On 17 December 2021, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Ethan Yang and Phil Magness revealed evidence that, contra the First Amendment, the federal government sought to squelch lockdown critics. As Magness and James Harrigan revealed, senior officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) coordinated a media pressure campaign targeting lockdown critics, including the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
Those three scientists – Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta – had convened a small conference at AIER in October 2020 to discuss the devastating consequences of the Covid-19 lockdowns. The conference produced a brief statement, the GBD, that argued against lockdowns as a pandemic response policy and espoused instead a scientifically-based “focused protection” protocol. Four days later, as the GBD began to gather momentum, then-NIH Director Francis Collins ordered Fauci to wage a “quick and devastating published take down” of the GBD and its authors.
Fauci immediately ordered subordinates to compile a list of political op-eds attacking the GBD. Coordinating with Collins, he then waged a media campaign to brand the GBD authors as “fringe” and to describe their anti-lockdown arguments as “dangerous” and “nonsense.”
[The best aspect of this effort is how many people contributed to it. I’m glad to see AIER and Magness claim their share of credit, which sets an example and incentive for others to follow. Others should do the same, especially those who helped expose the regime through the Twitter Files — Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others. — Ed]
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