A Victory for Covid Policy Skeptics?
14 December 2024
The news that Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary have been picked by Donald Trump to head up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), respectively, has been cheered by many of those who opposed the lockdowns and vaccine mandates rolled out during the Covid-19 pandemic. As veteran critics from the left of the Covid regime, this is something we can understand — and yet we believe many are underestimating the potential ramifications of this decision.
Certainly, the fact that two of the most outspoken scientific critics of the authoritarian, unethical and anti-scientific Covid response could soon be leading the two most important US public health agencies represents, on the one hand, an irrefutable win — especially when considering the key role played by the two agencies throughout the whole affair.
We know that the NIH — through the Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of its branches, led for nearly twenty years (until 2022) by Anthony Fauci — was funding gain-of-function research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where it has been suggested that the virus may have “escaped” from. Fauci, the then-director of the NIH, Francis Collins, and other leading public health experts engaged in an elaborate cover-up to stifle an open scientific debate over the origin of the virus, shutting down any mention of a possible lab leak, and imposing a consensus around the alleged natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Whether or not the Covid-19 virus (SARSCoV2) did in fact emerge from a lab or not, this entirely unscientific quashing of discussion was a key act, setting the stage for the disturbing policies which followed — detonating human rights and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Fauci went on to become one of the most vehement pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine mandate advocates, riding roughshod over previous scientific norms — while claiming to embody “the science”. Lockdowns were imposed with no regard for the inevitable collateral damage (the evidence for which continues to pile up); meanwhile, the NIH, combined with other US government grants and contracts, publicly funded, to the tune of billions of dollars, experimental and ultimately little-known “next-generation” mRNA vaccines — which were then fast-tracked by the FDA and mandated country-wise in the US and several other nations, while falsely claiming they were 100% safe and effective. In the process, vaccine makers made mind-blowing profits.
Despite the rampant corruption, corporate profiteering and blatant disregard for the scientific method involved in the whole affair — and mounting evidence of the damaging consequences of these policies — critical voices were ruthlessly silenced and slandered by Fauci and the rest of the public health establishment. Indeed, Fauci played a key role in the public takedown of Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown document that presciently predicted their devastating effects, co-signed by NIH chair-designate Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff.
In light of the above, it’s understandable why Covid dissenters are celebrating the prospect of two prominent critics of the pandemic response taking leadership roles in these agencies. Beyond the sense of poetic justice and validation, their hope is that this moment presents a clear opportunity to reform these institutions, rid them of their entrenched corrupt practices, and realign them with their original mission: a genuine dedication to advancing public health in its truest form — a mission to which Bhattacharya and Makary are undoubtedly deeply committed. Moreover, having taken such a strong and critical line throughout the last few years, it’s difficult to see what option both had other than to take on the roles they were offered by Trump.
Nevertheless, there are some issues which should be of deep concern to everyone about this move as well. First of all is Trump himself, who showed no sign of being averse to many of the worst excesses of the pandemic policies. It was after all Trump who signed off on Operation Warp Speed, kickstarting the unprecedented speed and extent of the vaccine production programme and the immense coercion and profiteering which went with it — and indeed the Republican-led House of Representatives Coronavirus Oversight Committee report issued last week applauded this project as an “incredible feat of science”. The report makes no mention of the fact that the man called to lead Operation Warp Speed and charged with allocating billions of public subsidies to vaccine makers was Moncef Slaoui, former GlaxoSmithKline executive (he formerly ran GSK’s vaccines programme) and board member of Moderna.
This type of government-corporate nexus was, in many ways, at the core of the corruption and profiteering observed during the pandemic. No wonder pharma companies were given a blank cheque in the development of the Covid-19 vaccines, including the unprecedented fast-tracking of the clinical trials. As Trump boasted while announcing Operation Warp Speed, his administration would “cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial”. All of this was unprecedented in the development of new vaccines.
And beyond the dubious credentials which Trump himself has on the topic, the further serious problem that Bhattacharya and Marty will need to confront concerns the broader Trump team. For whatever realignments they are able to make in the NIH and FDA will occur within the broader political context of Trumpism, making it near-impossible for them to counteract the core ideological positions at work.
In the first place, and for all the hullabaloo around Trump, the heir-elect to the MAGA movement and its longer-term candidate is clearly vice-president-elect JD Vance. Trump will step down in four years’ time, and at 40 years of age, Vance sits waiting for his moment. And the reality is that, far from embodying a “victory over lockdowns”, Vance’s policy agenda represents the triumph of many of the worst aspects of the Covid surveillance regime.
Vance is the protégé of California Tech mogul Peter Thiel. It was Thiel who introduced Vance to Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021, and who backed him for the Senate in 2021-22 with donations of around US$15 million. Both Thiel and Vance are subscribers to the techno-authoritarian philosophies of Curtis Yarvin, who seeks to re-engineer governments into smaller “patchworks” controlled by tech corporations “without regard”, as he put it, “to the residents’ opinions”. Opponents of the Covid regime like Bhattacharya and Makary should be aware of Yarvin’s philosophy, which is completely in line with the biosecurity state against which they fought. In his imagination of a future San Francisco (“Friscorp”), Yarvin wrote this:
All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both. Residents cannot use this data to snoop into each other’s lives, but Friscorp can use it to monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level.
Since the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Bhattacharya and Makary risk finding that their work produces almost exactly the reverse of what they aspire to. One of Yarvin’s principal ideas is RAGE (“Retire All Government Employees”), something that Vance has riffed on in various settings. A real danger is that Bhattacharya and Makary’s goals to rebuild public health can easily be co-opted by this movement simply to fire as many employees in the NIH and the FDA as possible rather than rebuild institutions aimed at truly protecting public health.
