile ego, let's say, and every comment or on every paper you submitted for review really got under your skin...
I think it would be a tremendous relief to suddenly have a whole new toolbox for mitigating that pain.
It wasn't about your work or the quality of your work.
They were just out to get you, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And then you have these think tanks coming along and saying, we're going to put together a dream team of geniuses like yourself to keep saying this stuff.
And when they tell you that you're wrong...
Here's your strategy to fight against that.
Yeah, and here's your money, here's your monetization.
Yep, yep, totally.
Jay Bhattacharya, he got almost everything wrong about COVID.
Again, our friend Dr. Jonathan Howard has done a lot of the heavy lifting here.
Bhattacharya never treated COVID patients.
But from his theoretical ivory tower, he wrote in March, yes, March of 2020, that estimates of COVID fatality may be too high by orders of magnitude.
He predicted it would be one-tenth the fatality of the yearly influenza virus and actually said we should really be taking resources away from this whole COVID hysteria and giving it to the flu because it's a much bigger deal.
Therefore, quarantine measures were just an overreaction.
But he was wrong because COVID killed over 1.2 million Americans.
He used the same line of reasoning to argue that the cost to the economy and individual mental and physical health would not be worth the benefit.
The COVID strategy proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration was in line, actually, with the controversial approach briefly employed in Sweden While their neighbors, Norway, were much more like the US in terms of their mitigation policies.
So we actually have the benefit of a control group for comparison.
Having rejected lockdowns and masks, by May of 2020, Sweden's death rate from COVID was 10 times higher than that of Norway, and it was heavily concentrated amongst the elderly.
months after this data was already available, the Great Barrington Declaration believed that there would be a way to protect the most vulnerable while letting everyone else just get sick and recover.
This goes to your question from earlier, Matthew, right?
Their proposal was, Great Barrington Declaration's proposal also actually lacked a lot of the measures that Sweden still adopted during this period within a culture that is otherwise quite steeped in high social responsibility and compliance.
The Great Barrington Declaration also asserted that rapid exposure herd immunity would be better for the economy.
But with hindsight now, if we are doing a retrospective on pandemic policy as we plan for the future, like these people claim to be doing, in hindsight, Sweden's economy was no less impacted by the pandemic than other countries.
Rather than accomplishing herd immunity, Sweden's initial approach put their medical system under immense strain, trying to keep up with COVID cases, which then delayed or derailed treatment and care for all other conditions, which is what everyone else in the world was so concerned about within their medical systems.
And let's not forget that Sweden is a country with socialized medicine.
So the economic impact on individuals who needed hospitalization, as well as the bills to their families if they died, would have been quite different in the US. And in fact, based on the initial death rate, within a couple months after the declaration was signed, the Great Barrington Declaration, Sweden would radically change their course and institute a lot of the same quarantine Lockdown style measures as the US and other countries by late 2021.
Oh, so they would do that actually as early as I think September, October of 2020.
But by late 2021, they had the dreaded vaccine passports that was such a point of contention in America, and compliance with that was fairly high.
So due to these measures, despite a horrific start to the pandemic, Sweden ended up at 30th out of 47 European countries in per capita deaths.
But that fact did not stop Stanford professor of medicine and epidemiology John Ioannidis, who gave the closing remarks to the conference from saying this.
The worst disaster was the United States and Bulgaria.
If you limit to less than 65 years old, we're far worse than anywhere else in the world.
The best, Sweden, and I'm very happy to have Anders Tegnell today with us.
It's the first time that we meet in person, and I think he is a legend, for sure.
Also New Zealand.
So, you know, two countries that had very different approaches to how they would handle the crisis.
Yeah.
You could definitely say Sweden and New Zealand had quite different approaches in terms of how they handled the crisis.
But saying that their outcomes were essentially the same is misleading.
Sweden, with a population of over 10 million, is roughly twice the size of New Zealand, who were famously extremely cautious for the first two years of the pandemic, and then struggled after opening back up in early 2022.
I mean, New Zealand barely broke double digits on COVID deaths for 2020 and 2021 combined, but then they opened up just in time for Omicron to spike their numbers.
And close down again, correct?
Yeah.
Because as soon as it started going up, they were like, oh, we got to go back.
