Above: Actress Jean Seberg, one of the targets of a covert federal media campaign against government critics in the 1960s and 70s
This month marks the two-year anniversary of the Great Barrington Declaration, an effort by university doctors to forestall the devastating effects of covid lockdowns on students, patients, and the general public. Sadly, it also marks the anniversary of a covert federal operation to undermine the scientific proposal through manipulation of the press.
In the mind of American progressives, the Declaration is a far-right initiative cooked up by the Koch Brothers. It therefore may surprise them to learn that its premise first surfaced in a New York Times op-ed by a liberal doctor who’d previously taught at Yale Medical School and written for Oprah Winfrey. In March 2020, David L. Katz MD, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote in the Times that it would be preferable for young people to be exposed to SARS-Cov-2 rather than isolate since they had a greater than 99 percent chance of surviving. A program of focused protection should be undertaken for the elderly and other groups proven to be high-risk, but this could be moderated as the young acquired herd immunity, minimizing the danger of seniors catching the virus.
Focused protection ceased to be a progressive proposal later in the month though, when Donald Trump began expressing agreement with it. The notion of herd immunity was now considered guilty by association, but it couldn’t be completely stifled. Some on the far-left actually held out longer than centrists in keeping an open mind: In September 2020, Jacobin magazine featured an interview with Drs. Martin Kulldorf and Katherine Yih—both of Harvard Medical School—who advocated for the same strategy of reopening that Katz had proposed.
But the Democratic Party had made it clear that it would reject any covid policy that Trump supported. Their circle’s message was that Trump was promoting covid denial (or maybe covid house parties) which in turn was killing masses of his own followers—a theory which Wired magazine later acknowledged was baseless. So it fell to a libertarian organization, the American Institute of Economic Research, to create a professional media project for the already existing focused protection movement. AIER brought the medical professionals together with journalists from all over the world for an October 4 event and launched a massive press campaign. It resulted in articles like this one from NBC the same week:
The chief of emergency medicine at San Francisco General Hospital confirmed to NBC that “shelter in place” advice and social distancing culture was costing lives, stating that “We've had patients die in the emergency department, and shortly thereafter, having experienced the complications of not seeing medical care earlier.” Unlike the denialist Trumpers convulsing in the ICU, these were not urban legends; They were real people whose lives were destroyed by the culture of germaphobia like the family of Dominic Battel. Battel was a father of two young boys who put off a hospital visit because he feared catching covid, and ended up dying of a heart attack. These tragedies were everywhere, but before the Great Barrington campaign the media had ignored them, focusing exclusively on covid dangers.
The day after the NBC story appeared, the director of the National Institutes of Health messaged the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. “This proposal from the fringe epidemiologists seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Francis Collins wrote to Anthony Fauci. “[There’s] even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. Is it underway?”
Fauci replied the same day, sending Collins a Wired editorial by Matt Reynolds denouncing the Barrington signatories for not “following the scientific method,” and using the techniques of “tobacco manufacturers and climate change deniers.” Fauci then sent a brand new Nation article by Gregg Gonsalves accusing the Declaration authors of “abandoning solidarity” in a national crisis; the article also implied that hospitalization of children infected with covid was common—in reality it was known to be around one in a million.
The recent behavior of the FBI has raised the specter of the J. Edgar Hoover era for some commenters, not just in its search of Donald Trump’s house, but in a raid of the African People’s Socialist Party in the same week. Yet federal treachery in the 21st century stretches well beyond the FBI, as the NIH case shows. Hoover’s domestic “counter-intelligence program” (COINTELPRO) wasn’t primarily about physical attacks, after all, it was about character assassination and secretly using the vast powers of federal agencies to program the media. Hoover’s network of Special Service Contacts in journalism and his manipulation of their narratives was the subject of an award-winning book by scholar Matthew Cecil. The FBI director’s favorite mouthpiece was columnist Walter Winchell, who has been called the originator of fake news. Fauci appears to share a similar relationship with science writer Greg Gonsalves. Such parallels have led US senate candidate Mehmet Oz to call the NIH official “the J. Edgar Hoover of public health.”
The Los Angeles Times recently apologized for its role in one of the ugliest COINTELPRO smears. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had once urged the newspaper to play up pregnant Hollywood actress Jean Seberg’s friendship with a Black Panther organizer and imply that he was the illegitimate father of her child. “It was intended by the FBI to damage the reputation of the actress as punishment for what the bureau saw as her radical political beliefs,” admitted the Times editor. Or as an FBI internal memo put it, “cause her embarrassment and to cheapen her image.” (Hoover even postponed the original plan for a month to make sure his smear was deployed after she had become visibly pregnant.) It succeeded stunningly, disrupting her marriage and causing her to miscarry her child. Seberg was never the same, and overdosed on drugs eight years later. No one in the government was ever held to account for this (although the family did win a small settlement from Newsweek magazine, who’d printed the smear nationally). A powerful political dissident had been neutralized, and the image of a movement impugned. The Times admitted decades later that it was a “subversion of the rule of law.”
