It’s unconscionable that Stanford School of Medicine and the Freeman Spogli Institute hosted a conference in October led by architects of the disablement of 100 million people and the preventable deaths of tens of millions more. It’s even worse that University President Jonathan Levin lent institutional support by volunteering to make the opening remarks. It’s worse yet that the apparent success of this conference may have influenced President Donald Trump to tap at least two conference participants for top health posts.
Mass infection with SARS-CoV-2 has so far left an estimated 400,000,000 people worldwide with Long COVID — around a quarter of whom have become disabled — and continues to cost the global economy upward of $1 trillion every year. As one of the many Stanford alumni who have had their lives turned upside down by contracting Long COVID, I’m very disappointed that Stanford is legitimizing the views of those who have openly downplayed the suffering of people with Long COVID and advocated for the mass infection that continues to ruin lives like mine every day.
Stanford openly platformed COVID skeptics. Who are they?
The October conference featured the brain trust behind the “Great Barrington” hypothesis (see also Urgency of Normal, the Norfolk Group and the Brownstone Institute), which proposed in 2020 that societies could most quickly “resume life as normal” by infecting everyone as quickly as possible, under the assumption that herd immunity would end the pandemic. As it turned out, their hypothesis was false — herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is impossible, and almost five years later, the pandemic rages on. Despite the U.S. population supposedly having long attained the benefits of widespread immunity, COVID is still one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., and at least 100,000 Americans are currently getting Long COVID every week.
Conference panelist Dr. Anders Tegnell, the author of Sweden’s heinous 2020 plan to pursue infection at any cost, suggested that the deaths of elders were “worth it,” and then presided over the suffocation deaths of elders deliberately given morphine instead of life-saving oxygen. He also deliberately infected children as human shields for adults, and continuously lied about his strategy to the public. (Contrary to panelist Dr. Vinay Prasad’s assertion that worrying about young children is “ludicrous,” children transmit COVID, get Long COVID at high and probably rising rates and die of COVID too.)
The U.S. equivalent to Tegnell is fellow panelist Dr. Scott Atlas, whose recommendations as Special Advisor to President Donald Trump likely resulted in at least 100,000 preventable deaths and at least a million preventable cases of Long COVID. Atlas’s values and recommendations were so divergent from the University’s that over 100 Stanford Medicine colleagues wrote an open letter in opposition to his unethical and anti-scientific campaign, and the Faculty Senate voted in favor of censure.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ’90 M.A. ’90 M.D. ’98 Ph.D. ’00, a fellow Stanford M.D., is the “Great Barrington” coauthor who convened the panelists. Bhattacharya became notorious in 2020 for poorly conducted seroprevalence research and for advocacy in favor of mass infection instead of the precautionary principle. A glance at his tweets reveals widespread misinformation about protective measures and about Long COVID; for instance, he suggested that preventing Long COVID is worse than getting it. Around 100 million people disabled by COVID would beg to differ — myself included.
Stanford’s president sided with disinformation and historical revisionism. Why?
Having experienced the long and devastating ripple effects of my own infection in 2020 (before vaccines), I find it repugnant that these particular individuals were allowed to meet under the California sun at a prestigious university (my alma mater, no less) for mutual back-slapping, while their victims with the very severe ME/CFS form of Long COVID — many of whom were previously young and healthy — now languish in darkened bedrooms, unable to walk or even tolerate light, sound and human touch, stricken by an illness for which there are no approved treatments, much less a cure.
It is especially disheartening to see the new Stanford president, of all people, contributing to the suffering of many in the Stanford community and harming the University’s reputation by supporting and fraternizing with these eugenicists, anti-science practitioners and disinformation peddlers. Levin is an academic collaborator with Bhattacharya, which suggests that the two may be of one mind with respect to the appalling “let-‘er-rip-and-bury-the-consequences” approach to the pandemic.
