Dear Professors Macedo and Lee,
When MAHA loomed in the fall of 2024, we at SBM desperately tried to warn people about it. We were very familiar with Kennedy and his ilk. We’d written extensively on their fake statistics, anti-vaxx propaganda, and preposterous predictions- that herd immunity to COVID was imminent, that immunity to it was long lasting, that variants were nothing to worry about, and that the mass infection of unvaccinated youth would end the pandemic in 3-6 months. We were rightfully fearful of what they would do in power.
In a review of We Want Them Infected, my book on these disinformation doctors, titled These ‘Experts’ Sold The U.S. On A Disastrous COVID Plan, and Never Paid A Professional Price, Michael Hiltzik wrote:
They’ve held credentials from some of the world’s most elite universities — Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They’ve been welcomed into the highest government policy councils. They became fixtures on television news shows and were quoted incessantly by some of the nation’s leading newspapers.
They’re a cadre of academics and scientists who pushed a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic, shunning masks, school closings, even vaccines, all in the name of reaching the elusive goal of “herd immunity,” resulting in what may have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths…
In a world guided by science, the promoters of an unsuccessful herd immunity theory would long ago have lost their credibility and their public soapboxes. The opposite has happened…
At this moment, anti-science ideology on the right appears to be in the ascendance. Agitation against the COVID vaccine is metastasizing into an opposition movement against all childhood vaccinations, a trend that threatens to produce a surge in other vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and polio.
“The anti-vaccine movement has spotted an opportunity to sow doubt,” Howard told me. “Getting rid of all school vaccine mandates has always been the Holy Grail for them.”
Howard’s book is a warning. We may be on the verge of a public health disaster, because the promoters of a failed theory that COVID could be fought through “natural immunity” without vaccines have been able to wrap themselves in the mantle of truth-tellers. But they’re not.
That was written in May 2023, as MAHA was starting to coalesce, and it seems pretty prescient to me. Some of us saw this public health disaster coming from a mile way, though that was no great achievement to be honest. The threat was out in the open for everyone to see. All anyone had to do was care about it, which you didn’t.
While much of my pandemic writing discussed obviously poor predictions made by MAHA/MAGA doctors, much of my subsequent writing has been devoted to obviously poor predictions about these MAHA/MAGA doctors. That’s where you come in.
In November 2024, you wrote an essay about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya titled Restoring Trust in Public Health. You absurdly blamed “educated elites” for the return of Trump, and had glowing words to say about Dr. Bhattacharya. He was a pro-Kennedy, pro-Trump doctor and advocate of herd immunity via mass infection, who spread copious disinformation at the behest of a proud child labor advocate. None of this bothered you. You overlooked it all.
“Bhattacharya exemplifies qualities that were lacking in our nation’s scientific leadership during the pandemic,” you wrote. You concluded by saying:
If the country had had more scientific leaders like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—and more who were willing to listen to him—our policymaking could have been based more on evidence and less on hubris. During the pandemic democracy’s “truth-seeking” institutions were infected by politics, partisanship, and dogmatism. What we need now is a strong dose of fresh thinking and institutional reform from experts prepared to challenge the reigning consensus and renew our commitment to the basic values of science and liberalism.
Enough time has passed that we can evaluate his performance and that of the broader MAHA/MAGA movement he represents. How do you feel things are going so far? How is he doing with measles, cyclosporiasis, hantavirus, and Ebola? Has he promoted a culture of free speech? Is the scientific community enamored with his performance thus far? Has he restored trust in public health, as you promised he would?
We discuss these topics every week at SBM, and we have no plans to stop. Reality doesn’t scare us.
In contrast, you’ve gone quiet as church mice. Though you couldn’t stop talking about public health when it came to COVID, you have nothing to say about what’s happening today, and you are hardly alone in this regards. Like all sheltered MAHA fluffers, who pontificated profusely about the pandemic, you’ve retreated to a safe space where current events can be simply ignored. As always, unwanted news is unmentionable news.
This silence, this refusal to even acknowledge what is happening in STEM today, is both shameful and unacceptable. You portrayed Dr. Bhattacharya as a COVID superhero who had figured everything out. You publicly endorsed him as the savior of American science and medicine in prominent forums.
No one forced you to do that, and you have responsibility for your words. You should either make the affirmative case that you were right, that Dr. Bhattacharya has renewed our commitment to the basic values of science and liberalism, or admit that you were wrong, that everything you said about him in your essay and book was based on a fairy tale.
We all know that you’ll never do that, however. I am very familiar with people like you, laptop class academics who make foolish predictions, only to pretend like they never happened when reality proves them wrong. You’ve gotten your podcast invitations, and you’ve sold your books. You now have the privilege and luxury to simply move on. You’re just more “experts” who sold the U.S. on a disastrous plan and never paid a professional price.
As with COVID, that doesn’t mean that there’s wasn’t a price to be paid, however. As Dr. Gregg Gonsalves put it:
I wish I could say, may they never live this down, but sadly, they were tourists passing through public health and biomedical research, and so are long gone now, with all of us having to clean up the mess. Frances Lee and Steven Macedo held the door open for the far-right takeover of science.
From shuttered labs to kids sick with measles, others are paying the price for your need to feel “special” and “heterodox,” and no one should ever let you forget that.