Monday morning, you sure don’t look fine
I always know it’s going to be an…interesting…week whenever I wake up on a Monday morning to find an email from hack conspiracy journalist and attack Chihuahua for all things COVID-19 contrarian and antivax, Paul Thacker. This time around, as has been his usual MO, Mr. Thacker cc’ed my department chair and medical school dean, a transparent tactic that cranks of all stripes have used to try to intimidate me into silence dating back to, well, April 2005. Mr. Thacker has a bit of a twist in that he says his “editor” needs comment by a certain deadline, his editor being him. (He publishes a Substack entitled The Disinformation Chronicle, for which he appears to be the main blogger, although another formerly respectable journalist turned conspiracy theory muckraker, Matt Taibbi, is also listed.) I therefore immediately knew it was, as always, a trap, and that, no matter what I responded, Mr. Thacker would do his best to make me look as bad as he possibly could.
The last time I dealt with our ever intrepid newshound conspiracy hound was last April, when I received a similar email, characteristically also cc’ing my department chair and medical school dean, requesting “comment” about whether Allison Nietzel was a real physician given that she hadn’t done a residency after medical school or obtained a medical license. My sarcastic answer was yes. Dr. Nietzel earned a valid MD at an accredited medical school, and the American Medical Association “affirms that a physician is an individual who has received a ‘Doctor of Medicine’ or a ‘Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine’ degree or an equivalent degree following successful completion of a prescribed course of study from a school of medicine or osteopathic medicine.”
I also threw in a bit of a rejoinder about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford health economist and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a very influential document published in October 2020 that advocated a “let ‘er rip” approach to the COVID-19 pandemic—before there was even a vaccine yet!—to achieve “natural herd immunity,” with a tacked-on sounding bit about “focused protection” to keep safe those at high risk of severe disease, complications, and death from COVID-19 (e.g., the elderly and those with chronic disease). Unfortunately, Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, appeared not to have thought too deeply about any of it, particularly the focused protection part, given that they really proposed no realistic strategy to achieve such protection. At its heart, the GBD was a profoundly social Darwinist document that, in essence, advocated abandoning the weak to the virus so that the strong could “open up” the economy again. Basically the GBD could never have worked, as one of its supporters implicitly admitted, but managed to do devastating damage to public health, due to its influence.
Here’s what I said about Dr. Bhattacharya, referencing the not-so-super-secret other blog for which I serve as managing editor:
Finally, I would also point out that, like Dr. Neitzel, someone whom you clearly admire given your recent appearance on his podcast (Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya) has no postgraduate medical training beyond completing medical school either. (Look it up if you don’t believe me.) Yet Dr. Bhattacharya bills himself as a physician in his bio at Unherd, a publication with a much larger readership than SBM. Now that you know this, may I trust that you will also ask the editors of Unherd the same questions about Dr. Bhattacharya that you have asked me about Dr. Neitzel, given that the State of California defines “physician” similarly as “an individual issued a license allowing them to practice medicine”? After all, if it’s wrong or deceptive for Dr. Neitzel to bill herself as a physician-writer in her brief bio on our blog when she does not have a medical license, then it should also be wrong for Dr. Bhattacharya (who similarly has no medical license or NPI) to do the same thing in a publication like Unherd, shouldn’t it? And you are someone with integrity, who couldn’t possibly have a double standard about things like this, right?
The reason that I mention this is because you need to know that Paul Thacker really has a bug up his posterior about my previous writings on Jay Bhattacharya and the GBD. Come to think of it, as you will see, so does Dr. Bhattacharya. This is somewhat alarming given that Dr. Bhattacharya is poised to be confirmed as the Director of the National Institutes of Health. His confirmation hearing yesterday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions appeared to be the pretext for Mr. Thacker’s attack on critics of Dr. Bhattacharya and the GBD.
So let’s get to the letter.
