Some of Our Top Schools Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Covid [View all]

Today, Stanford University is holding an all-day gathering on the Covid pandemic, with its new president making opening remarks. It’s the second such meeting at a prestigious university in recent months, after Johns Hopkins hosted a “symposium on health policy” in September. They may seem fine on the surface, but both events should be a source of embarrassment for the institutions involved. (I have a personal stake in the former gathering: I’m spending my time this fall at Stanford with a group of wonderful, truly talented researchers, who I hope do not get sprayed with the stink of this misbegotten affair.)

While the organization and funding for these two meetings isn’t explicitly linked, the cast of characters at both are eerily similar. They each feature a collection of well-known Covid contrarians: those who, in the early days of the pandemic thought we should “let ’er rip” and get as many people infected as possible, with a performative nod to protecting the vulnerable; suggested that vaccine and mask mandates were somehow akin to Nazi totalitarianism; told us not to worry about variants (“variants, schmariants,” as one of them remarked months before Delta and Omicron blasted their way through the US); and said we’d have herd immunity by April 2021.

If you want just one piece of evidence about the kind of cranks we’re talking about, consider this: A late addition to the Stanford meeting is a senior editor of the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that not only dabbles in Covid conspiracies but is a frequent purveyor of climate change denialism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/stanford-covid-symposium-misinformation/