Public health wasn’t always a dystopian hellscape intent on using police and military power to maximize compliance… But it is now!
We’ll never know, but it’s entirely possible that without the unholy union of MAHA and MAGA in the summer of 2024, Trump might not be in power today. As such, it’s important to understand how MAHA came to be. While that’s a long, complicated story I’ve explored in two books and nearly 300 essays here, SBM readers know that disinformation doctors played a crucial role in elevating Kennedy, and thus Trump.
Although MAHA doctors described themselves as “medical scholars” who based their opinions on a “sober assessment of available evidence”, in reality, they were content creators first and foremost. They rose to prominence via their emotionally manipulative social media output, and their videos, podcasts, Tweets, Fox News clips, and blogs were deliberately designed to stoke fear and rage regarding COVID mitigations.
In their telling, COVID threatened only grandma, and plagiarizing from pre-pandemic anti-vaxx agitprop, they depicted public health officials not as people struggling to stop a new virus from overwhelming hospitals and morgues, but as diabolical totalitarians who would gleefully send masked police in the street to terrorize innocent civilians.
Pre-pandemic anti-vaxx propaganda
In this video for example, set to ominous music and footage of police in riot gear, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the current head of the NIH, hysterically warned of a “biomedical security state” should another pandemic arise. The alternative he offered was “a liberal democracy, with enlightenment norms guiding science.” “Those are the stakes going forward,” he said. He wasn’t wrong about that.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya warns of a “biomedical security state.”
Dr. Vinay Prasad, a top FDA official today, sounded similar themes on social media by writing:
Public health wasn’t always a dystopian hellscape intent on using police and military power to maximize compliance with interventions that are based on 0 RCTs. But it is now!
He elaborated on this delusion in a video and essay titled How Democracy End: COVID19 Gives A Road Map for Political Control, which also warned of a police state ushered in by fascists who might seek to contain a future pandemic. Dr. Prasad wrote:
The pandemic events of 2020-2021 outline a potential pathway for a future democratically elected President of the United States to systematically end democracy… During the COVID19 pandemic, some of the most ardent calls for strong restrictions came from members of the political left… When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events. Indeed, this was the case with Germany in the years 1929-1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing, the president subsequently died, a key general resigned after a scandal and the pathway to the Fuhrer was inevitable.
Dr. Vinay Prasad warns of military in the streets.
Elsewhere, Dr. Prasad rejected calls for “forgiveness.” “These pieces of shit are still lying”, he said in his typical vulgar, vengeful manner. “They are still fucking lying.”
Although this was theatrics, an imagined, paranoid, fantasyland conjured to spread anger and doubt, it was very effective in warping public opinion. Many people are now convinced that the only problem with COVID was that Nazis from the “political left” tried to limit its carnage.
God gave us two arms. One to vote for Donald Trump, the other to give thumbs up to RFK Jr.
However, this histrionic fearmongering regarding COVID mitigations served a larger purpose beyond deliberately infecting people with SARS-CoV-2. Despite claiming to be apolitical scientists, MAHA doctors were open about their political leanings and ambitions. Brushing off January 6th and dead children in Samoa, MAHA doctors openly campaigned for both Trump and Kennedy, who himself compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany. This too was effective- Kennedy and Trump are in power- and none of it was hidden. MAHA doctors were loud and clear about their loyalties and intentions.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya speaks at a Kennedy presidential rally.
Dr. Vinay Prasad directs his audience to vote for Trump and support Kennedy.
Vinay Prasad is divisive, opinionated — and usually right
However, MAHA doctors could not have triumphed on their own. They had a formidable public relations team that amplified, normalized, and defended their message every step of the way. While many of us desperately tried to alert people to their obvious risks, these enablers gave MAHA doctors a platform to disseminate both COVID disinformation and MAHA/MAGA propaganda.
The enablers invited MAHA doctors to speak, published their articles, promoted them on social media, appeared on their podcasts, defended them in newspapers, and berated anyone who corrected their disinformation. MAHA doctors told the world that Trump was the key to preserving liberal democracy and that Kennedy would be the savior of vaccines, and this cadre of collaborators told the world that the men behind such messages were wise, principled, and trustworthy.
While the enablers provided a safe space to MAHA doctors, they deliberately undermined those of us who stuck our necks out to warn of them, mocking us as hysterical, dishonest, nasty, woefully ignorant, and a stain on the academy. Only we were “political.” Only we had to watch our “tone.”
The list of enablers is very long and includes not just obvious bad-faith actors- malignant tech oligarchs, MAGA doctors, pundits, and politicians, contrarian podcasters such as Lex Fridman Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad, supplement salesmen and wellness influencers, juvenile pseudo journalists, crank medical organizations, Fox News, Epoch Times, Brownstone Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Bari’s Weiss’s grift the Free Press– but also shadowy right-wing dark money organizations and cartoonish villains, including a cape-wearing, pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate with Neoconfederate ties. Predictably, these people are thrilled with the news today. Things are going mostly as they hoped and planned.
