If I were to do this story right, Kennedy told me, I needed to talk with his top deputies: Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH; Marty Makary, the commissioner of the FDA; and Mehmet Oz
The Atlantic recently ran a cover story on the rise of Robert Kennedy Jr. titled Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? It said:
How, I asked him, did he explain going from scorned activist to the boss of the public-health apparatus?
“I would say in one word: providential,” Kennedy said.
The article discussed the prominent role We Want Them Infected doctors play in Kennedy’s “providential” rise:
If I were to do this story right, Kennedy told me, I needed to talk with his top deputies: Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH; Marty Makary, the commissioner of the FDA; and Mehmet Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon turned TV doctor known for having hyped dubious “miracle” cures, who is now running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. All three of these physicians, like Kennedy, say that they were transformed by the pandemic, which they thought public-health authorities had mishandled. They had dissented from government edicts regarding vaccine mandates and masking. Although they do not embrace all of Kennedy’s views on vaccines, his deputies share his big-picture view that America’s public-health system is broken.
Early in the pandemic, Bhattacharya, a Stanford University physician and health economist, co-wrote the 2020 “Great Barrington Declaration,” a document that argued against universal COVID lockdowns in favor of allowing healthy people to gather while isolating only those groups at greatest risk of severe illness or death, such as the elderly and the infirm. For this, Bhattacharya was ostracized by colleagues at Stanford and the broader scientific community: An email that later became public shows Francis Collins, then the NIH director, telling colleagues that they needed a “quick and devastating published take down” of the declaration. (Tens of thousands of Americans a month were dying from COVID at that time; overstrained hospitals were at risk of collapse.) Death threats—a recurring feature of public-health work these days—followed for Bhattacharya, who now compares the COVID years to pre-Enlightenment Europe, when Galileo Galilei was imprisoned by Catholic leaders for arguing that the Earth orbited the sun.
In reality, the Great Barrington Declaration wanted “healthy people” to gather because it claimed the mass infection of this population, none of whom were vaccinated at the time, would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months. However, it is true that without WWTI doctors, Kennedy would probably not be in power today. Myself and many others have been writing about this unholy alliance between cranks and prominent doctors from prominent universities for some time. The subtitle to WWTI was:
How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID.
I intended the book as a warning.
My recent writing has sought to understand why such warnings were dismissed. How did MAHA achieve power? Why were so many Americans blind to obviously dangerous threats?
Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma
One source of blurry vision was The Atlantic itself. Here are some gems they published from some familiar names.
- Emily Oster, October 2020: “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders“: It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19.
- Dr. Monica Gandhi February 2021, “Overcaution Carries Its Own Danger to Children”: Incessant pessimism about the coronavirus is hard to kick, but the vaccines are banishing any doubt about reopening schools.
- Emily Oster, March 2021: “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma“: Children are not at high risk for COVID-19. We’ve known since early in the pandemic that they are much less likely to fall ill, especially seriously ill. Although scientists don’t quite understand why, kids seem to be naturally protected. As a result, you can think of your son or daughter as an already vaccinated grandparent.
- Drs. Tracy Beth Høeg, Lucy McBride, Vinay Prasad, and Monica Gandhi, May 2021, “American Kids Can Wait”: Allowing the export of doses would be not only effective vaccine diplomacy but also in Americans’ own interest. Gaining better control of the disease across the globe would prevent or slow the emergence of worrisome viral variants.
- Dr. Lucy McBride, August 2021, “Fear of COVID-19 in Kids Is Getting Ahead of the Data”: Shielding children from danger is a fundamental instinct. Tolerating risk for them is hard—but necessary—emotional work.
- Dr. Vinay Prasad, September 2021, “The Downsides of Masking Young Students Are Real”: Scientists have an obligation to strive for honesty. And on the question of whether kids should wear masks in schools—particularly preschools and elementary schools—here is what I conclude: The potential educational harms of mandatory-masking policies are much more firmly established, at least at this point, than their possible benefits in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
- Dr. Monica Gandhi, November 2021, “The New COVID Drugs Are a Bigger Deal Than People Realize”: These miraculous drugs arrived with minimal fanfare but represent the biggest advance yet in treating patients already infected with COVID-19.