Levin’s actions call into question the wisdom of the Board of Trustees in selecting him as president. (Notably, President Emeritus Gerhard Casper is Senior Fellow at the institute cosponsoring this conference.) In his opening remarks at the conference, Levin hid behind its purported purpose of “bring[ing] together people with different perspectives,” even as he openly acknowledged that invitees with opposing views had withdrawn their participation due to some panelists’ history of abhorrent behavior.
Contrary to Levin’s claims, the final panel roster was clearly like-minded, particularly with respect to denial of ongoing harms. All but one speaker who mentioned the pandemic used the past tense to do so, and only two of the 23 panelists mentioned Long COVID, even though — as an audience member, asking specifically about Long COVID, pointed out — the WHO considers the pandemic to be ongoing. Long COVID is a very inconvenient truth to anyone who wants to claim that the pandemic is now “mild” or “over.”
One panelist in the first session, Dr. Marty Makary, went to great lengths to avoid acknowledging Long COVID. He claimed that the decrease in IQ in recent years has been caused by school closures instead of the pandemic virus that has been established by science to invade the brain, fuse brain cells and reduce cognitive ability, even in supposedly mild infections and even in young undergraduates. Also in that session, Sweden’s Tegnell stayed true to form, making the contrarian claim that the precautionary principle “does not really make… much sense during a pandemic” and maintaining that the most notable misstep of the pandemic was a ban on “visits to elderly care homes, [which] was very destructive and did not help at all.” Apparently, he would have been more satisfied had even more elders died of COVID.
Tegnell was not alone in his views. The common refrain throughout the conference was that “we now know” how wrong pandemic protections are, as though refrigerator-truck morgues, mass graves and Long COVID are figments of our collective memory. On the contrary, only a minority of the public believes the pandemic response has been overblown, and what has been proven correct by history is misinformation experts’ predictions that this conference would promote a revisionist history and a false equivalence between fringe theories and established science.
The weight of science and ethics is clearly on the side of preventing transmission rather than hedonistically imbibing hopium, the illusion of normalcy and SARS-CoV-2. Every infection, even if initially mild or asymptomatic, is an additional round of Russian roulette with Long COVID, and every infection may cause hidden damage that in some people will ignite a time bomb. Scientific findings on the harms of COVID have not significantly changed since 2020; what’s changed, as a result of desensitizing messages by people like these panelists, is the public’s tolerance for decreased healthspans and lifespans in themselves and their children, and for the suffering and societal exclusion of the vulnerable and chronically ill.
Although many panelists denounced the lack of equity in the age of COVID, none practiced equity themselves by wearing a respirator, which would have offered vulnerable people safer access to the conference. On the contrary, during the ninth pandemic wave of an airborne pathogen that travels and hangs in the air like smoke, multiple panelists spouted misinformation about the utility of masks. This misinformation (or disinformation) went unchallenged.
No one mentioned the fact that authorities’ decision to give the virus free reign has meant that many people known to be at high risk for severe acute or Long COVID (risk factors differ) have been denied the freedom to physically exist in society for half a decade already; panelists decried 2020’s short lockdowns without a mention of the countless families now on permanent lockdown.
Most tellingly, no one mentioned that they themselves had Long COVID or had lost a loved one to COVID. In other words, the people who are arguably the most important stakeholders in “assessing the past” were absent. Evidently, this conference was agenda driven, rather than debate driven — a gathering of ivory (Hoover) tower ideologues intent on laundering their own reputations on the coattails of Stanford’s. Bhattacharya’s self-congratulatory piece in The Telegraph about the conference mentioned Stanford in its first line.
Stanford must stand against forced infection
As The Stanford Daily reported, the audience wasn’t fooled. The conference’s stated commitment to “bringing together all sides of the debate” was just as much lip service as the panelists’ proposal to implement “focused protection” for people vulnerable to COVID. (Of course, everyone is potentially vulnerable to Long COVID.) Panelists promoted mass infection under the banner of quick resumption of normalcy, minimized disruption to the economy, freedom from government-imposed mitigations and upholding of civil liberties. Yet for over a million Americans, insufficient mitigations have removed the most basic of civil liberties: the right to live. For millions more, unrestrained transmission has meant a highly circumscribed life of lost potential, and resumption of normalcy will never be possible. And any short-term benefits to the global economy of pretending COVID is mild or over are far eclipsed by that ongoing — and likely growing — trillion-dollar annual loss.
