Dear Professor Milkman,
You will soon be hosting a conference titled Workshop on Enhancing Scientific Integrity, which is sponsored by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Although the organization purports to be “driving progress for the benefit of society by providing independent, objective advice to advance science, engineering, and medicine,” the program nonetheless includes “fireside chats” with Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor Emily Oster, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, three individuals who became celebrities for their opinions on what other people should do when COVID raged.
On social media, you justified your invitations by saying:
Our goal in choosing speakers was to platform both popular and unpopular figures advocating for scientific reforms to spark productive conversations across divides! If this makes you angry, come engage in dialogue — that’s how we improve.
The purpose of this letter is to spark a productive conversations across a divide. I also have a simple, important, and genuine proposal.
By way of introduction, I am a doctor who has written extensively about the threat of MAHA/MAGA and COVID disinformation doctors, two of whom will be speaking at your conference. I am very familiar with these speakers and the harm they’ve caused. Along with many others, I’ve thoroughly recorded their words, extensively documented their disinformation, and desperately tried to warn of their danger. We’ve done the hard work for you, and it’s all very easy to find. As the conference host, it’s your responsibility to delve into the speakers’ history and have a thorough understanding of what they said. There is no excuse for you or anyone else to be unaware of their track record. Ignorance is a purposeful choice at this point. So is apathy.
This is not my first open letter to a conference host like you. I encourage you to read my previous letter, An Open Letter to the President of Stanford, Jonathan Levin: Don’t Censor Drs. Scott Atlas, John Ioannidis, Sunetra Gupta, Marty Makary, Monica Gandhi, Jay Bhattacharya, and Vinay Prasad. Amplify Their Voices. That letter referenced a conference very similar to yours that occurred at Stanford on October 4th, 2024, titled Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past.
My letter implored Jonathan Levin, the president of Stanford, who gave the introduction to the conference, to not censor his speakers. I asked him to simply be honest about what they said. That’s it. I provided him videos of things each speaker had said regarding COVID and encouraged him to show them to the audience. The videos are 100% unassailable evidence. Literally no one can argue with them, because no arguments are being made. They’re just history.
President Levin rejected my suggestion, however. He censored the speakers. He had a golden opportunity to reveal them for who they were to their faces using nothing but their own words, and he turned it down. That’s astounding. More than that, he had an obligation to alert people to their risk, and he refused. That’s disgraceful.
I’d love to hear him justify his indifference to reality. In a conference all about COVID, he ignored literally everything the speakers had said about COVID. None of it mattered to him. Not their obviously fake statistics, their farcical forecasts, their pro-infection agenda, nor their anti-vaccine disinformation. He didn’t care about it at all, and he hid it from the audience.
The speakers were also open political actors, and it’s no mystery whose side they were on. They had already spoken at political rallies and endorsed candidates. They treated doctors who worked in hospitals with contempt and vitriol. They hurled juvenile, unprofessional taunts and accusations at beleaguered scientists whose children (!) needed bodyguards. President Levin didn’t care about any of this either. He similarly refused to inform the conference attendees about the overtly political agenda and vile behavior of several of the speakers.
Incredibly, President Levin used his introduction to sanctimoniously scold critics of the conference. They needed to be put in their place. He absurdly said the purpose of the conference was to repair rifts and spur fresh thinking, and that its critics “seemed to reopen old and existing divisions.” Instead of pausing and humbly considering whether they had any valid points, he wagged his finger and blamed them- just like you did. Their actual arguments didn’t matter at all to him. His mind was totally closed.
In contrast, President Levin dishonestly portrayed the conference speakers as reliable, good-faith actors with valuable opinions to share. Today, several of the speakers he praised and elevated are MAHA/MAGA royalty. How are things going so far?
An editorial in The Lancet Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 Year of Failure summed it up thusly.
The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
This is all happening with doctors from the Stanford conference leading the way. They are the medical establishment now, and given his introduction to the conference, I’d also love to hear what President Levin thinks about their performance so far. Is he pleased with their purges, censorship, cancelled research, and anti-vaccine disinformation? How does he feel about unfixed bullet holes in windows at the CDC and measles spreading in ICE facilities? Can he be the first person to make the affirmative case that the NIH, CDC, and FDA are thriving under the leadership of doctors from his conference? Is it possible that just perhaps the conference’s critics were on to something 1.5 years ago?
At this point, Professor Milkman, I am going to repeat the same desperate, begging, plea that I made to President Levin. Don’t censor your speakers. However, you have a crucial advantage. You can learn from his failure. You can recognize that you too have a golden opportunity to simply reveal the truth about the speakers by doing nothing more than sharing their own words. Don’t pass it up. Given that your conference is titled Workshop on Enhancing Scientific Integrity, you should show a modicum of integrity yourself.
Best of all, this requires no work from you. It’s trivially easy to put together a montage of the speaker’s videos, which you can play to introduce them at your conference. They couldn’t possibly object to hearing their own words, and your audience will learn exactly what they said both regarding COVID and the current MAHA/MAGA regime. It’s vital that the attendees know the speakers’ past credibility to judge their current credibility, don’t you think? After all, even in 2026, Dr Bhattacharya literally “loves” Donald Trump. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch the video of him saying that, and make sure your audience sees it too.
The bottom line is this, Professor Milkman. None of us has to wonder what we “would do” in some imaginary sci-fi universe where powerful disinformation forces threatened science and medicine. That’s been happening for a long time, and what you actually did in the past few years is exactly what you “would do” in such a dystopia.
And though the danger of MAHA/MAGA doctors was obvious and out in the open, it was ignored and intentionally covered up, often by supposed “leaders” like President Levin, who were in the ideal position to have rung the alarm bell. When the MAHA/MAGA threat loomed in October 2024, he and countless others, rolled out the welcome mat to it, all disguised in a polite, but utterly disingenuous package of making “every effort to get people who disagree, even sharply, in dialogue with one another.“, as if this staged, performative conference “dialogue” was the highest value and ultimate goal, to which reality itself must subsumed. When powerful disinformation forces threatened science and medicine, that’s what he did.
Now that the speakers at the Stanford conference have power, things have deteriorated even further. Once again, what you are actually doing right now is exactly what you “would do” in a world where powerful disinformation forces threatened science and medicine.
You have a choice to make, and the right answer is obvious. However, if you choose to censor your speakers and refuse to inform your audience of their COVID disinformation and MAHA/MAGA activism, you’ll prove that none of that really matters to you, at least not in comparison to portraying yourself as someone who sparks productive conversations across divides! Like President Levin and many “esteemed professors” before you, you too will be deliberately covering up the truth and aiding the COVID Amnesia Project. Your productive conversation will be nothing but a safe space for powerful people who’ve already caused damage, and a golden opportunity for them to further dissemble and numb people to their risk.
And if that’s the choice you make, then your apathy and enabling will automatically and permanently become what you actually chose to do in April 2026 when powerful disinformation forces threatened science and medicine. You’ll be an accomplice. Everyone will know it, and no one will forget it.