Yep.
So as a simple measure, if you're going to say, yeah, New Zealand and Sweden, basically the same.
The total number of deaths in New Zealand is 5,500.
In Sweden, it was 27,500.
And you're talking about a country that is double the size, so you can do the math on that.
So this must be underlined.
The explicit goal of Sweden's initial strategy is We're good to
go.
In a panel that the one mistake he regretted was banning visits to elderly homes, which is just outrageous given how decimated that population was due to his policy.
You mean he would have made the actual worst outcome of that entire sequence even worse by allowing visits to, wow.
In whatever distorted reality he's living in, yeah.
He thinks that was actually a bad decision to stop people from visiting the elderly homes.
Regarding the highly pedigreed John Ioannidis, he's most infamous for a typically minimizing prediction in April of 2020 that the total number of deaths that season, this is how he said it, this season, the total number of deaths from COVID will be under 40,000.
And the death rate actually exceeded that eight days later.
And at that time, in another interview, Ioannidis said he thought the pandemic was almost over.
But COVID deaths would rise to 350,000 in total for 2020 in the U.S. and over 1.2 million to date.
These people love to rake figures like Anthony Fauci over the coals for his mistakes.
And yet none of their mistakes are talked about in this conference at all.
Vinay Prasad was also in attendance.
And Julian, you've mentioned Dr.
Jonathan Howard a few times, and he's written more about Vinay than most anyone.
A professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco, Prasad has the right credentials to speak about public health.
But shortly into COVID, something in his brain seems to have been broken.
He wrote a blog post comparing America's response to COVID to the Third Reich.
He wrote, When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events.
Indeed, this was the case in Germany in the years between 1929 and 1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing.
The president subsequently died.
A key general resigned after a scandal, and the pathway to the Fuhrer was inevitable.
He's also consistently and falsely stated that masks do not stop the spread of the virus.
And whereas most of the panel guests were at least cordial, Vinay is like a Twitter troll come to life.
He opened with a really bad joke about Dr.
Peter Hotez, and he couldn't wait two minutes before making another one.
Isn't he always like that?
He's the guy who spends a lot of time telling people in masks they're paranoid and that's kind of a big joke, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
He shared a lot of false COVID claims, but this one really jumped out at me.
I chose it because it really highlights how someone can just say something false and have no one on the panel challenge him.
And remember, this is supposed to be a panel of experts.
Had COVID-19 occurred in 2009 or 1999, the response would not have been anything like this.
It was contingent on one thing we've not discussed, which was the ability for people in high income nations to take a huge percentage of their upper middle class workforce and allow them to work remotely on Zoom, order food on Uber Eats, and get their deliveries on Amazon.
The big tech companies, which suppressed the speech of many panelists, benefited greatly from the pandemic restrictions because it allowed them to consolidate power, to put mom-and-pop businesses out of office, to make us all dependent on Zoom, to disrupt our daily going to office.
This is a huge legacy of the pandemic.
And had it occurred in a time when the Internet was not so robust, when the companies couldn't have thrived, there would never have been a lockdown in 1999 because you couldn't have had Zoom meetings.
Completely forgetting or just entirely ignoring that many of the same lockdowns and social distancing measures were enforced during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
There was no nationwide lockdown, but many regions at that time enforced them.
So Seattle, according to reports, quote-unquote closed tight.
Chicago banned public gatherings and closed theaters and movie theaters.
San Francisco required anyone working in public to wear a mask.
New York City enforced mandatory quarantines and they also staggered business hours.
So during his monologue, Prasad said that school closures did not reduce the spread of COVID, which we also know is false and there is precedent.
During that influenza pandemic, Cities that implemented preventative measures saw a 50% reduction in deaths over cities that did not.
And it's known that the cities that did best closed schools, churches, and theaters and banned public gatherings.
Prasad likes to act like these measures have never been studied, yet that is also false.
And again, just to reiterate, no one challenged him on this or any of the false assertions that he made.
I'm still hung up on our title, our whole theme today.
What is it about Stanford?
Like, how do so many of these people converge here or get incubated here?
Like, is it luck?
Is there something unusual going on in the intersection between the public health and business school faculties that made Levin like a logical pick to open the event?
