Pro-COVID UK Charity With Anti-Vax Ties Behind Controversial Stanford Health Policy Conference

Collateral Global’s fight against pandemic mitigation measures has gone international.

A recent, controversial health policy symposium at Stanford University was made possible in part by funding from a UK-based charity with ties to anti-vaccine groups that is known for opposing COVID-19 mitigation measures

“Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past” was held on October 4. The event drew the ire of prominent public health experts and scientists for its speaker roster stacked with fringe voices, including anti-vaxxers and right-wing political operatives who had advocated against government efforts to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. According to the event’s organizer, Stanford professor and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—a senior fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution, which is housed on the school’s campus—the purpose of the gathering was to model open dialogue with all sides to achieve some greater understanding and mend bridges.

“This is not the last pandemic we as a world will face, and it’s in this kind of event; this kind of dialogue—the hit pieces aside—that, really, advances get made,” said Bhattacharya, who famously co-authored the widely rebuked Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for achieving COVID herd immunity through mass infection. “It’s almost an act of faith to come here,” he said.

But the real goal of Bhattacharya’s symposium appeared to be airing out his personal grievances and those of the other contrarian panelists at having had their ideas rejected by the larger scientific community. By design, the event would place fringe perspectives on equal footing with mainstream science. In that sense, it was part of a larger effort by the political right to rewrite the history of COVID—a continuation of a years-long war on public health to which Bhattacharya has proudly lent his voice.

For weeks, the money behind the controversial summit remained a mystery. But shortly after the conference took place, Stanford’s health policy department, which hosted the affair, updated the event page with a disclaimer that the proceedings had been “supported in part by contributions” from Dr. George F. Tidmarsh, an adjunct professor of pediatrics and neonatology at Stanford School of Medicine, and a UK charity called Collateral Global.

“Collateral Impacts”

Collateral Global was incorporated on November 4, 2020 as a private limited company by attorney James Bassam Farha of Farha Secretaries Limited and serial entrepreneur Alex Caccia, who was reportedly the partner of Great Barrington Declaration co-author and Stanford symposium panelist Sunetra Gupta as of December 2020. Until last year, Caccia, himself involved in the drafting of the declaration, headed up the now defunct Animal Dynamics Limited, a company that designed and manufactured “autonomous solutions” like drones and received funding from the UK Ministry of Defence.

All three Great Barrington Declaration co-authors—Gupta, Bhattacharya, and biostatistician Dr. Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard Medical School—were involved with Collateral Global as early as December 2020 as part of its supervisory board. Kulldorff no longer appears on the organization’s website.

In February 2021, Gupta became a trustee, which is a director position for legal purposes. She also currently serves on Collateral Global’s scientific advisory board. Bhattacharya, who was appointed as a trustee at the end of March 2023, is the organization’s editor-in-chief and a member not just of its scientific advisory board, but its editorial board as well. Caccia has resigned his trustee position but is listed as the organization’s CEO.

Collateral Global claims to be “dedicated to researching, understanding, and communicating the effectiveness and collateral impacts of the Mandated Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions…taken by governments worldwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Unsurprisingly, though, given the individuals involved, the organization has staked out contrarian positions against efforts to control the spread of COVID like lockdowns.

Collateral Global has also taken aim at the World Health Organization’s stalled pandemic preparedness treaty, which seeks to establish critical framework for the the nations of the world to respond to future crises including through the sharing of medical technologies like vaccines. A major goal of the treaty is addressing inequities between wealthy and developing nations and improve access to lifesaving medicines.

Bhattacharya and Collateral Global director and head of research Kevin Bardosh, an applied medical anthropologist and Stanford health policy symposium panelist, penned an editorial excoriating the treaty for “validating” lockdowns and other mitigation measures as well as infringing on national sovereignty and free speech. Collateral Global features the piece on its website in a section called “in the press.”

“Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years,” the pair wrote. “Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.”

U.S.-based business-aligned, right-wing groups have also come out against the unfinished treaty. The Heritage Foundation, for example, published a commentary in February lambasting an early draft for potentially doing “grave harm to the property rights of U.S. companies “and “disincentivizing future research and development of vaccines and other medical innovations that could be critical in dealing with a future pandemic.”

Collateral Global’s website suggests that the organization intends to create policy tools and produce academic research in the future, though, as of this writing, the pages for that work are under development. The site indicates that Collateral Global is focused on mainstreaming contrarian public health stances across the developed world. It has formed working groups in Canada and the UK to study the impacts of COVID mitigations in those countries and hold conferences. The page for the U.S. working group has no text.