Paul just wrote me a letter
On Monday morning, I fired up Outlook to check my morning email, only to be greeted by this missive from Mr. Thacker, with my department chair and medical school dean cc’ed to boot:
Hello Gorski,
I’m working on a story, and my editor needs comment back from you by Tuesday, 12 noon. I’m looping in your department chair and dean to provide you with professional support as this seemed to work out in the past.
You posted false and misleading statements about the safety AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which was found to cause blood clots. The UK government stopped offering the vaccine and the company now faces legal liability for its COVID vaccine, according to several news accounts. Several medical experts tell us your Science Based Medicine site serves as pharma marketing and you have zero expertise in vaccines or infectious diseases.
You also posted false and misleading statements about NIH Director nominee Jay Bhattacharya in an error-riddled BMJ essay. The BMJ later corrected some, but not all of your falsehoods.
We need responses to the following questions.
1) Why have you not corrected the record about the documented dangers of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine?
2) Do you disagree with AstraZeneca’s admission in court that their COVID vaccine causes side effects?
3) Why do medical experts tells us your Science Based Medicine website is just a pharma marketing website used to harass doctors?
4) Why have you not corrected the record about your documented falsehoods in the BMJ, as explained in several different essays?
5) Why have you not written for The BMJ since they had to correct your essay?
6) Anything we have missed?
Again, we need your response by 12 noon on Tuesday.
Thank you,
Paul–
Paul D. Thacker
https://www.pauldthacker.com
[email protected]“At the sound of the intruder, a dog barks. The other 99 dogs bark at the first dog.” – Hannah Arendt
“Hello Gorski”? Well, hello Thacker, I guess.
My first thought, me being me, was that I had to respond. Indeed, I wrote up a response, which I’ll post here, just for your edification. I, too, cc’ed my dean and department chair, because there was a message for them in it too:
Hello Thacker,
Nice to hear from you again. Thanks for your concern that I receive “professional support,” but I don’t think that I need it. It was very kind of you, though.
One notes that you don’t list precisely which statements about the AstraZeneca vaccine you consider to have been “false and misleading,” nor do you link to any specific posts in which these allegedly “false and misleading” statements were published. Similarly, you don’t specify which “medical experts” claim that our blog, Science-Based Medicine, serves as “pharma marketing” or any of the specifics of what they said and why they said it. Absent more information on these two points, it is very difficult for me to formulate a response to these two claims, except for a general response to your slur about SBM: SBM receives no financial support from pharma. Given that I am not the one who does any of the finances of SBM, I am letting Dr. Steve Novella, who founded SBM and manages its finances, know about your inquiry.
As for the 2021 commentary in The BMJ co-authored by Prof. Gavin Yamey and myself, COVID-19 and the New Merchants of Doubt, let’s be frank. Regarding the “falsehood,” I consider that to have been somewhat sloppy wording that somehow made it through the editorial and fact-checking process but was very quickly corrected with an addendum explaining the clarification made. That error didn’t harm Drs. Bhattacharya or others. Quite the opposite, in fact, it gave the defenders of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) a convenient pretext to take one error and try to discredit everything else stated in the commentary.
Moreover, no one, not even you, appears to be denying that AIER, the right wing “free market” think tank at whose headquarters the meeting at which the Great Barrington Declaration was drafted was held, did indeed receive funding from the Koch Foundation. One also notes that Jeffrey Tucker, who at the time was serving as Editorial Director for AIER, organized this conference with Martin Kulldorff, another co-author of the GBD. To me, Mr. Tucker’s involvement in the GBD makes it difficult to argue that AIER was only just the host of the meeting and had little or nothing to do with organizing and promoting the GBD. Indeed, Mr. Tucker bragged about setting up the meeting on a YouTube video (where he also bragged about being “in the room where it happened” when the GBD was drafted), and AIER registered the GBD website a day before the declaration was issued.