Yeah.
Was there some kind of ideological, I don't know, bottleneck at some point in hiring?
Well, I mean, we shouldn't forget their proximity to Silicon Valley.
So there's maybe this overlap between tech, entrepreneurial, libertarian, capitalist kind of focus, and then the way that we've seen since COVID this rightward trend amongst people in those circles.
That probably, you know, there's a cultural piece there that probably has something to do with it.
But I have some other things to say.
You know, the conference, as we've pointed out, was held on the fourth birthday of the Great Barrington Declaration.
It was under the auspices of both Stanford Medical School and I noticed something else called the Freeman Spokely Institute for International Studies.
And it turns out that Freeman Spokely is a private equity firm whose two founders donated $50 million to establish the institution.
Wow.
And that institute essentially looks like a quite large neoliberal university think tank that comprises 12 centers, six of which are major research facilities within Stanford.
Wow.
As Derek mentioned, the Pandemic Policy Conference was sponsored by Collateral Global, a UK-based organization created in November of 2020 specifically to agitate against COVID-19 quarantine measures to minimize the dangers of the pandemic and to call for a herd immunity strategy.
That funding by Collateral Global was only disclosed on the event page after the conference was over.
Collateral Global is heavily funded by donations from the Opel Foundation and the King, I don't know how to say this word, Baudouin Foundation?
Yes, you would think my previous affinity for French pronunciation would come in handy here, but not necessarily.
So these two large foundations are big funders of Collateral Global.
They have significant overlap with the Great Barrington Declaration and its three main architects, all of whom have sat on the supervisory board of Collateral Global.
Bhattacharya and these allies have been actively criticizing the WHO's currently stalled out pandemic preparedness treaty via aggressive editorials and by doing what experts like Peter Hotez call revisionist history.
Collateral Global is apparently backing more future conferences just like this one around the world to the same end.
They all have behind-the-scenes ties to other initiatives which were not only anti-lockdown but anti-vaccine during COVID.
And as Derek mentioned, Collateral Global has published speculation that self-reinfection created by wearing protective masks was a major driver of people developing long COVID.
To the point of those conferences, I'll say this.
Prasad also mentioned something where he believes that if another pandemic were to happen two or three years from now, that people like him and the contrarians Their messaging is so strong that people will really rebel against the government and refuse lockdowns and quarantine measures.
But if it were to happen 20 years from now, then he feels a generation will be too long and people forget and we're going to need to repeat the same mistakes.
So I would guess that organizations like Collateral Global are funding these conferences to keep it into the public mind for as long as possible because they can't have business locked down again.
They're kind of like doing anti-lockdown vaccines for the population.
They're trying to vaccinate the world against the possibility that people would actually be compliant with mitigation measures.
Yeah, against the virulent idea that we should take care of one another during a global pandemic.
So back to this specific conference.
The positioning was one of free speech, as you just mentioned, free speech, academic freedom, open debate.
But as you just mentioned, Derek, people said whatever they wanted to say in those panels, and there was very little argument.
There was very little pushback, even when people said outrageous things that were unevidenced or ran counter to the scientific consensus.
It was only after initial criticism from journalists and scientists, as I said, that the entire roster of speakers were contrarians, that they included some more mainstream voices.
But despite this, 18 minutes into the first panel, UC Irvine public health professor Andrew Neumer was able to say, I believe that the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are that it's an experimental virus that escaped from a lab.
And Tony Fauci is intimately linked to the funding for experiments that created this virus.
And not a single panelist pointed out the lack of evidence for both of those claims.
The moderator for that first panel was, for some reason, this relatively unknown blogger named Wilk Wilkinson, not to cast aspersions on Twitter follower counts, but he has like 400 followers on Twitter.
I don't know who this guy is.
He asked particularly bad questions, and at times he rubber-stamped what had just been said as if he was sort of the arbiter of what was true.
And he gave his layman's takes about the nature of science and evidence, stuff that would have been completely at home on a heterodox YouTube podcast.
Nature of science and evidence, university censorship and biased media reporting.
He had some hot takes on all of that.
This underlined the fact that no evidence or academic work was presented at this conference at all.