The main work of Collateral Global, based on its website site, appears to be commentaries by its members. The site features a section called “UK Covid inquiry,” which notes that the organization has been tracking the proceedings since June 2023, producing weekly analyses “in Unherd and other media.” The outlet, which is known for platforming “heterodox” thinkers like anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr., is hyperlinked. Another page on Collateral Global’s site for “global evaluations” simply links to a May 2023 paper by Bardosh on the harms of COVID mitigation measures.

Extreme Connections

Collateral Global has sought to position itself as a mainstream organization, but it has ties to anti-vaccine groups. There are numerous connections, for example, between the organization and the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART), a UK-based advocacy group that opposed pandemic lockdowns and the COVID vaccines. HART also notably sought help from former Cambridge Analytica psychologist Patrick Fagan to spread its contrarian messaging. 

Two individuals on Collateral Global’s editorial board, University of Nottingham professor Ellen Townsend and University of East Anglia professor David Livermore, are former members of HART. According to leaked internal messages from the group, Gupta was in contact with HART members in 2021 and even offered suggestions as to who they might recruit. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, has participated in a panel discussion with HART co-chair Claire Craig, who was revealed to have suggested seeding the false narrative that “vaccines cause COVID” into the mainstream. 

The ties run deeper. Both Gupta and Bhattacharya—along with their declaration co-author Kulldorff—were on the scientific advisory board of an anti-vaccine, anti-COVID mitigation group called PANDA, which has overlapping membership with HART. HART co-chair Jonathan Engler is listed on the group’s website as part of “The Team.”

PANDA is more extreme than either Collateral Global or HART, going so far as to claim “there was no pandemic.”

More ties between Collateral Global and HART run through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pandemic Response and Recovery, which purportedly aimed to “inform a more focused and flexible approach to government policy” and “reach new solutions in pandemic management to prevent suffering and loss in the future” but really sought to build a case against COVID mitigations.

An October 2021 filing in the parliamentary register of all-party groups indicated that Collateral Global put up money and in-kind services for the informal group, which was comprised of conservative members of Parliament and the House of Lords. The funding, however, reportedly never materialized and a filing from the following month does not list the donations. Nevertheless, individuals from both Collateral Global and HART were involved in the group’s sessions.

“False Balance”

The Stanford health policy summit fit neatly into Collateral Global’s larger mission opposing economically disruptive pandemic mitigation measures. Over the course of multiple hours, panelists served up revisionist takes suggesting that the government response to COVID was more harmful than the virus itself, which has killed more than 1.2 million Americans to date. They also promoted popular conspiracy theories that have served to undermine public confidence in public health officials and institutions.

During the panel on “evidence-based medicine,” moderator Wilk Wilkinson, a podcaster who has leaned into vaccine skepticism, criticized public health experts for focusing “very narrowly on deaths from COVID” early on in the pandemic when tens of thousands were dying each week. This focus, Wilkinson asserted, often “came at the expense of other social values” such as “being able to visit people...or putting children in school as they normally would go to school, or attend funerals.” One question he posed to the panelists was to name a mitigation policy they initially supported but now felt did not hold up in hindsight. 

Speaking on the panel, Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of Population Health & Disease Prevention at UC Irvine, offered a defense of mitigation measures before launching into a bizarre theory about Dr. Anthony Fauci, a popular right-wing target. He suggested that the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had embraced premature reopening in order to cover up his involvement in gain-of-function research that allegedly created the virus.

Meanwhile, the panel about “misinformation, censorship, and academic freedom” saw Bhattacharya and other contrarians who promoted fringe ideas throughout the pandemic painted as victims, unjustly silenced by academia, government, and social media.

“I regret not being more outspoken on what my lane really is, and what I do know is that when First amendment institutions suppress civil discourse, they are not doing their proper job—regardless of who is right,” said Michael McConnell, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and director of Stanford’s constitutional law center. McConnell’s remark was directed at his university for allegedly mistreating Bhattacharya and his fellow pro-infection Hoover Institution operative Dr. Scott Atlas, who advised the Trump administration’s COVID response.

“Even if Jay and Scott were wrong—and I think increasing evidence is that they were right—but even if they were wrong, they were contributing to a proper discussion of public policy and they should not have been silenced,” he said.

During that same panel discussion, reputed anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson claimed that the federal government “conspired with Pfizer” to “censor” him for questioning the mRNA COVID vaccines—an allegation he is currently litigating in court. 