I think that I answered most of your questions in the text of this letter. Also note that, depending on what I see in your final version of your Substack post, I reserve the right to publish a public response and/or take other appropriate action. After all, I am about nothing if not science-based medicine and transparency.
Best,
David
P.S. Since you have done what you and people seeking to attack me for science advocacy frequently do to try to intimidate me, specifically looping in my department chair and dean (a tactic all too frequently used by people like you to try to silence me dating back 20 years), I thought it only appropriate to include in my response a bit about your history and tactics. The first thing they should know is that you write a Substack (The Disinformation Chronicles, which I encourage them to peruse), and your only “editor” is you. The second is that claiming your “editor” needs a response by a certain deadline is a tactic you have used on me before, as explained here and in #4 below. Second, I’ll include a bit of commentary about you and your history of dishonest journalistic tactics, so that they are as aware of what you really are and how you operate as I am, should they have the time and inclination to peruse the articles below:
- Paul Thacker amplifies antivaccine messaging by attacking science communicators
- Paul Thacker Trolling Skeptics on Vaccines
- What the heck happened to The BMJ?
- Hack conspiracy journalism: Paul Thacker vs. the definition of “physician”
- The Once Promising Journalist Who Became a Sadistic Troll
- Thacker parrots an old antivax trope: “Vaccines are magic!”
- “Transparency” should not equal a license to harass scientists
Remember how I (in part) entitled this “Paul Thacker relitigates criticism of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya”? Basically, that’s because that’s exactly what Mr. Thacker is doing here. I actually answered a lot of his loaded questions/criticisms three years ago, when GBD supporters, including Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, struck back. At the time, I expressed surprise that it took them a month to push back. Today, I express surprise that, more than three years after that BMJ commentary and more than four years after the GBD was published and I wrote my initial criticism of it, I still seem to be living rent-free in Dr. Bhattacharya’s head, as do several other critics. Predictably, Mr. Thacker is trying to portray bloggers at SBM as “pharma shills“; so let me just interject again: SBM does not receive funding from pharmaceutical companies. I might as well also add: Neither does Respectful Insolence. Nor do I.
I was all set to hit “send” on what I thought to be an epic response, when I communicated with a colleague with a cooler head, who advised no contact with Mr. Thacker. I thought about it, and I agree. Far better to post a public response, rather than to email him answers that he could cherry pick and distort! So I didn’t send the email to Mr. Thacker, although I did forward it to my dean and department chair, the better to remind them who Mr. Thacker is.
Before I move on to Mr. Thacker’s hack smear-job, let me just amuse you by pointing out that Mr. Thacker followed up the next morning with this, cc’ed (as always) to my dean and department chair:
Hello, we have not received a response. We need your response by 12 noon, today.
Thank you, Paul
I ignored this, and yesterday morning I was greeted with another email, again cc’ed to my dean and department chair:
Hello Gorski, you did not respond to questions but the piece is out.
The COVID-Era Smearing – and Resurrection – of Trump NIH Appointee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/03/04/the_covid-era_smearing_and_resurrection_of_trump_nih_appointee_dr_jay_bhattacharya_1095151.htmlI wrote and pushed through the law that addresses conflicts of interest in medicine and helped the NIH to reformulate their regs on the matter. So I’m still a little confused by the error-riddled essay you wrote in the BMJ on Jay Bhattacharya. If you’re interested in becoming a forward-facing, productive member of the scientific community on financial conflicts in medicine, I’ll refer you to some critical points of interest.