Nevertheless, the whitewashing aims of this conference have apparently been achieved. Two of the conference participants (in addition to Surgeon General runner-up Vinay Prasad) are being nominated to head federal health agencies in the new Trump administration. Bhattacharya, infamous for his SARS-CoV-2 biomedical research that was methodologically, mathematically and ethically flawed, is now set to head the largest biomedical research organization in the world, the NIH. If confirmed, this unlicensed doctor who has supported the mocking of vulnerable patients will be in charge of funding — or not funding — research into their illnesses. Similarly, Marty Makary is Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responsible for approving medications to treat Long COVID, even though Makary’s unwavering devotion to herd immunity and his trivialization of Long COVID are the antithesis of public health.
The proponents of mass infection have somehow leveraged business leaders’ focus on the short-term bottom line, political leaders’ incentives to declare victory over a giant foe and the public’s wishful thinking, psychological reactance and pandemic trauma to manufacture consent for endless waves of sickness, disability and death. But as panelist Dr. Neil Mahotra noted, facts are facts regardless of whether or not you believe them. Our current mass delusion that SARS-CoV-2 has magically become harmless doesn’t make it so. And just because masters of that delusion are being fêted at Stanford and installed in positions of national power doesn’t mean history will acquit them of their crimes. Eventually, society’s collective shoulder shrug whenever people “unwell to begin with” end up “fall[ing] by the wayside” will be seen for what it really is.
So I ask: how can organizers claim an ounce of credibility if their COVID conference all but ignores the five-ton elephant of Long COVID in the (Arrillaga Alumni Center) room? How can intellectuals be trusted to look ahead in “planning the future” when they’re shutting their eyes to the present pandemic and its ongoing harms? And how can a university justify claiming the moral high ground of academic freedom when the free speech it’s protecting has put millions of people into the ground?
Early in the pandemic, Stanford publicly disavowed the protection-elimination approach that was lauded at this conference; an official University statement said that these views “are inconsistent with the University’s approach in response to the pandemic.” I call on Stanford to do the same now. As Stanford constitutional scholar Michael McConnell pointed out in the second symposium session, “Stanford and other universities do not have to let people stand in a classroom and spout nonsense.” What’s more, our system of laws is built on the principle that someone’s temporary right to pursue happiness, or someone’s brief liberty of speech, must not supersede someone else’s permanent right to life.
To restore its reputation and humanity, Stanford must support students, alumni, faculty and staff with Long COVID and their caregivers, and work to prevent additional cases of Long COVID in our community. If Stanford’s president graces a pandemic-related campus event with his imprimatur, it should be to benefit patients at Stanford’s Long COVID clinic, not to benefit those who brought about the population of that clinic. Stanford Medical School, whose students vow to do no harm, should don PPE for IPC and seek effective treatments for Long COVID patients rather than harming us further by supporting our abusers. The people who should be platformed at Stanford and who should lead our nation’s health agencies are the trained scientists without conflicts of interest who have been consistently correct in their assessments and predictions about public-health threats, not physician-intellectuals funded by partisan think tanks and beholden to EBM and outdated dogma who have been consistently and devastatingly wrong. Plenty of venues are available to people who wish to spread misinformation, including that which results in crimes against humanity. Stanford need not be one of them.
Many people with infection-associated chronic conditions are looking on in escalating apprehension as speakers from this Long COVID-denying Stanford conference are being elevated to positions of power over how soon treatments and cures will offer relief to patients. This “conference about pandemic misinformation featuring its biggest purveyors,” as Stanford faculty member Pantéa Javidan called it, and particularly President Levin’s participation, are a slap in the face to all of us in the Stanford community who are battling Long COVID. And they are a slap in the face to every person whom these speakers will continue to have a hand in killing or disabling, including maybe even you.
Rena Rudy ’98 is an award-winning social science researcher currently studying Long COVID risk factors with a team from Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
