A thread about this fantastic @DeathPanel_ episode on the “Great Barrington Declaration,” because this stuff is really f___ing important.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/42895151 
cc @PhilipRocco @jfeldman_epi
/1

They write about Jay Bhattarcharya, Martin Kulldorf, Sunitra Gupta, and the American Institute for Economic Research. I know something about the first and the last.
/2

The short version is that these people are very dangerous and the forces who should be shutting them out of public life have failed, because they’re ill-equipped to stamp out a basic threat to society’s health.
/3

And that’s because we live in a failed system in which even ostensibly progressive orgs & media are captured and choose not to understand a basic clash of interests. They can only interpret things through “elite establishment consensus good; populist demagoguery bad.”
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1. Bhattarcharya is part of a network of health-provider-aligned consultancies and think tanks whose aim is to maximize the share of GDP expended on healthcare, while minimizing the actual health of the population.
/5

This @propublica article covers one organization in that network:
https://www.propublica.org/article/big-pharma-quietly-enlists-leading-professors-to-justify-1000-per-day-drugs
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The reason why that crowd is downplaying the pandemic is because, immediately, people aren’t going to hospitals during the pandemic and that’s a problem for profits. But more perniciously, in the much longer run, **they want the population to be chronically unhealthy.**
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This is healthcare under capitalism: it is in providers’ interest not to cure their patients, but rather to throw a torrent of money at “managing” them. The correct attitude of the government to such people is the same as that it would adopt toward a hostile invading army.
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Namely to destroy it, by any means necessary, because its purpose is to destroy us.
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2. AIER is a right-wing think tank that has recently been quoted favorably in the New York Times and by alt-right-adjacent media elites like Andrew Sullivan (in both cases, for attacking the 1619 project).
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They have also gone after @gabriel_zucman’s research & been praised by mainstream economists in good standing for doing so. The problem is the trappings of scholarship & elite credentials, which elite media is incapable of understanding can be gamed just like any metric.
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Here’s the game they play: the elite, professional establishment, philanthropic funders, and other gatekeepers fetishize consensus and the absence of disagreement and conflict, even though there’s a basic hostility to public welfare at stake.
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So they create a “conflict” over someone like @gabriel_zucman’s research, which is inherently threatening to their interests. That tells gatekeepers to stay away, that there’s a problem here, that this stuff is outside the consensus whose boundaries those gatekeepers patrol.
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And they can repeat that play as many times as they want, because it always works. As @HeerJeet wrote in his reconsideration of Hofstadter, they are heirs to a historiography of a centrist establishment which sees itself as above conflict. They are therefore subvertable.
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[unclear pronouns: first “they” is the AIER crowd; third “they” is the centrist establishment]

What AIER is up to, as they say on @DeathPanel_, is modern eugenics. They want to weed out poor & unhealthy people, and their task is to come up with socially acceptable ways to euphemize that, including the valorization of the idea that everyone must supply market labor.
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3. Finally, @jfeldman_epi is too credulous to the miasma theory on the episode, because it really is exactly what’s going on now with the Great Barrington Declaration.
It was in merchants’ interest to convince governments that theory was correct, so it had a scholarly life.
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There was no good-faith anything behind it, just as there isn’t behind contemporary COVID trutherism. The truth is simply hostile to the interests of incumbent wealth and power, and so they suppress it. The same exact thing is the case in antitrust economics.
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To the extent you’re trying to “achieve consensus,” forge a common agenda, or whatever you do to accommodate these people, you are sacrificing the public interest. It’s no surprise that it’s philanthropic orgs with nothing real at stake who think that’s a viable strategy.
/fin