(2021-12-22) How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid

EXPOSEDbyCMD: How The Koch Brothers Network Hijacked The War On Covid-19. ...as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas. (Note that not all of their points were wrong, even if they were supporting them for the wrong reason. See (2022-12-22) ZviM Covid 12/22/22 Reevaluating Past Options.)

The academy was inspired by the pandemic

But the venture isn’t exactly an effort to apply science to the Covid-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like filter mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns. Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Donald Trump administration

the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures. The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign succeeded in supplanting public health experts and hijacking governmental response to the pandemic.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.

Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world.

The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank.

Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to Covid-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced massive suffering.

Florida has become a Covid-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. Covid-19 deaths at the time.

Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved.

In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of Covid-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. Ron DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.