So here's moderator Wilk Wilkinson posing what is to me a shocking but not surprising question, followed by gastrointestinal surgeon Marty Macquarie's answer.
Public health leaders focus very narrowly on minimizing deaths from COVID and often it came at the expense of other social values, other things that really make our society tick. other things that really make our society tick.
Being able to visit people, whether it be in elderly homes or put our children in school as they normally would go to school or attend funerals and things like that.
Should public health pay more attention to the other side of the scoreboard in future health crises?
I mean...
I'll start with you, Dr.
McCary, and then we'll kind of go around.
Well, this is one of the few places in America where we're actually having an honest conversation about the outcomes of COVID. And you saw the politicalization on both extremes.
And you had Dr.
Fauci saying in July of 2020 that teachers should wear goggles and gloves...
In the classroom to reduce COVID transmission.
Monica Gandhi was saying in day one that, hey, the other two coronaviruses, the cost of air illness in humans, SARS and MERS, they were airborne.
Why would this suddenly buck the trend?
But you saw no civil discourse.
And then when Dr.
Fauci decided, hey, should we recognize natural immunity, he brought in four vaccines.
of his like-minded friends and had them vote in a little straw poll.
And two voted to recognize it in the COVID vaccine mandate requirement.
Two voted not to.
And he says, well, I'm just going to not recognize it.
That's how decisions were made.
And we wonder why public trust in doctors and hospitals and the JAMA study went from 71% to 40%, a 31-point drop, because you cannot put something out there with absolutism as if it's science when you're just shooting from the hip.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, just shooting from the hip and then you heard Wilkinson.
Yeah, that's right.
That's absolutely right.
The thing is, Marty, everyone on that stage was actually hugely involved in politicizing the pandemic, which is something that you're bemoaning.
It's how you've all become famous on Fox News and on alternative media.
And of course, Fauci and other public health officials changed their recommendations over time as the science on an oval pandemic evolved.
But you're the guys who shoot from the hip.
What we all discovered about new variants was that natural immunity wasn't as protective as you all wanted to claim as the basis for opening up and getting back to business more quickly.
You said that Wilkinson's framing question was shocking but unsurprising.
I agree with both of those, especially the unsurprising part, because we heard all of that back at the beginning of the pandemic from the COVID metaphysicians.
What is death anyway?
I know they were hand-waving at eugenics, really, by doing this cost-benefit analysis on whether going to church or yoga classes or funerals wasn't really more important than fat or immunocompromised or old people dying.
In the most extreme cases, I don't know if you guys remember this, but there were GOP dudes that were arguing that the elderly should have a self-sacrificing attitude.
Most famously, in March of 2020, Dan Patrick, who was the lieutenant governor of Texas at the time, he went on Fox to talk about how keeping the economy open was of paramount importance.
And then he said...
No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?
And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
Meaning, basically, if I'm given the choice as a senior to expose myself to COVID so that everybody can keep shopping, then yeah, that's my patriotic duty.
That's how much I love my country.
And then we had this viral mantra right at the beginning of the pandemic, which was fear is the virus.
And it wasn't just about your odds of getting sick.
It was whether you were going to live a restricted and somehow compressed or suppressed life because of a supposed vulnerability.
And then we have Bobby Kennedy starting to say there are worse things than death.
That was like standard throughout.
And we should do a little callback here to Charles Eisenstein because he wrote several different essays about the importance of festivals.
Yes.
And people getting together and sharing love and food and in the face of death showing that they are still committed to like the beauty and the connection and the magic of being alive together.
Yeah, and not just pausing that for six months.
I need to point out something really important as well.
Marty Macri is behind a 2016 analysis that was published in BMJ that most listeners might not be aware of but have likely heard the results of.
And it's the idea that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
I've seen this claim repeated ad nauseum by influencers who want to claim how horrible our medical system is.
And unfortunately, when I was looking into it, a ton of news outlets, including NPR and The New York Times, they just ran with this headline after the publication of this report.
And we've been talking about bad data all episode, so it might not surprise you that that analysis was entirely based on bad data.
So for example, he never accounted for the death of critically ill hospitalized patients, and he attributes medical error to doctors who are fighting to keep patients alive in emergency situations as part of that cohort.