Here’s a talk I gave at Harvard Law School on the matter and why dealing with corruption in medicine is so important: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/at-hls-former-investigator-questions-the-relationship-between-physicians-and-pharmaceutical-industry/
And here’s a piece I wrote for the Safra Center on getting the law and regs changes done: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2014/09/30/the-father-of-sunshine-2/
Enjoy your day,
Paul
I did actually enjoy my day, as I looked forward to writing this response yesterday evening, part of which was already written, thanks to my email above. I also enjoyed the rest of my day, content in knowing that, contrary to Mr. Thacker’s smear, I receive no money from big pharma. Indeed, he is more than welcome to search the Open Payments database described in his article for the Safra Center. (I bet he did and was disappointed.) I will admit to being mildly surprised that Mr. Thacker’s response hadn’t been published on his Substack, but rather on something called RealClear Investigations. Maybe he does have an editor after all, at least this one time! Perusing the website, the editor of RealClear Investigations is Tom Kuntz, of whom I’d never heard before. If Mr. Thacker’s “exposé” is typical of the quality of the “investigations” reported there, this is clearly an unreliable site.
Aha! I see what’s going on here:
Basically, it looks as though the GBD authors formed their own dubious journal, supported by the RealClear Foundation and associated with the RealClear Media Group. Rather than a real peer-reviewed journal, it looks as though it’s designed to be an echo chamber:
According to the academy’s guidelines, public health researchers can become members through invitation or nomination from other members. New members are accepted based on whether they are “good scientists,” Kulldorff says, something the academy establishes “either by knowing it already from our own experience as scientists, or by reading what they have published” and checking for sound methods and interpretation. Kulldorff says he doesn’t know how many members the academy currently has, but Stanford physician scientist George Tidmarsh, an author on one of the eight papers, said membership was “growing rapidly by the hour, and it will continue to grow indefinitely.”
Once members, researchers can publish “any of their public health research” in the journal, as well as contribute perspectives and reviews of papers in other journals, according to the submission guidelines. “If somebody’s a good scientist, we think they should have academic freedom to publish what they think is important,” Kulldorff says. He notes that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) used to allow members of that academy to forgo peer review. (This approach has since faced strong criticism, and PNAS has adjusted some of its policies over the years to increase oversight of submitted articles.)
PNAS published some absolutely atrocious crap, along with its good stuff. For example, Linus Pauling, because he was a member of the Academy, was allowed to publish his dubious research on vitamin C in PNAS. This new journal doesn’t have the heft of a real National Academy of Sciences behind it, in addition to its editorial board including a who’s who of COVID-19 contrarians, “respectable” antivaxxers, and grifters, several of whom have been featured on this blog. I suppose that this is what they call “brand synergy” in the biz. Nice work if you can get it.
Let’s dig into the final product, The COVID-Era Smearing – and Resurrection – of Trump NIH Appointee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. I’ll focus mostly on what he says about me, because it reveals his mendacity. At the same time, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw my photo in the article, with the caption “David Gorski: Antagonist of Bhattacharya.” I’m seriously thinking of adding that to all my social media profiles. It has a nice ring to it. Thanks, “Thacker”!
Living rent-free in Dr. Jay’s (and Paul’s) head
Mr. Thacker begins by portraying Dr. Bhattacharya as a suffering hero for scientific truth:
Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.
Poor baby. Promote bad ideas, and there will be pushback. “Freedom of speech” does not mean “freedom from consequences,” and, I note, the most recent consequence for Dr. Bhattacharya’s advocacy of mass infection has been for him to be nominated to run the NIH, despite his being grossly unqualified to hold that office on the basis of his not being a physician-scientist with a strong track record of biomedical research coupled with his lack of any discernible experience running a large organization like the NIH. Naturally, Mr. Thacker touts his “vindication”:
In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What apparently led Dr. Bhattacharya to have such agita five years ago was the reaction to his infamous Santa Clara County seroprevalence study, initially published as a preprint in April 2020 coauthor by (among others) his Stanford colleague Dr. John Ioannidis, which used flawed methodology to produce a much higher estimate of how many people had been infected with COVID-19, the better to produce a much lower estimate for its case fatality rate. Its methodology was widely criticized, and this study was one of the first studies during the pandemic to have wide influence despite having only been published on a preprint server. (It didn’t hit the peer-reviewed literature until a year later, and its flaws were mostly uncorrected.)
