Hopkins Business School to Platform COVID-19 Contrarians at Health Policy Symposium

Next month, Stanford University’s Department of Health Policy is set to host a conference on pandemic policy featuring a number of prominent COVID-19 minimizers. Of particular concern to public health and medical experts is the participation of the university’s new president, Jonathan Levin, who previously served as its business school dean. The event itself was organized by Stanford health economist and author of the pro-economy, anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

But before that, Bhattacharya and two of the other physician panelists from the Stanford conference, Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Marty Makary, are set to appear at a similar event this week in Washington D.C. hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School. This forum, which is notably not being conducted in coordination with the prestigious Johns Hopkins medical or public health schools, reveals a concerning trend: Right-wing business interests are working to infiltrate academia in order to legitimize pro-business, anti-public health policy.

The Atlas Dogma

Atlas, Bhattacharya’s colleague from Stanford’s conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution, will be speaking at Hopkins on a panel titled “Health policy 2025 & beyond.” In June 2022, the Democratic-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC) published a report, “The Atlas Dogma: The Trump Administration’s Embrace of a Dangerous and Discredited Herd Immunity via Mass Infection Strategy,” specifically exposing the work of Atlas and Bhattacharya within the Trump White House in 2020.

Atlas and Bhattacharya are founding fellows of the Academy for Science and Freedom at the right-wing and politically active Hillsdale College – a sponsor of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 plan, which serves as the extremist policy strategy for a second Trump presidency and is markedly anti-public health.

Back in June, Atlas and Bhattacharya spoke at an event at the New College of Florida titled “Reversing the Ideological Capture of Universities and Institutions.” New College is a public liberal arts school overhauled by the far-right state government to be the “Hillsdale of the South.”

The Heritage Foundation

This past March, Atlas co-authored a report titled “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years” published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group whose leadership includes Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media; Arthur Laffer, a former member of President Reagan’s Economic Advisory Board; and Steve Moore, a Wall Street Journal contributor and visiting fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s “Project for Economic Growth.”

The Heritage tie is notable given their authorship of Project 2025. Heritage also authored a “Road Map for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” which appears to be the playbook being followed by the current GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) (the HSSCP replaced the HSSCC following the 2022 midterms).

Misleading claims

Atlas’s co-authors on “Lessons Learned” include Philip Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity; Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and former chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump Administration; and Steve Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins.

Their report contains multiple misleading claims including “lockdowns do not work to substantially reduce deaths or stop viral circulation” (they did) and “masks were of little or no value” (false). It echoes messaging promoted by the GOP-led HSSCP, including overstating damage caused to children from school closures and decrying the harm of supposed governmental suppression of scientific dissent.

This week, Atlas and Bhattacharya will be joined for the “Physician autonomy and leadership” panel by Makary, who is, tellingly, the sole medical representation from Hopkins. Makary infamously over-promised that the U.S. would “have herd immunity by April” in a 2021 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, despite having no background in infectious diseases or epidemiology.

The Norfolk Group

Bhattacharya and Makary are both members of the Norfolk Group apparently created to send GOP-friendly experts to the HSSCP. Shortly before the opening HSSCP hearing in February 2023 featuring Bhattacharya and Makary, the Norfolk Group published a blueprint of “questions for a COVID-19 commission,” which bears a striking resemblance to the Heritage Foundation’s “Road Map.”

Of note, Norfolk Group member Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg – part of the 2022 so-called Urgency of Normal, which felt very much like a school-focused rebrand of the Great Barrington Declaration and downplayed the risk posed to children by COVID-19 – is currently a visiting scholar at MIT’s business school, the Sloan School of Management (she is not participating in the Stanford or Hopkins events but testified to the HSSCP last year).

Rounding out the “Physician autonomy and leadership” panel are two Hopkins professors: Phil Phan (Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship) and Dan Polsy (Professor of Health Economics and Policy). Shortly following the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration, Polsy hosted Bhattacharya at a webinar on the “herd immunity vs. lockdown” debate through the business school.

Dark money and rewriting history

As my colleague Walker Bragman reported, the lineup at this Hopkins event also features speakers affiliated with right-wing dark money groups with ties to billionaire Charles Koch, a major donor to Hopkins ($1.3 million from 2021-2022) and Stanford ($3.3 million from 2020-2022). The Great Barrington Declaration, which codified the herd immunity strategy pushed in the Trump White House, was itself on the edges of the Koch Network.

These Hopkins and Stanford events as well as the GOP-led HSSCP serve the purpose of rewriting pandemic history to push an anti-public health agenda favored by right-wing business interests – just ahead of the presidential election. If these contrarians continue to be platformed this way, there must be a concerted effort to draw attention to the damage their ideologically-motivated strategies caused in Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Preview of what may come

The doctors who aided in his destructive pandemic response are very likely contenders for positions in a second Trump administration. These “conferences” serve the dual purpose of auditions and campaign-adjacent events, and their dangerous anti-science narratives are not something academia should be validating by platforming. This is not about academic freedom or censorship; this is an issue of academic integrity and information safety.

If you have not already, now would be an excellent time to read Science-Based Medicine’s Dr. Jonathan Howard’s 2023 book “We Want Them Infected,” which expands on the HSSCC’s “Atlas Dogma” report. And perhaps donate a copy to Stanford’s President Levin and the Carey Business School.