The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects
Dear Ms. Paul,
I recently read your article title The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects. Your article was an homage to a Dr. Marty Makary. I am very familiar with Dr. Makary. You had nice things to say about him and his calls for medical professionals to abandon incorrect positions. You wrote about children peanut allergies and said:
This avoidable tragedy is one of several episodes of medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence that Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examines in his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”…
While these mistakes are appalling, more worrisome are the enduring root causes of those errors. Medical journals and conferences regularly reject presentations and articles that overturn conventional wisdom, even when that wisdom is based on flimsy underlying data. For political or practical reasons consensus is often prized over dissenting opinions.
“We’re seeing science used as political propaganda,” Makary told me when I spoke to him by phone. But, he argues, mistakes can’t be freely corrected or updated unless researchers are encouraged to pursue alternative research.
You told your readers that Dr. Makary’s book would educate them about medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence
We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
That’s ironic.
Since 2021, there have been few better examples of someone sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence than Dr. Marty Makary himself. To pick one example amongst many, in February 2021, Dr. Makary authored the article We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April. Listen to what he had to say then.
Then in May 2021, Dr. Makary said he said he was right, that herd immunity had arrived. Just watch these videos from that time. The Delta and Omicron variants arrived by the end of the year.
Dr. Makary felt that herd humanity had arrived, because natural immunity was powerful. Of course, the power of natural immunity was that it already killed and injured millions of people in its first year, and it would go on to kill and injure many millions more. Nonetheless, Dr. Makary wrote articles such as Natural Immunity to Covid is Powerful. Policymakers Seem Afraid to Say So. This article said:
The emerging science suggests that natural immunity is as good as or better than vaccine-induced immunity.
Although vaccine-induced immunity was much safer than natural immunity, this was a major theme of Dr. Makary’s at that time. He said things such as “immunity is probably lifelong.” Just listen to this video. There are many more examples.
In another article from June 2021, just before the Delta variant arrived, called The Power of Natural Immunity, he said:
The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard… There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.
He added:
With more than 8 in 10 adults protected from either contracting or transmitting the virus, it can’t readily propagate by jumping around in the population. In public health, we call that herd immunity, defined broadly on the Johns Hopkins Covid information webpage as “when most of a population is immune.” It’s not eradication, but it’s powerful.
Dr. Makary concluded:
It’s time to stop the fear mongering and level with the public.
As I described previously, the arrival of the Delta and Omicron variants didn’t budge Dr. Makary a bit. Whatever the virus was doing, Dr. Makary was there to tell us the only problem with the virus was the fear that some people still had of it. Literally nothing the virus did impressed him after 2020.
Medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence
Dr. Makary called the Omicron variant “good news” and “nature’s vaccine”. Just listen for yourself.
All of this is just a small sample of some of Dr. Makary’s pandemic pronouncements. He spread gross misinformation about COVID’s risk to children, as well as the vaccine’s risk to them. He wrote error-filled articles with titled such as The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children. In the interview below Dr. Makary says that natural immunity is 27 times better than vaccine immunity, even though natural immunity killed 1.2 million Americans. Meanwhile Jim Jordan spins conspiracies about the COVID’s origins. Just watch. I can give you volumes of such material.
And yet, I have never seen Dr. Makary acknowledge he was wrong about any of this. Maybe he does so in his book, but I’ve not seen him write an article titled I Was Wrong About Herd Immunity or Natural Immunity Wasn’t So Powerful After All or As It Turns Out, the Delta and Omicron Variants Mattered.
Incredibly, despite his track record, you depicted Dr, Makary as an exemplar of a brave medical truth-teller, a maverick with integrity, a rightful correction to those dastardly “medical authorities” who stick to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence.
With trust in science on the wane, conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferating and anti-vaxxers like Robert Kennedy Jr. setting a deranged example, this may not seem like the best time to criticize the medical profession.
And it matters that you presented him this way in America’s most prominent newspaper. Your readers will think he is a heroic figure, yet they’ll be totally ignorant of his own words. Indeed none of the commentators I read seems to have any awareness of his pandemic predictions or his current activities.
And this is a more important story.