Indeed, if there’s one thing that Mr. Thacker avoids like the plague in his search to portray Dr. Bhattacharya as a scientific soothsayer unjustly persecuted by the scientific Powers That Be, as well as their apparent lackeys (e.g., me), for speaking COVID-19 truth, only to be vindicated later is how, over and over and over again, Dr. Bhattacharya has been so wrong as to be not even wrong. Friend of the blog Dr. Jonathan Howard documented his many pronouncements that turned out to be wrong in his book We Want Them Infected. Basically, fan of “natural herd immunity” fan that he is, Dr. Bhattacharya predicted that we had achieved “natural herd immunity” and/or that the pandemic would be over in 3-6 months so many times that it’s a running joke.
Indeed, it’s amazing how fast Dr. Bhattacharya went from authoring an article in March 2020 entitled Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?, in which he wrote:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
Although, Dr. Bendavid eventually admitted their predictions were “way off“, Dr. Bhattacharya never looked back or deviated from this message, regardless of the reality on the ground. As the pandemic progressed, he prematurely declared the danger to be gone and minimized every variant. He said COVID had been “defanged” on: April 14, 2021; May 3, 2021; July 21, 2021; July 28, 2021; and January 6, 2022. In 2021, he greatly over-hyped vaccines, saying they blocked transmission and eliminated severe disease. Future historians can understand how the pandemic unfolded by reading Dr. Bhattacharya’s predictions and knowing the opposite happened.
In July 2020 he said Sweden had reached herd immunity. Months later, Sweden limited public gatherings to eight people amidst a COVID surge. In May 2021, he said COVID was “clearly a seasonal disease” and discussed herd immunity in the U.S. by saying “we are kind of already there.”
And this:
Weeks later, Florida reported record COVID deaths, and schools, “drowning in COVID”, couldn’t stay open. Undaunted, Dr. Bhattacharya recorded an interview titled Why No One Should Panic About the Omicron Variant. The headlines later reported soaring death rates in older people and a record number of pediatric hospitalizations and deaths.
Weeks later, Florida reported record COVID deaths, and schools, “drowning in COVID”, couldn’t stay open. Undaunted, Dr. Bhattacharya recorded an interview titled Why No One Should Panic About the Omicron Variant. The headlines later reported soaring death rates in older people and a record number of pediatric hospitalizations and deaths.
Of course, later, Dr. Bhattacharya turned against COVID-19 vaccines, eventually starting a Substack and podcast with Ray Arora, the Illusion of Consensus, which has featured among the vilest of antivaxxers, including Steve Kirsch and Kevin Bass, among others. He held a “debate” with Joseph Fraiman over whether authorization for current COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should be suspended and concluded:
By the end of the debate, Joe had convinced me that not pulling the authorization makes it more likely that we will never get good clinical trial evidence testing to check whether such groups still exist in a setting of widespread recovered immunity.
Peruse his Substack, and search it for “vaccine.” You’ll see what I mean. It’s a festering mass of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience about COVID-19. So is his more recent Substack, Science From the Fringe, where it’s more of the same, including a “conversation” with Joomi Kim, who went out of her way to defend antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Never mind all that, though. The whole first part of Mr. Thacker’s article portrays Dr. Bhattacharya as a heroic warrior for free speech and scientific inquiry whose first famous pandemic study was unjustly “canceled” through an “inquisition” by a cabal of scientists that included Stanford colleagues, then-NIH Director Francis Collins, and, of course, Anthony Fauci. The truly hilarious thing is that a implication and outright narrative running through Mr. Thacker’s article is that all of us, myself included, who criticized Dr. Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration did so at the behest of Anthony Fauci and/or Francis Collins, starting with the predictable reference to Fauci’s email about The Great Barrington Declaration:
That month, Bhattacharya and professors Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for rejecting harmful COVID lockdowns in favor of “focused protection” for society’s most vulnerable, such as the elderly. With the declaration building support, Collins, four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, sent Fauci an email with the subject line “Great Barrington Declaration.”