But these malevolent forces are just a small part of the story. The list of enablers includes many venerable individuals and institutions who found common cause with the the right-wing disinformation machine in their promotion of MAHA doctors. This list includes a world-renowned scientist, Princeton political scientists, a “civil rights attorney”, a famous “skeptic”, a Nobel Prize winner, public health professors from UC Irvine and Johns Hopkins, “medical conservatives”, a podcasting neuroscientist, the former dean of the Brown School of Public Health, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a former NYTimes columnist, a podcasting economist, a YouTuber cosmologist, a leading libertarian, a formerly respected vaccine-advocate, an “acclaimed” independent journalist, a Rutgers molecular biologist, a Rutgers geneticist, a contributing editor to City Journal, a UCLA surgeon and former JAMA editor, a Bernie Sanders acolyte, a legendary conservative pundit, a Johns Hopkins cardiologist, a toxic media-hungry British biologist, a doctor who writes for the Washington Post, a concierge internist from Washington DC, a guitar-playing oncologist, a UCSF ID doctor, a UCSF geriatrician, a Yale law professor, a Cornell internist, a former Harvard Medical School dean, a current Harvard ID doctor, another current Harvard ID doctor, the president of prestigious medical societies, a department chair, and a university President. One of Dr. Prasad’s business partners, a prestigious professor from the University of Chicago, said that Dr. Prasad- who likened leftist public health workers to Nazis and endorsed Trump and Kennedy the solution– was “divisive, opinionated — and usually right”.
The list also includes the Cato Institute, The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Technology Policy Institute, Biosafety Now, Labroots, Independent Institute, Salem Center for Policy, The Fund For American Studies, The Fund for American Studies, Family Research Council, The Atlas Society, New Books Network, Buckley Institute, University of Chicago Federalist Society, Manhattan Institute, and Hoover Institution. It includes publications such as The Atlantic, New York Times, City Journal, Spectator, USA Today, US News and World Report, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, UnHerd, Politico, Reason Magazine, The Hill, Tablet Magazine, Persuasion, Washington Post, STAT News, MedPage Today, and even medical journals such as JAMA and the BMJ. It includes universities such as Harvard, Emory, UCSF, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Washington University.
All this on behalf of MAHA doctors who claimed they were silenced and censored.
Under President Trump’s leadership. We are just getting started!
Fast forward to today and MAHA doctors are loathed and ridiculed by workers at the institutions they purportedly lead. Diseases are spreading, and everyone knows they are untrustworthy. No one can make the affirmative case that the FDA are NIH thriving under their leadership.
However, MAHA doctors haven’t just given us censorship, purges, and vandalism of vaccines, public health, clinical trials, and basic research, they also are key members in an authoritarian regime that is gleefully sending masked police to the streets to terrorize innocent civilians, including young children and in hospitals. Their dystopian fantasy is now our dystopian reality.
While MAHA doctors faked a concern about a dystopian hellscape intent on using police and military power to maximize compliance in order to spread COVID and catapult themselves to power, they now literally stand behind the corrupt, mad king responsible for the real thing today. Dr. Bhattacharya, for example, now says it is “ridiculous slander” to say that Trump is anything but a champion of science. “What the president is doing is very, very healthy”, he said. No MAHA doctor has resigned in protest thus far. Neither Trump nor Kennedy has crossed any of their red lines. None of this is new, of course. There are ample historical precedents of doctors lending the legitimacy of the medical profession to authoritarian, anti-science regimes, and it never ends well for those involved.
Anyone seeking to grasp how this nightmare came to be in the U.S. needs to understand not just the role of MAHA doctors, but everyone who elevated them along the way. Even if many of these venerable individuals and institutions are now shocked and horrified by what they helped unleash on us all, their cowardly capitulation helps explain how we got here, and we don’t need their permission to remember that. Instead of having the integrity to simply be honest about the threat back when there was a chance of containing it, they collaborated to elevate MAHA doctors, and thus Kennedy and thus Trump. While none of these individuals and institutions alone are to blame, like an individual shooter in a firing squad, they are collectively responsible for the end result.
When the history of this sad era is written, MAHA doctors will be disgraced pariahs and cautionary tales for future medical students. They made their choice and sealed their fates. Everyone else made their choices too and should be remembered based only on whether they at least tried to put the brakes on MAHA/MAGA or whether they slammed the accelerator.
We are all along for their ride whether we like it or not, and unfortunately Dr. Bhattacharya wasn’t wrong when he said that under Trump, they are just getting started.