How Money From Gates And FTX Bought Scientific Silence

Looking back, it’s utterly bizarre how the world of science could have gone so silent even as the world locked down and lives were shattered by the billions by governments the world over. The silence was deafening. We went from a March 2, 2020, letter signed by 800 public health experts associated with Yale University—which warned against quarantines and closures—to a strange disappearance of nearly all clear voices a few weeks later. And so things stood for the better part of two years.

Governments were allowed to create vast carnage based on a novel experiment with absolutely no precedent in history and no scientific literature that backed it. Even the World Health Organization’s pandemic plan included nothing like lockdowns as a solution to a widespread pathogen. At the time, it was obvious to me and others that the silence was due not to broad agreement with the policies but to something else.

That something, sad to say, was money.

We are more and more discovering the heightened role that the crypto exchange FTX played in funneling money to major public health outposts and academics at Johns Hopkins and Stanford University, as well as its family connections to the Columbia University department of public health. And before that funding spigot opened up, there was the Gates Foundation which had clearly pivoted from seemingly nonpartisan research to full support for the lockdowns.

To be sure, there is no one explanation for the disaster. The whole profession had already been infected by the intellectual virus of mechanistic rationalism and modeling. The idea was that if you slap some math and equations together and let the computer take over, you can gain a picture of disease outcomes under various scenarios. Such models are easily manipulated with small changes in variables. – READ MORE