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the [Health] Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Collins wrote. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?”
Some hours later, Fauci forwarded Collins a “refutation” of the Great Barrington Declaration written for The Nation by his friend and advocate Gregg Gonsalves, an AIDS activist who is now a professor at Yale. Fauci rose to prominence in the 1980s as an HIV/AIDS researcher. “Indeed, and well said,”replied Collins. The Gonsalves essay referenced no actual science but denigrated Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff for ignoring what he called “progressive principles of justice and equality” in favor of “survival of the fittest.”
Fauci has praised Gonsalves several times over the years and, in his recent memoir, singles out Gonsalves and a handful of other activists “for their unflinching support over the past few years.”
Dr. Collins was right about one thing and wrong about another. The three co-authors of the GBD are definitely fringe, but only one of them, Sunetra Gupta, is a legitimate epidemiologist.
Let’s skip ahead to what Mr. Thacker wrote about me, first:
Gorski is a self-described “misinformation debunker” and runs a website called Science Based Medicine. It doesn’t always get its facts straight. After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021, for example, that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski decried the decision on his X account claiming, “Reported blood clots appear to be no higher than background and very likely unrelated to the vaccine.” The UK government eventually stopped offering AstraZeneca’s jab, and the company finally admitted that its COVID vaccine causes harm in what The Telegraph reported could result in millions of dollars in legal claims.
This is very typical of Mr. Thacker’s tactics. For example, he cherry picked a single Tweet, without actually linking to the Tweet, and neglected what I later wrote about the AstraZeneca vaccine. Instead, he linked to an Substack article by him attacking Steve Novella and me, whose deceptive spin and misinformation both Steve and I debunked right after the Substack was published. Here’s the Tweet referenced:
One month later, I wrote about the AstraZeneca vaccines and blood clots, where I conceded that the evidence looked more and more consistent with an association. I even noted that the detection of rare blood clots associated with the vaccine was evidence that our vaccine safety monitoring systems were working! Steve Novella wrote about the same issue and noted the same thing: The association appeared real, although such clots were rare. You wouldn’t know that if all you knew about our writings on the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines came from Mr. Thacker’s biased writings. Basically, he’s just regurgitating an old attack he’d made on us in 2021 that Steve and I had refuted…in 2021! This also demonstrates another difference between SBM writers and Dr. Bhattacharya. We change our views when the evidence demands it—and say so.
Amusingly, apparently to Mr. Thacker I was also doing either Dr. Collins’ or Dr. Fauci’s bidding, because it never occurs to him that Dr. Bhattacharya’s critics might have minds of their own:
“Gorski is damaging to science,” said Bhattacharya. “He creates an environment where researchers can’t speak their mind if they cross the biopharmaceutical industry.” Bhattacharya described Yamey and Gorski as part of a network that carried out Collins’ devastating takedown. “I’ll never publish in a big mainstream journal,” he said a couple of years ago in an interview.
See what I mean by my living rent-free in Dr. Bhattacharya’s head? (And, apparently, also Mr. Thacker’s?) Relitigation, indeed. What really appears to have gotten under Dr. Bhattacharya’s skin, though, is a 2021 BMJ commentary that I co-authored with Gavin Yamey at Duke entitled Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt. The next part of Mr. Thacker’s smear is basically a rehash of the same attacks launched on that commentary a month after it was published:
In late 2021, Gorski partnered with Yamey on a piece for the BMJ falsely charging that Bhattacharya and other Great Barrington Declaration signers were supported by billionaires “aligned with industry.” Bhattacharya and the other signatories met at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, Yamey and Gorski argued, “has also received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, which was founded and is chaired by the right-wing billionaire industrialist known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business.”
While Gorski and Yamey provided no evidence that Koch money funded the GBD signatories, the BMJ still published their piece. Association with a nonprofit that has distant links to Koch money was apparently enough to carry the whiff of dark money corruption, a charge that still circulates on social media to this day.