Okay, does that actually mean that when ER docs are throwing everything at the wall at the end of the line to try to save somebody and an intervention is unsuccessful, that that might be deemed a medical error?
Yeah, that's exactly what it means.
And again, this is an anecdote, but I worked in an emergency room for two years and I saw doctors trying to literally save lives when people were coming in with gunshot wounds and Part of my job was rolling the patients around on the stretchers and you can't imagine what's going on in those situations when doctors have no time to try to save someone's lives and he's putting those as errors.
So that's absolutely correct.
Damn it.
Unbelievable.
Macquarie also solely relied on death certificate data, which is known to be imprecise.
But you probably know that this contrarian population we're discussing today likes to say someone died with COVID, not of COVID. Macquarie also flattened medical error, which is not a diagnostic category, and he lumped it together with diagnostic categories like cancer and heart disease.
So epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz said that medical error is likely not in the top 15 when it comes to death rates.
But thanks to Macri, this false statistic has persisted for over eight years now.
And Macri was also, you mentioned Fox News and other places, Julian, he was also on the Maha panel in front of Congress.
And he was probably really pleased when Casey Means repeated his false statistic and Just like this conference, not one person in the entire room objected.
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because I neglected to say that in his opening comments, the first time we heard him speak at this conference, he basically just went right to all the stuff about we have an epidemic of chronic disease, it's because of the food, it's because of the chemicals and the pesticides.
He basically gave the Maha stump speech.
I was like, wait, what?
What's going on here?
Oh, okay.
These folks are running in all the same circles.
I mean, he's probably among this cohort now that is just really angling for a cabinet position if Trump is elected.
And it feels like that is just...
There's a frantic level of the people who are kowtowing.
I mean, I posted on our Instagram, Bobby's...
McDonald's actually isn't that bad if we just use beef tallow again the day after Trump...
I worked at a McDonald's over the weekend that was actually closed.
And it's just this feeling from these people who just, they pick me that's going on with the Maha movement is so gross.
And the fact that they're saying one thing about Red Dye 40, it's like, I see these wellness influencers be like, finally, someone's saying something and you can't see what they're actually trying to do.
Does that mean that we're going to see Jordan Peterson move over to the all-beef tallow diet?
Like just beef tallow?
That sounds utterly disgusting.
Yeah, these folks are really good at finding those viral moments, right?
John Ioannidis, I didn't realize this, in his closing remarks, also mentioned he's the author of a paper that everyone has heard of, which says...
Most scientific research is wrong, right?
That was like a year or two ago, everyone was talking about this.
Oh, it turns out you can't trust scientific research in general.
Well, he's the origin of that meme.
My last comments here about this is that the conference positioned itself as an overdue and unique academic event at which fearless open discourse could help show the way forward based on honestly evaluating the evidence.
And we just heard Marty Makari perpetuating this false trope that No honest scientific examination of the pandemic has happened.
Like this is the only place, guys, where it's happening.
We're doing it.
We're the ones.
This conference represents a breaking supposedly of that institutional silence.
But Stanford itself already hosted a 2021 multidisciplinary symposium of 54 expert speakers on exactly this topic.
That was just one of such events that, of course, have happened elsewhere.
And according even to John Ioannidis' own closing remarks, he acknowledged there were over 700,000 papers by around 2 million researchers that had been published on all aspects of the pandemic and pandemic policies.
Of course, he was using that factoid to support some other argument he wanted to make.
But this gathering did nothing to add to that body of work.
Because its presenters had no new research to share, because they have risen to prominence by being contrarian gadflies and heterodox podcast guests, not by doing groundbreaking research or painstaking, boring following of the evidence.
Despite being held at a prestigious university and endorsed by its newly minted economist president, this was not actually an academic conference.
It was a bullshit session, birthday party, for the Great Barrington Declaration.
And probably, I'm speculating here, a nice payday for some of the speakers.
These criticisms were nowhere more apparent than an entire quarter of the time allotted for panels being dedicated to a discussion of the lab leak hypothesis, which has been exhaustively examined and found by scientific consensus to be highly unlikely.
What's more, photos from the event showed widely spread-out dinner table-style seating with plenty of empty chairs rather than typical audience seating, and participants looked to mostly be in their 60s and above.
