Dear President Levin,
Your university will soon be hosting a conference titled Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past. The conference claims to value “vigorous discussion and debate on matters of pandemic policy”, and says that it is “bringing together esteemed academics, public health practitioners, journalists, and government officials from all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate.”
Right off the bat, this is obvious misinformation. There will be no vigorous discussion and debate on matters of pandemic policy. The conference organizer, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, carefully curated the speakers to create an echo chamber and foster groupthink. Unsurprisingly, they agree with him. I’ve extensively quoted many of them in my writing, and I know they basically marched in lockstep. They were mostly united in their belief that young people should be infected with SARS-CoV-2 instead of vaccinated against it, and that the pandemic ended years ago. Each of these articles/podcasts is by or about one of the speakers:
- Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, March 2020: Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?
- Dr. John Ioannidis, April 2020: The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News
- Dr. Anders Tegnell, April 2020: Sweden Resisted a Lockdown, And Its Capital Stockholm is Expected to Reach ‘Herd Immunity’ In Weeks
- Dr. Scott Atlas, April 2020: The Data Is In — Stop The Panic And End The Total Isolation
- Dr. Sunetra Gupta, July 2020: We May Already Have Herd Immunity
- Dr. Monica Gandhi, February 2021: The End of the Pandemic
- Dr. Marty Makary, February 2021: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by Apri
- Dr. Vinay Prasad, April 2021: The Motivation We Need to Reach the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Dr. Monica Gandhi
A more accurate name for the conference would be “Doctors Who Declared The Pandemic Over Years Ago Meet In the Middle of a COVID Surge to Claim They were Right“.
What could they possibly debate? Perhaps doctors who said we had herd immunity in 2020 will get into it with those who said we didn’t have herd immunity until early 2021. Several doctors who said COVID wasn’t anything to worry about in the first place will also chime in. This is what is being promoted as “all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate.”
If that wasn’t enough doublespeak, one of the sessions, Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom, features Dr. Scott Atlas, a celebrity radiologist who advised a President and predicted COVID would kill 10,000 Americans. However, despite this professed loathing of misinformation and censorship, I fully expect that this conference will censor its speakers’ misinformation. I hope you’ll read recent articles on the conference (Dr. David Gorski, Pandemic Accountability Index, Allison Neitzel and Walker Bragman), as well as my articles on these speakers. I predict the quotes we’ve collected will be purposefully censored. I am confident the conference will be a giant exercise in deliberate collective amnesia and pandemic revisionism. I expect the plan to infect 250 million unvaccinated Americans to reach herd immunity in 3-6 months will be silenced and suppressed, even though several speakers were leaders of the We Want Them Infected movement. I predict the speakers will fantasize that they would have opened schools, but will say nothing about how they actually worked to deliberately infect the unvaccinated students and teachers within them.
That’s unfortunate.
Doctors who died of COVID were silenced. In contrast, the conference speakers were loud and famous. They advised world leaders and were ubiquitous in the media. They were everywhere, except hospitals. In this video, the former President of the United States specifically credits Dr. Atlas and other Stanford doctors for influencing his thinking on “herd mentality.” Not bad access for “censored” doctors.
Though only a few of the speakers treated COVID patients, they greatly influenced our pandemic response, and for this reason, I’ve worked diligently to preserve their words. I don’t want them to be censored or have their voices erased. Quite the opposite. They deserve to have their pandemic pronouncements amplified and remembered for the rest of their careers. Those of us who worked with COVID patients will never forget the consequences.
You are giving the introduction to the conference, meaning you are setting the tone and giving your personal stamp of approval to it. I am sure we both agree it’s important to have an accurate account of the pandemic and to reject cancel culture. In that spirit, I believe you are obligated to boost these doctors voices. The attendees and the general public deserve to know what they said and the policies they pushed. The speakers claim to have been “silenced”, and you have a unique opportunity to remedy that injustice.
I can help.
While other doctors were treating sick patients, these doctors were in front of cameras. I have collected some clips below and many more are available here. I trust you’ll have the intellectual integrity to play many of them. Anything less would be misinformation and censorship, betraying the purported mission of this conference and your university.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Howard