Doctors who minimized COVID, often with the express purpose of infecting unvaccinated people with it, are being platformed at conferences at prestigious institutions such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins, often in conjunction with right-wing politicians and business interests. I suggest you read the articles Johns Hopkins to Hold “Fringe,” Dark Money Heavy COVID Summit and New Scientist Group Calling For Pandemic Answers Has Ties to Right-Wing Dark Money by Walker Bragman. This article said:
Meanwhile, Dr. Marty Makary, a surgical oncologist, Johns Hopkins professor, and Norfolk Group member, made the rounds on conservative media as a critic of the federal pandemic response and a COVID minimizer before being tapped by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia as a COVID adviser last January.
Last month, in its “post-pandemic” roadmap, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, highlighted Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, Høeg, and Makary. Like Hoover, the foundation has gotten funding from many prominent conservatives over the years including Kochs and the Waltons. In 2021, it received $15,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, $8,000 from Stand Together Fellowships, and $361,000 from DonorsTrust.
Under these influences, an alternative narrative of the pandemic is being written where the We Want Them Infected Movement never existed, and the only problem with SARS-CoV-2 was that we ever tried to stop it. The conferences will censor important information about the speakers. None of the videos I’ve included here will be played at those conferences. This interview, for example, won’t be presented.
Despite your portrayal of him, it turns out that Dr. Makary is not some outsider who is speaking to medical authorities. He is a medical authority. He is an insider. However, he is more than a book author and professor at Johns Hopkins. He was a pandemic celebrity. He has a large social media following. He was a wrote many articles in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NY Post. He appeared on Fox News 142 times in a single year, according to the article The Dishonest Doctors Who Were Fox News’ Most Frequent Medical Guests in 2021. Dr. Makary was #2 on that list. He testified in front of Congress and advised Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin. I haven’t done any of those things.
Dr. Makary may also have a future if Trump wins and Robert Kennedy Jr. gets to make some key appointments. Dr. Makary’s rhetoric pandemic record appealed to Mr. Kennedy at times. It’s an important story that the words of a professor from Johns Hopkins were useful to a dangerous and influential anti-vaxxer.
Your readers won’t know any of this.
Looking forward to Monday when I testify at a nonpartisan roundtable discussion with @SenRonJohnson on how we can Make America Healthy Again. #MAHA
You also quote Dr. Makary as saying:
Asking questions has become forbidden in some circles. But asking questions is not the problem, it’s the solution.
So I’ll ask why you hid all of this from your readers, especially since you claim to share a fear of mine? You wrote:
With trust in science on the wane, conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferating and anti-vaxxers like Robert Kennedy Jr. setting a deranged example, this may not seem like the best time to criticize the medical profession.
I have also been very worried about this man and what he might do if he gets info power. I wrote two long articles this week (here and here) about the risk of Mr. Kennedy and the dangers of doctors normalizing him and sanewashing his record, as you did with Dr. Makary. You are right to be worried about Mr. Kennedy, though I wonder if you expressed your fear to signal to your readers that you are reasonable, that you oppose the real anti-vaxx loons, and Dr. Makary is not definitely one of those.
Because if you seriously think Mr. Kennedy is dangerous- and I seriously do- then you should rebuke anyone who normalizes and legitimizes him. You should inform your readers that Dr. Makary did not object when Mr. Kennedy amplified his voice. Dr. Kennedy has not done this to me, though I would be horrified and embarrassed if he did. I would immediately denounce it.
The ties are deeper than just a few Tweets. Dr. Makary is testifying with Mr. Kennedy and other such luminaries- remember Food Babe– at the Senate on Monday. He is doing so at the invitation of Senator Ron Johnson, another COVID conspiracy-theorist. According to the article Johnson Pushes Ivermectin and Vaccine Conspiracies Despite Federal Warning
Sen. Ron Johnson has made multiple podcast and radio appearances this week in which he pushes Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 while fear mongering about vaccinations. And he’s continued to do so, even after clear warnings that his message is dangerous.
This is who Dr. Makary associates with, though your readers won’t know it. You didn’t tell them. They believe that Dr. Makary is a brave truth-teller who stands up to “medical authorities”. We’ll find out soon if this is true. Will Dr. Makary can repudiate Mr. Kennedy and his anti-vaccine disinformation during their Senate testimony? Will Dr. Makary bring up children dead from measles in Samoa? I would.
I think you should write about that Senate hearing. Your readers deserve to know what Mr. Kennedy might do if he gains power and who he might bring with him. Having praised Dr. Makary as you did, it’s incumbent on you to inform your readers and accurately quote his pandemic record. Feel free to link to any of my videos. I am just asking you to be honest about who he is, and for some respected newspapers to do a better job of being honest with their readers about some basic things.
This is all much more important than peanut allergies.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Howard