“The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication,” wrote Martin Kulldorff in The Spectator. “While the AIER has received only a single $68K (£50,000) Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.”
Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, Gorski did not respond when asked why he had not corrected his allegations against Bhattacharya.
I’m responding now, in public, so that Mr. Thacker can’t Thack again and twist my words, noting that Mr. Thacker doesn’t actually cite more than one “error.” As I wrote three years ago, saying that other universities receive funding from Koch-associated organizations is not exactly the slam-dunk defense that Kulldorff thinks it is. It’s more of an indictment of universities than a defense of AIER or the Great Barrington Declaration or anything else. Once again, Mr. Thacker shows that there is nothing new under the sun with GBD supporters, as I directly addressed all of this over three years ago—twice!—including this bit by Mr. Thacker: Moreover, a lot of the funding the right wing “free market” think tank AIER didn’t come directly from the Koch Foundation. In my rebuttal, I even cited John Mashey’s investigation, as well as the investigation by Dana Drugman published soon after the GBD was published. Here’s the subterfuge. Little of the Koch Brothers’ support for AIER wasn’t direct, but rather came through other Koch-affiliated entities.
For example, Mashey noted:
Prior to 2017, AIER did not appear to have many connections to Koch-tied individuals or organizations. [35]
However, at some point in early 2017 no later than February, Benjamin Powell joined AIER’s board of directors. Powell was one of several new key staff who joined AIER around that period, with many having ties to the Koch-funded George Mason University (GMU) among other Koch-funded or affiliated groups. [36]
Powell, a GMU economics graduate (PhD), is a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Independent Institute and former president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education that itself received at least $330,500 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation according to DeSmog’s review of public 990 tax forms. [37]
Also:
As shown in comprehensive books including Jane Mayer’s Dark Money and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains,George Mason University’s (GMU) Economics Department, and the Mercatus Center at and Institute for Humane Studies at GMU have long been key groups for recruiting, training and connecting people for Koch-funded universities and think tanks in the Koch Network. [45], [46]
As I’ve repeated emphasized for the case of AIER and the support it gave the Great Barrington Declaration, not all support is financial, and there’s a lot of important support in terms of personnel and training that filters out from Koch-affiliated organizations to groups like AIER that allows such groups to claim plausible deniability or to discount the amount of Koch-related support as relatively inconsequential by pointing to how seemingly small any direct contributions are. I also can’t help but mention again that Jeffrey Tucker, who at the time was serving as Editorial Director for AIER, organized this conference with Martin Kulldorff, another co-author of the GBD. Again, Mr. Tucker’s involvement in the GBD makes it difficult to argue that AIER was only just the host of the meeting and had little or nothing to do with organizing and promoting the GBD, especially given how Mr. Tucker bragged about setting up the meeting on a YouTube video (where he also bragged about being “in the room where it happened” when the GBD was drafted), and AIER registered the GBD website a day before the declaration was issued.
I’ll also cite more of my previous refutation of this nonsense:
I wouldn’t exactly say that The BMJ “retracted,” but rather clarified the article. There is no doubt that, even if the Great Barrington Declaration signatories didn’t receive grants, direct payments, or even travel and lodging expenses from AIER, they definitely received support of considerable other value from the think tank in the form of the “coming out” press conference that the AIER held for them to announce the Declaration and access to the press and high-ranking government officials in the UK and the US. Before the Great Barrington Declaration, they were mostly unknown outside of their professional circles. After that conference, they were well on their way to becoming superstars of the anti-lockdown, antimask movement and were able to promote their ideas at the highest levels of government and for major publications like Newsweek.
