by Phillip W Magness at AIER
Is the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) simply a front for a secret global eugenics plot, hatched at AIER by the British Ministry of Defence and financed by the Koch Brothers as part of an ongoing effort to force climate change, tobacco, and Covid-19 infections on our senior citizens? Such claims may sound like the farcical ravings of an internet paranoiac, yet precisely this narrative has gained a shocking amount of currency among ostensibly serious public health scientists and journalists since the Declaration launched last October 4th.
This outcome is the result of a disturbing turn in the academic discourse around Covid-19 policy over the past several months, with scientific disagreement taking a back seat to the political vilification of anyone who questions the wisdom of lockdown ideology – even as the lockdowns themselves utterly failed at their stated aims. Rather than debating the evidence around these policies and evaluating their performance over the last year, it has now become the norm to accuse anyone who questions “the science” of lockdowns of being beholden to secretive “dark money” interests and operating in the service of nefarious profiteering and political malice.
This bizarre string of conspiratorial attacks on AIER began in the days after the GBD’s release last fall. Self-described “journalists” with dubious backgrounds led the charge from peripheral media outlets that nonetheless provided a political message for the GBD’s opponents.
Consider the case of Nafeez Ahmed, a writer from a London-based blog called the Byline Times who has spent the better part of the last year posting conspiratorial bromides against scientists who question lockdown ideology. Fresh off of an unsuccessful Twitter campaign to flood the GBD’s website with fraudulent signatures during the week after it went live, Ahmed shifted his tack in mid-October with a new charge. In a succession of blog posts, he purported to show that the GBD was part of an elaborate scheme by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch to force the reopening of the American economy in spite of Covid’s risks, using AIER as its front. After outlining the financial portion of his conspiracy theory, Ahmed quickly appended a new “partner” in the alleged plot: the British Ministry of Defence, which he implied to be the source behind the GBD’s website. To top it off, this growing plot was allegedly orchestrated through the owner of a resort hotel in Wales, operating amid a web of military contracts that somehow or another pointed back to the GBD authors and AIER.
If that sounds like loony talk, it is.
Contrary to Ahmed’s wild imagination,…
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