In other words, whatever aims both may have, however difficult it may have been for them not to accept these invitations, they will certainly find that the real power in the Trump administration lies with the MAGA movement, who will co-opt their aims to achieve quite different ends — ends which embed the biosecurity state and which are also entirely opposed to everything they fought for since 2020. Scientists are not political strategists, and it’s hard to believe that Bhattacharya and Marty will have the power within the administration to avoid the distortion of their work for other ends entirely.
With this dystopian vision of tech authoritarianism, the broader economic realignments of Trumpism come into view. In particular, there’s the question of geopolitics and the Global South. The appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State makes it clear that the new Trump administration intends to pursue regime change in Latin America, with a view to re-entrenching the historic economic interests of US and Latin American elites. In an op-ed in February 2023, Rubio wrote that the White House should take a “firm line with Brazil’s new president [Lula]… as well as other bloody handed dictatorships, like those of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela”.
It’s worth noting that — along with Sweden, which also had a left-wing government at the time — Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government in Nicaragua was the only country in the Western hemisphere to reject lockdowns completely, something that they might not have been in office to do had Trump and Rubio been in the White House.
Given that Bhattacharya has often said that it was the impacts of Covid policies on the Global South was one of his main concerns in the last few years, it’s hard to see how working with the Trump regime will redress these impacts. A US president who has referred to the entire African continent as “shithole countries” is unlikely to take steps to address the devastating impacts of Covid policies there, even if ending the war in Ukraine would have a beneficial impact.
Meanwhile, the appointment of Mick Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel shows that Trump intends to provide carte blanche to the Netanyahu regime to pursue whatever wars it wants to — all to the benefit of US finance, which profits as always from disaster capitalism, as recent books have shown. This is particularly disturbing when considering that, aside from its brutal hyper-militaristic policies, Israel is also at the forefront of the techno-authoritarian paradigm of mass surveillance and biosecurity. This became apparent during the Covid-19 crisis, when surveillance and tracking tools previously tested on Palestinians were deployed against the Jewish population under the guise of managing the pandemic. “Millions of Israelis are now subject to the same Shin Bet–style monitoring once reserved mainly for terrorist suspects”, Haaretz complained in April 2020, ignoring the fact that countless Palestinians under Shin Bet surveillance weren’t terrorists at all.
In a documentary on the threats to free speech and liberty during the pandemic, Under the Cover of Covid, Dan Davies and investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein interviewed Or Biron, a Jewish resident in Tel Aviv who regularly protested against Netanyahu. During one of the lockdowns, she met with fellow activists and a few days later was sent a text message from the government stating that she had been near someone with Covid and had to immediately isolate herself. “I felt really angry”, Biron said. “I had a feeling that because we were there [meeting with activists], like many people from the protest, it happened [getting told to isolate] because of this event”.
As Loewenstein wrote in the award-winning book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, “perhaps the only positive aspect of Covid in Israel was the awakening of some Israeli Jews to the oppressive state of Shin Bet monitoring usually reserved for Palestinians”. Covid-19 massively benefited Israeli cyber-firms, which received half of global investment in the cyber-security sector during 2020 and 2021. One example is that of Supercom, an expert in electronic ankle monitors and sold its product to follow prisoners leaving jail in the US. It saw interest spike during Covid-19, with its advertising explicitly mentioning that its expertise on imprisoned or convicted individuals could be used to detect Covid-19 in the general population.
Beyond Trump’s unsavoury approach to foreign policy, the broader economic question at stake is one which touches profoundly on the human experience since 2020. As we’ve noted before, the Covid response, far from being some kind of socialist plot led by “Marxist” institutions, was the inevitable consequences of the oligarchisation of American society caused by decades of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatisation, soaring inequality, and the corporate capture of state institutions — all policies which Trumpism now proposes to take further. The fact that Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, is slated to play a key role in the administration is a key case in point.
Trump intends to pursue radical tax cuts for the richest members of society, and further slashes in government regulation. To understand what these policies will produce, one needn’t look any further than what is happening in Milei’s Argentina, often held up as a model by Trumpists like Musk. Since coming to power, Milei has implemented brutal austerity measures that have plunged millions into poverty and caused unemployment to rise, while boosting the return on stocks and bonds. It’s hard to see how such policies of deregulation will address the notorious corruption and revolving door politics which led to the Covid debacle; indeed, the will simply exacerbate the conditions that made the authoritarian Covid response possible.
To be sure, society as a whole faces a Hobson’s choice. Ideological confusion is the order of the day, with Western leftists who supported lockdowns having cheered policies which impoverished hundreds of millions of people and took a bonfire to human rights, and libertarian anti-lockdowners now cheering on a regime whose ideological underpinnings seek further entrenchment of the surveillance state. Such contradictions are probably symptoms of the broader headwinds now facing human societies. It’s hard to see how anyone facing this broader dynamic will be able to achieve much, even though Bhattacharya and Makary may hope to shed some light on the many aspects of the pandemic management that are still shrouded in mystery, often hidden behind confidential or heavily redacted documents.
The broader context however illuminates why a political analysis is necessary to understand the problems inherent in their move. So much is at stake, not least the question of whether Bhattacharya and Makary will be able to reconfigure the expertise-governance dynamic, and rescue political support for the scientific method in health management. In a regime which in the longer term apparently seeks to dispose with governance as we know it, the dangers seem far graver than the opportunities.
.jpg)
.png)
.jpg)