Here’s the funny thing. The somewhat sloppy wording of the initial version of the commentary, which implied that the GBD had been directly funded by the Koch brothers, has provided a pretext for GBD authors and supporters to attack everything else in the commentary, none of which has been refuted. It was a wording that was rapidly corrected, but now, well over three years later, hacks like Mr. Thacker still cite it as though that one slip invalidates the central thesis of whole article. It doesn’t, basically trying, as cranks love to do, to use falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all things) to cast doubt on the whole narrative. What’s even funnier is that the narrative wasn’t really totally false in one thing; it was just unclear in a way that allowed for overinterpretation.
Basically, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is a legal principle that dates back to ancient Rome that indicates that a witness who is false about one matter can be considered to be not credible in all matters. This principle is why lawyers are often so aggressive trying to impeach the credibility of a witness and lawyers on the other side labor so hard to prevent that from happening. If a witness can be shown to have been badly mistaken or to have lied about one thing, then by the principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, it is reasonable to question everything else in that witness’ testimony. In a criminal case such questions could easily be enough to cast “reasonable doubt” on the testimony, which is all that is needed for an acquittal. However, we are not in a legal proceeding, and the GBD authors are not defendants. They are being criticized. Lack of clarity on one point does not invalidate all the other points, and, tellingly, Mr. Thacker doesn’t even try do do that, preferring instead to quote GBD author Martin Kulldorff making a blanket statement that there are a lot of errors in the commentary without actually citing what those errors are and providing evidence to show that they are errors.
Not that you’d get even a whiff of a hint of that narrative from Mr. Thacker, who invokes the usual “lab leak” conspiracy theory bogeymen about connections with EcoHealth Alliance and a a pandemic preparedness program called PREDICT to try to smear Gavin Yamey and then writes:
But the defamatory damage was already done,” Bhattacharya wrote in Newsweek, calling out Yamey and Gorski for their BMJ errors, “and many scientists stayed silent as schools closed and children were harmed, even though they knew better. They did not want to be similarly smeared.”
“Yamey is a narrative enforcer for the pandemic preparedness industry that likely funded the research that caused the pandemic,” Bhattacharya said.
I really hope that RealClearInvestigations didn’t actually pay Mr. Thacker for this tripe.
Why so angry?
I never realized that I had so much power! Living rent-free in Dr. Bhattacharya’s head? I’m crushing the evil GBD signatories, so much so that a commentary I co-authored nearly three and a half years ago still irritates the crap out of GBD supporters in general and Dr. Bhattacharya in particular. I rule! Oh, wait. Dr. Bhattacharya is about to be confirmed as the new NIH Director, and I’m just an academic surgeon with a blog who, professionally, is struggling to keep his research program going. It makes me wonder why Mr. Thacker and Dr. Bhattacharya are still so very, very angry. After all, by any reality-based assessment of influence and power, Dr. Bhattacharya appears to have “won,” so much so that I have to wonder if I will ever be competitive for an NIH grant or be allowed to serve on an NIH study section again. Indeed, given Dr. Bhattacharya’s desire to penalize universities that don’t live up to his very specific vision of “free speech” by withholding grant support, I almost wonder if he would go so far as to punish my university because it is where I am faculty. That an NIH Director would do that was once unthinkable. Not any more. He will be able, potentially, if he chooses, to force me into early retirement, at least in academics, by threatening my place of employment.
I can’t worry about that now, at least not much.
Mr. Thacker’s “report” and comparing it to what I’ve written here, I hope that it’s obvious to our readers just how slanted and deceptive Mr. Thacker’s narrative is. He really is relitigating old grievances held by GBD supporters and authors, including our new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. His claims were answered and refuted three years ago, but I guess the distance of time lets him trot them out, tart them up, and present them as though they were something new, right on the day Dr. Bhattacharya faced the Senate HELP Committee.
Again, why so angry? Dr. Bhattacharya won, at least politically. Scientifically, however, he lost three and a half years ago and, regardless of how much political power he amasses, he will never win in actual science. The most he can do is impose a new Lysenkoism on the NIH. I fear, working for his boss antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he will do just that.