The personal consequences on Collins and Fauci’s targets aren’t as dramatic as Jean Seberg’s ordeal, the Scarlet Letter-level tragedy of a woman driven to nervous breakdown, miscarriage and suicide by a dubious sex scandal. But the overall consequences are actually much more tragic. We are regularly told that one million Americans died in the two years of the pandemic, but unpack that claim and you’ll find something even more horrifying. As The Washington Post acknowledged, the “one million covid deaths” is composed not just of the “lethality of the coronavirus,” but of the consequences of the government’s response. It includes the “swollen numbers of deaths from heart disease, hypertension, dementia and other ailments across two years of pandemic misery,” which have more to do with the lockdown policy than the covid virus. The Post noted the “secondary health crisis, as people canceled cancer screenings, ignored warning signs of heart problems or possible strokes, and failed to receive the kind of medical care and support they needed”—precisely the deadly crisis The Great Barrington Declaration scientists wanted to alleviate. Indeed, the Post acknowledges that “Deaths soared more than 40 percent above normal in the United States in the second week of April 2020.” That date was over two months since the fast-spreading coronavirus reached America, but it was directly after Fauci, Collins and CDC pushed lockdowns nationally.
Most virus mortality occurred in seniors, but the majority of lockdown deaths occurred among younger people. New York magazine has reported that more people under 65 died of alcohol poisoning than died of covid in 2020, and the CDC has acknowledged a 30 percent increase in drug overdoses since the state of emergency was declared. The deaths continued to climb in 2021. This is Jean Seberg hundreds of thousands of times over.
There is no evidence that the lockdowns protected seniors overall given how care of the elderly was constrained by social distancing. The Post acknowledges:
“During the initial wave of infections, when the country largely shut down, the quality of care for the most vulnerable populations probably suffered,” Anderson said. Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease exceeded the expected total by 66,000 during the course of two years, he said. “People with dementia, in isolation, they sometimes lose the will to live,” Anderson said.
The Great Barrington signatories proposed to empower elders by granting them full access to staff and relatives who acquired natural immunity to covid through past infection. Fauci, Collins, and their cohorts denounced the idea that natural immunity conferred protection as deadly and deranged; A few months later, the National Institutes of Health was forced to concede that past infection provided robust and lasting immunity from the virus.
Remarkably, the Post article features this assessment from Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security:
“Adalja said the excess deaths associated with the pandemic but not directly caused by the virus suggest that in a crisis such as this, the country should favor targeted rather than broad public health interventions.”
The actions that Fauci and NIH took in October 2020 ensured that only broad public health interventions would occur. There must be a thorough investigation on whether this was the first subversion of the rule of law that NIH took to undermine legitimate scientists, or whether it began at the start of the pandemic, when Fauci protege Gregg Gonsalves organized a campaign to repudiate Dr. David L. Katz at Yale.
Thus far the only ongoing investigation is the lawsuit brought by the Great Barrington Declaration authors against the federal government. This suit, filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has growing standing in the courts. But it took multiple lawsuits to fully expose COINTELPRO, along with direct actions, congressional investigations, and eventually disclosure from the executive branch. Does Fauci use “blind memoranda”—off the record press releases—to influence media the way that Hoover did (and the way Fauci’s friend Dick Cheney did when he was indoctrinating the public for the War in Iraq)? Does his office ghostwrite misleading articles to be planted in “friendly newspapers,” as Hoover’s office did to paint Martin Luther King as a Communist? No one knows, because the NIH has many dark corners that have never seen sunlight. One transparency group had to do multiple filings and spend thousands of dollars in court proceedings to get access to Fauci’s two year old redacted work calendar.
The FBI only acknowledged its campaign against Jean Seberg after both she and J. Edgar Hoover were dead. In its statement it assured the public that the Bureau regretted its role and would never engage in covert defamation again. “The days when the FBI used derogatory information to combat advocates of unpopular causes have long since passed. We are out of that business forever,” they said. Whether or not that’s true, we know that the days when the NIH uses such tactics against its critics has not passed. It is the era we live in today.
Garrett's piece does a great job of connecting Hoover's COINTELPRO to Fauci and Collins' contemporaneous version that's still contaminating the field of U.S. public health and the public's ability to have any trust in it.