"What's happening at Stanford?" writes one medical school dean on social media, regarding the Pandemic Policy symposium at Stanford University today, featuring a number of Fauci-hating anti-maskers who took constroversial stances on public health policies during the pandemic.

The Friday conference is called Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past, and beginning with the very first panel discussion — moderated by conservative Christian podcast host Wilk Wilkinson — the event seems to have peculiarly right-wing bias. The first panel this morning was about "evidence-based decision making" and the restrictive policies that many cities put in place in 2020, and sought to answer the question "How well did these policies work to protect the public from COVID-19 and what were their unintended consequences?"

Hindsight is 20/20, certainly, when it comes to a novel pathogen, and watching the horror show that unfolded in New York City in March and April of 2020, other cities  took some very strict measures to try to limit the spread of the first variant of COVID-19. UCSF's Dr. Monica Ghandi was on the panel, and she was likely a voice of reason, but with Wilkinson moderating and Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, a noted skeptic of pandemic restrictions also participating, who knows?

Another panel today on "Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom" featured Trump's COVID advisor Scott Atlas, who early in the pandemic cast doubt on the usefulness of masks, and who is now part of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford. Also on that panel is writer Alex Berenson, who used his Substack to shriek about the pandemic being over in the summer of 2020, and who regularly rails against mRNA vaccines and the Biden administration generally on his Xitter account.

Bay Area News Group reports that the wider medical and public health community has not been too thrilled with the obvious angle of this symposium, which seems aimed at promoting a Republican agenda of as few restrictions as possible if we're hit with another pandemic.

"My goodness, what’s happening at Stanford?" writes Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, on X. "This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda."

The Nation noted this week that this is the second of these symposiums with a strangely similar cast of cranks — the first was held at Johns Hopkins University in September. And the purpose of the events seems to be both to "rewrite the history of the pandemic" and to audition for a second possible Trump administration, where some of these conservative medical professionals would like a job.

"These Covid contrarians — who have found little support for their views among their peers — have decided that the science has been turned into “a dogmatic tool of oppression" for rejecting them," writes Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation. "In their minds they are Galileos against the church, and now they are tilting their fury against the institutions themselves."

Gonsalves argues that the two symposia are focused on "establishing a beachhead" in liberal academia for these figures, who are largely disrespected among their academic peers.

"If you cannot convince your colleagues of the worth of your arguments, then you can cry out that you’re being discriminated against for simply having 'differing views,'" Gonsalves writes. "But things don’t work like that in science: we don’t teach intelligent design alongside evolution, or alternative theories of the cause of AIDS."

Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of these discredited figures. Bhattacharya wrote something called the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 which argued for sheltering the sick and vulnerable but letting young people run free to get infected and gain immunity to COVID-19. The Pandemic Accountability Index rails against this alternative theory of public health today, gaming out how many more Americans would have likely died, and how many children could have been left without caregivers or teachers, if Trump had someone like Bhattacharya running the show four years ago.

"It’s an election year,” says Martha Louise Lincoln of San Francisco State University, speaking to Bay Area News Group. Lincoln argues that these conservative-leaning "experts" looking for a hire from Trump "likely advocate weaker, cheaper public health protections that tolerate disease, ask little of government, and leave it to individuals to protect their own health."

Luckily Trump and Atlas were only charge for ten months of the pandemic.

Photo: Robert Gareth