- Dr. Monica Gandhi, November 2021, “It’s Time to Contemplate the End of the Crisis”: Americans should be asking ourselves what else needs to happen before we can declare an end to the crisis phase of the pandemic. Although the coronavirus’s course remains unpredictable—and bad surprises are still possible—the Delta-variant surge that started in early July ushered in what may have been the final major wave of disease in the United States.
This is how The Atlantic used seemingly credibly voices to trick its readers, especially regarding to pediatric COVID. And today, Drs. Vinay Prasad and Tracy Hoeg are working at the FDA, where they are featured in articles titled How Two Top FDA Officials are Quietly Upending Vaccine Regulations and FDA Described As “Clown Show” Amid Latest Scandal.
The Case for Finding Common Ground With RFK
When manufactured rage over COVID led directly to MAHA, The Atlantic was there to tell its readers not to worry about that either. In December last year, they published an article titled The Case for Finding Common Ground With RFK which said:
Democrats need to build a bigger tent to be competitive. But building a bigger political tent means compromising—and that compromise usually means making someone inside your tent angry.
Take, for instance, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who surprised many and angered some by announcing that he was “excited” by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Asking people to hold off on mocking or disagreeing with RFK Jr., Polis pointed to issues like pharmaceutical reform, nutrition policy, and the use of pesticides. After facing backlash, Polis clarified that he was pro-vaccines, but it left me thinking: What might it look like to open the Democratic tent to vaccine-skeptical Americans, of which there are a growing number?
What might it look like to open the Democratic tent to vaccine-skeptical Americans? The answer is obvious. Whenever children are unvaccinated, some get sick and suffer. Some die. Viruses don’t care which political party you belong to.
This spring, The Atlantic continued to minimize obvious dangers in an article titled The Health Official Who Just Might Stand Up to RFK Jr. which said:
Marty Makary, Donald Trump’s pick for FDA commissioner, is undoubtedly qualified for the job. A longtime Johns Hopkins surgeon and best-selling author, he has advised the World Health Organization and been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
That was obviously false. Dr. Makary wasn’t qualified to lead the FDA no matter what fancy titles he had. He was a pandemic fabulist who confidently made things up all the time. There’s an overwhelming amount of material, none of it is hard to find. Dr. Makary also had no experience leading a large organization, and predictably, things aren’t going well at the FDA today. “What to Know About the Collapse of the F.D.A“, read one typical headline. Predictably, Dr. Makary is not standing up to Kennedy. Rather he is lending the legitimacy of the medical profession to bolster Kennedy’s rank anti-vaccine disinformation.
This summer, The Atlantic published an article titled How Public Health Discredited Itself. This absurd piece of COVID revisionist history said:
Early in the pandemic, a few prominent researchers echoed Henderson’s warning that the unprecedented restrictions on liberty were not justified by the scientific literature and could cause much more harm than the virus. But these researchers—including Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas—were promptly vilified by colleagues, smeared in the press, and censored on social-media platforms. Other researchers became afraid to openly challenge the establishment, so the officials promoting lockdowns became the public face of scientific authority.
This was also obviously false, as I discussed in my article The Opinion Class: Practicing Focused Protection From Reality. Like Dr. Makary, Drs. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, whom The Atlantic portrayed as supermen stronger than COVID, are also flailing now that they have real world responsibility for the first time.
The Atlantic had some of the sharpest, most insightful writers on the pandemic and misinformation in general- Katherine Wu, Ed Young, Ben Mazer, and Charlie Warzel come to mind- and I am glad it recognizes that without WWTI doctors, Kennedy likely would not be where he is today. It’s important to honestly tell the story of how MAHA triumphed.
For that reason, it’s important to remember that The Atlantic was perfectly willing to repeatedly deceive its readers and numb them to grave risks, both COVID and MAHA. They were eager to launder right-wing disinformation that also found a home at wretched outlets such as the Brownstone Institute and Children’s Health Defense. What made The Atlantic exceptionally pernicious, however, is that they did all this under the guise of a being liberal, reasonable, and moderate publication, able to see all nuanced sides of complex issues.
If The Atlantic wishes to write more about the origins of MAHA, that will require them to turn the spotlight on themselves, at least if they want to do the story right.