So this was hardly the next generation of maverick young Stanford medical students packing the room to find out what the hidden truth was.
Now, on a positive note, it is worth observing that several of the speakers, including Anders Tegnell and John Ioannidis, emphasized that the countries with the worst COVID outcomes were those with the most financial inequality and that addressing this would be crucial for the future.
It's too bad that their funders and allies are in bed with powerful think tanks advocating for Project 2025-style deregulation and libertarian policies that would actually only make matters worse.
That's why I find pings like that particularly gross and RFK Jr. like, because there's always some kind of lip service paid to the marginalized or to inequality while promoting policies that would just sort of increase inequality.
Yeah, it's folded into populist bullshit, basically.
Yeah, and you mentioned that I watched two of the full panels and then the opening and closing remarks, and there were people pushing back on some of the aspects of it.
But unfortunately, they were usually minutiae, predominantly around free speech and censorship, but not around COVID statistics, which is really what this was about.
Now, I made this comparison earlier, but I think it's pertinent enough to unpack here as we wind down.
This is creation as level thinking packaged under the premise of serious debate and open inquiry.
So Ken Ham is an Australian Christian fundamentalist who believes that the earth is 6,000 years old.
He founded Answers in Genesis, which is the organization that built the Creation Museum in Kentucky in 2007.
Now, given how ridiculous such a museum, which non-ironically posits the literal arc as a real story inside its walls, is to most sane people, Ham wanted to give his organization an air of legitimacy.
And unfortunately, science educator Bill Nye helped him by agreeing to debate creationism in 2014.
And there's real-world damage we can point to.
That debate helped Ham complete the construction of the Ark Encounter theme park in 2016.
So funding had stalled for that theme park, but when investors and donors saw an actual scientist, Bill Nye, take Ham seriously, the money rolled in.
Now, even more bonkers to me is that Nye visited the theme park the day after it opened for another debate.
So anti-vax contrarianism isn't as outlandish as a 6,000-year-old Earth where Jesus rode T-Rex, but it's entirely built on feelings and beliefs and not science.
Vaccinations are extremely well-tested, regulated, and effective.
And no, they're not perfect, but they're the best preventive medicine we know of alongside not being poor.
So This wasn't the theme of the event at Stanford, but it certainly was given airtime.
So the event was an anti-lockdown celebration, and honestly, mitigation measures are more open to debate than the efficacy of COVID vaccines.
Just this weekend, I was at Powell's Books here in Portland, thumbing through a book on seven centuries of quarantine measures that were implemented for pandemics around the world.
And it reminded me that no one has ever gotten it 100% right.
But again, this panel wasn't really about that because nearly everyone involved is invested in the business and financial side of health, not science.
And so they can outright lie about the efficacy of lockdowns and masks without much, if any, pushback.
And this doesn't mean everything they say isn't worth considering.
But when we consider the intention behind it, which is to keep businesses humming along, collateral damage in the form of immunocompromised and seniors be damned, we should be very concerned that such an event is given such a mainstream platform.
Matthew, in preparation for this event, you asked, are there any public health schools doing it right?
My response was that there's no public health institution that I'm aware of that has the sort of presence in the contrarian space.
The numbers of public health schools have grown rapidly in the last 20 years.
So in 2001, there were 44 institutions awarding public health degrees on an undergraduate level.
By 2020, it was 183.
I think most people who go through public health programs are just doing their job and they're getting it right.
But that's when you see these contrarians who conflate science and censorship and freedom with these business measures.
That's why they're given such an air of mysticism around them, basically, because they're speaking to different themes than the boring work of public health, which is what most people learn.
Now, this is especially concerning given that we're now just discovering the potential long-term effects of long COVID on seemingly healthy people as well.
Bhattacharya, Prasad, and all the others don't look good in the short hindsight that's now available to us.
And their business-first mentality is going to appear even crueler in a decade's time when we're grappling with a portion of the population that's really suffering from something we don't quite understand.
So I'm glad people like Dr.
Peter Hotez didn't show up to debate because it's not really about a debate.
It's just an event to help them build their own contrarian theme park.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here over the weekend for a brief on Monday over on Patreon for a bonus episode and of course next Thursday for our main feed.