“Probably almost none of you know any of this because essentially the mainstream media will not report on the facts of my case or what happened to me because it’s so embarrassing,” he said. He later admitted that he had “promised Jay” that he wouldn’t get into his issues with the vaccines.

Berenson went on to assert that there was “another great censorship scheme” to cover up “the lab leak,” which he said was most likely the origin of COVID. 

“We now know that the people who thought that the lab leak was the most likely—if not the absolute, let’s say 99 percent—origin of COVID were correct,” he said. 

Evidence has consistently supported zoonotic origins and natural spillover is the favored explanation by scientists. 

Some panelists throughout the day pushed back on the fringe narratives promoted by the contrarians. Josh Salomon, a professor of health policy at Stanford, for example, offered a genuine defense of mitigation measures on the panel about evidence-based medicine. However, he and those like him on other panels were outnumbered. 

In a post on Threads, health law and policy professor Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta labeled the event “shameful” and a ‘False Balance Festival.’ He called on Stanford to “do better.” 

Big Donations

Collateral Global’s opposition to economically disruptive public health measures has aligned it with major business interests. Unsurprisingly, the group has boasted some large donations and big name contributors. Among them is German-born Swiss billionaire businessman Georg von Opel and his wife, Emily. 

The Von Opels have been major funders of conservative politics in the UK for years. Their foundation, the Georg and Emily Von Opel Foundation, had a relationship with Gupta before Collateral Global was founded. In April 2020, the group bankrolled her research “into the prevalence of COVID-19 in the population” to the tune of roughly £90,000. They subsequently gave Collateral Global £130,000 between December 2020 and November 30, 2021.

Another major Collateral Global funder in the same period was the King Baudouin Foundation, a Belgian charity established in the 1970s in honor of the then-monarch which supports projects related to health, education, climate, and other issues. The group gave Collateral Global £94,000. DonorsTrust, a U.S.-based donor-advised fund that is a preferred funding conduit of right-wing donors like those in billionaire Charles Koch’s political network, gave £70,000. Another £10,000 came from businessman and investor Luke Johnson, a vocal opponent of lockdowns, while about £67,000 originated from unidentified sources.

Between December 2021 and November 30, 2022, Collateral Global received £117,000 through RSF Social Finance, a donor-advised fund affiliated with the Rudolf Steiner Foundation. It got another £157,000 from the King Baudouin Foundation, and £5,000 from the UK-based Mackintosh Foundation, which is dedicated to the performing arts and education.

Collateral Global also received £10,000 from RS Furbs Limited, a UK-based investment firm run by Robert Charles Standing, a former director of J.P.Morgan Europe Limited. Standing has been a director of at least 11 other companies—many now defunct. The company was a contributor in 2022 to conservative members of Parliament with contrarian views on COVID as well, including Steve Baker, a now-ex MP who chaired the informal, anti-lockdown COVID Recovery Group, and Miriam Cates, a former member who worked with a group called UsForThem on a campaign against vaccinating children against COVID. UsForThem does not merely oppose the inoculations. It is against the World Health Organization pandemic treaty, lockdowns, and masking.

Finally, Collateral Global received £14,000 from Toby Green, a professor of African history at King’s College in London. Green, who sits on the organization’s scientific advisory board, joined as a trustee in March 2023. Contributions and grants totaling £84,000 came from “other,” unnamed sources.

During Collateral Global’s next filing period—running December 2022 to November 2023–the organization took in substantially less money. The King Baudouin Foundation gave nearly £81,000, but was the only reported big donor.

Mystery Money

While Collateral Global’s role in funding the October 4 Stanford health policy symposium is public, the amount it fronted for the event remains a mystery. This year’s financial disclosures will not be available for months and Stanford’s health policy department was not forthcoming with the dollar figure.

Moreover, the original source of the Collateral Global money used for the conference is not publicly available, and the organization did not respond to our inquiry on the matter. 

On the day of the Stanford conference, The Nation published an op-ed by Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves about the event and similar symposiums at other top schools. The piece noted that “the architects of these meetings come with bags and bags of right-wing funding.” Bhattacharya, who was presented with the $250,000 Bradly Prize in May by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has been a major funder of right-wing causes, took to X to request a “retraction.”

“I donated the award money for my Bradley Prize to a charity,” he wrote. “They are not providing me ‘bags’ of money.”

Bhattacharya, however, did respond to Important Context’s inquiry about which charity he passed the funds to.