In the early days of the COVID pandemic, Stanford neuroradiologist Dr. Scott Atlas, tapped as President Trump’s coronavirus czar, cast doubt on the usefulness of wearing masks.
Influential surgeon Dr. Marty Makary urged the lifting of pandemic restrictions, asserting that half of the nation had “herd immunity” in the spring of 2021. The following month, more than 21,000 people died of COVID-19.
These and other dissenting voices — dismissed as cranks by many of their scientific peers during the pandemic — are featured speakers at a Friday symposium, organized by Stanford University’s Department of Health Policy, about how to best manage future contagions. New university president Jonathan Levin will deliver opening remarks.
“There was a very wide range of things that we got terribly wrong during the pandemic,” including school closures and mask mandates, said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and health economist, who suggested the Pandemic Policy conference. He said he hopes it will spur vigorous academic debate and open dialogue to inform future strategies.
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Some public health experts and scientists are dismayed by university sponsorship of the conference, saying it lends a prestigious platform for what they described as “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.” They worry that the speakers will promote misinformation and undermine public confidence in public health tools.
“My goodness, what’s happening at Stanford?” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda.”
Pantea Javidan of Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences said the symposium “provides a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangerous, scientifically unsupported or thoroughly debunked approaches to COVID. … Their positions assail scientific consensus and promote fringe positions.”
“It’s an election year,” said Martha Louise Lincoln of San Francisco State University. People seeking to position themselves as potential advisors to a new administration, she said, “likely advocate weaker, cheaper public health protections that tolerate disease, ask little of government, and leave it to individuals to protect their own health.”
But Bhattacharya and other organizers say that scientific debate is overdue. For too long, they contend, discussion has been hijacked by dogma — and it is time to hear from critics of the prevailing policies.
“There should never, ever again be censorship as a tool to manage pandemics,” said Bhattacharya, a plaintiff in a lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, that claimed Biden administration officials pressured social media outlets to suppress content critical of the government’s COVID policies. The U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their claims.
The conference is being held on the anniversary of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration. That document, co-authored by Bhattacharya in 2020, argued for an easing of restrictions in favor of “focused protection” — sheltering those at risk of dying but allowing younger people to return to public life and build up immunity through the natural spread of the virus.
As the pandemic raged, conflict over strategies created rancorous debate on Stanford’s campus, raising questions about the responsibilities and limits of academic freedom.
The university stood by its Statement on Academic Freedom, which states that “expression of the widest range of viewpoints should be encouraged, free from institutional orthodoxy and from internal or external coercion.”
But there are limitations to academic freedom, faculty said. Scientific opinions must be honest, data-based and reflect what is known in the field. The Stanford Code of Conduct holds all faculty responsible for “sustaining the high ethical standards of the institution.”
Faculty concerns focused primarily on positions advocated by Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford. He said that pandemic-era restrictions were ineffective and overly punitive.
A group of 98 experts published a letter excoriating Atlas, saying his assertions “run counter to established science.” They said that Atlas had leveraged his relationship to Stanford to assert a health care expertise he did not have. They urged that Atlas be sanctioned, and he in turn threatened to sue his detractors.
On Friday, Atlas is a featured speaker on a panel entitled “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom.”
Other speakers include UCSF oncologist Dr. Vinay Prasad, who warned that the pandemic restrictions could pave the way to totalitarianism, and Stanford’s Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. John Ioannidis, who co-authored an influential but flawed seroprevalence study that looks at blood serum to determine the prevalence of a pathogen in a population Also speaking is lawyer Jenin Younes, whose law firm represented the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and who asserted that the Biden administration’s top COVID health official, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Anthony Fauci, belonged in prison.
Moderating one discussion is an editor at The Epoch Times, a Falun Gong-backed newspaper that has built an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.
But also included are more respected voices, such as UCSF’s Dr. Monica Gandhi, who urged earlier school openings due to the health impact of prolonged closures, and Dr. Laura Kahn of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, who studies the politics of infectious disease.
“I am desperate, as an infectious diseases doctor, to bridge divides,” said Gandhi, author of Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook, which offers a 10-point pandemic preparedness plan. “My biggest fear is the degree of vaccine hesitancy I am seeing among parents to vaccine their children for routine infectious diseases in this post-pandemic era.”
Critics of the conference say that dissenters were never silenced. They cite large and devoted social media followings, as well as easy access to GOP officials, including Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
But in the years since the virus threat eased, public officials have acknowledged some of their pandemic policy critics had a point, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, the first to order a statewide lockdown, and whose state kept public school learning remote longer than most others, worsening attendance and widening learning gaps.
“I think we would’ve done everything differently,” Newsom told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September 2023.
Bhattacharya predicted disagreement among speakers but hoped that public policy would benefit from the debate.
“Seeing people in public health discussing their different points of view honestly with each other, rather than trying to create an illusion of consensus,” he said, “is a step forward toward restored restoration of trust in public health.”