Who’s Speaking At the 2024 Brownstone Institute Conference?

This year’s fringe fest shows the extent of the anti-science group’s influence.

This piece has been updated from its original email version. Last edit: 11/1/24

Mere days before the presidential election, the Omni William Penn hotel in Pittsburgh will play host to a gathering of prolific anti-vaccine conspiracy mongers, public health contrarians, and right-wing operatives. Among them will be the organizer of the recent controversial Stanford University health policy symposium and a founder of Moms for Liberty. The occasion is the annual gala and conference of the Brownstone Institute, a small but influential right-wing dark money group known for promoting pandemic conspiracy theories and misinformation.

The event, called “The New Resistance,” promises to bring together “scientists, medical professionals, economists, attorneys, intrepid journalists, and knowledgeable activists who want to restore the free and humane social order that respects dignity, freedom, and truth.” In reality, the conference will be a celebration of fringe perspectives and misinformation. Tickets for the affair range from $540 for general admission to the conference to $1,500 per couple for the VIP black/white tie dinner.

Brownstone was founded in May 2021 to be the “spiritual child” of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto advocating a COVID herd immunity strategy based on mass infection to minimize economic losses. The group’s founder, anarcho-capitalist Jeffrey Tucker, was one of the declaration’s organizers and wanted to prevent the recurrence of lockdowns.

In its short existence, his Brownstone Institute has catapulted to the forefront of a years-long war on public health waged by the business-aligned political right, becoming a central hub for contrarian thought. Behind that rise has been big money—much of it anonymous. Today, the group wields real influence. When the GOP-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held its first hearing in February 2023, the Republican expert witnesses were all members of a scientist team called The Norfolk Group, organized by Brownstone to aid the governmental body.

The panel lineup of the 2024 Pittsburgh conference not only illustrates how wide Brownstone’s influence web has become, but how unifying—and animating—public health denialism is to the global right today. Represented by the speakers are different countries, various universities and other institutions, including not a small number of dark money groups. The vast majority of the panelists are public health contrarians who have expressed skepticism of the COVID vaccines and espoused anti-trans sentiments.

Day 1

Keynote

The festivities will begin with a keynote speech delivered by Tucker himself. Tucker has worn many hats throughout his career—Bitcoin advocate; managing partner at a crypto investment fund; neo-Confederate; right-wing political operative. He has a reputation for his extreme free market beliefs, which include support for child labor and youth tobacco use, and opposition to anti-discrimination laws.

Conversely, Tucker lives in the rigid world of Traditionalist Catholicism and has written for various publications with a focus on liturgical music. In 2009, he promoted his book “Sing Like a Catholic” at the D.C.-based Catholic Information Center run by the secretive, radical sect Opus Dei, known for patriarchal teachings and extreme practices like self-flagellation.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, Tucker’s focus shifted to opposing economically disruptive government efforts to control the spread of the virus. He has embraced fringe perspectives and promoted misinformation, including about the COVID jabs, which he called Bill Gates’s “potions.” 

The panels at the Brownstone conference represent the range of Tucker’s interests and the contrarian speaker choices are reflective of his own extreme politics.

Panel 1: The Psychology of Tyranny 

Following Tucker’s opening keynote speech, the first panel, “The Psychology of Tyranny,” features two academics who have drawn the ire of their home institutions for their COVID rhetoric and behavior. 

Mattias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and the author of “Psychology of Totalitarianism” about COVID mitigation measures, who bills himself as “the world's leading expert on the theory of mass formation as it applies to the COVID-19 pandemic.” He rails against “globalist censors,” calls the vaccines a risky “experiment,” and has appeared on the programs of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones where he made false and misleading claims.

While Desmet has maintained his position at Ghent, the school launched an investigation into his conduct and took action against him, banning the use of his book in lectures and handing responsibility for his course over to a colleague in his department. The university’s Committee for Scientific Integrity found that his work was sloppy and partly based on outdated science. 

Aaron Kheriaty is a psychiatrist who lost his position at the University of California, Irvine, over his refusal to get vaccinated against COVID per the institutional mandate. Despite unsuccessfully suing his former employer, Kheriaty has found a soft landing thanks to right-wing dark money.

He is listed as a senior counselor at Brownstone and is a member of The Unity Project, a California-based group focused on medical freedom and parents’ rights which is stacked with anti-vaccine physicians. He is also a senior fellow and director of the Health and Human Flourishing Program at the Zephyr Institute, an off-campus conservative operation working to serve Stanford students, scholars, and young professionals. Additionally, Kheriaty serves as a fellow and director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The D.C.-based think tank dedicated to Judeo-Christian traditions received $1.3 million from right-wing legal activist Leonard Leo’s The 85 Fund and is on the advisory board of Project 2025, a series of extreme proposals crafted by the Heritage Foundation for a second Donald Trump presidential term.

In August 2022, Kheriaty was one of several fringe doctors represented by a business-aligned, dark money lawfare group in litigation against the Biden administration for allegedly strong-arming social media companies into “censoring” dissenting medical voices. The case made its way to the Supreme Court where it was dismissed.

On the day of oral arguments, Kheriaty (and Tucker) spoke outside the court at a rally organized by Children’s Health Defense, the dark money outfit of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump is entrusting to take over public health institutions in a second administration.

Panel 2: Public Health 

The next panel of the day will focus on public health and features speakers who have cast doubt on the life-saving COVID vaccines.

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill is a Canadian pediatrician who, after receiving criticism for her anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown views in 2020, filed a $12 million libel lawsuit against 23 of her detractors, including “doctors, a former president of the Ontario Medical Association, university professors, media outlets and newspaper journalists.” Her case was struck down in 2022 and she was ordered to pay the defendants $1.1 million for the legal costs they had accrued. Gill’s case caught the attention of COVID contrarians including Elon Musk, who announced that he would pay her legal bills. 

With Gill will be Brownstone Senior Scholar Steve Templeton, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine and former member of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's Public Health Integrity Committee and Brownstone’s Norfolk Group. He authored a book published by the institute called “Fear of a Microbial World,” which casts COVID mitigations as mass hysteria and argues that pandemic “maximizers” were maybe even more “wrong” than minimizers. The book also claims that the benefits of COVID jabs were exaggerated and suggests the CDC recommendation that children be vaccinated is attributable to pharmaceutical industry money.

The last panelist will be Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family medicine physician and former state senator who was defeated by Gov. Tim Walz in the 2022 gubernatorial election after running on an anti-vax and anti-abortion platform. He has since been embroiled in a battle with his state board over his medical license–which he has been able to maintain. 

In April 2020, Jensen appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and made the false claim that COVID case counts were artificially inflated due to hospitals being paid a higher rate for patients with the diagnosis—something then-President Trump would later parrot. Jensen has previously identified himself as a member of the pro-Trump group America’s Frontline Doctors, which anti-vax Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo was also involved with, and has been a member of the international contrarian group World Doctors Alliance. 

Panel 3: Science 

The third panel, focused on “science,” will host right-wing stars known for spreading misinformation about COVID and health.

Brownstone Fellow Bret Weinstein is a former evolutionary biology professor-turned-podcaster who has promoted ivermectin for COVID, said that mRNA vaccines are “experimental,” touting the superiority of “natural immunity” and “natural selection,” and even dabbled in HIV/AIDS denialism. He was an organizer of the recent Rescue the Republic rally in Washington DC, which hosted Kennedy, his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, and a slew of far-right media personalities. 

Weinsten has also spoken out against the World Health Organization’s (WHO) planned pandemic preparedness treaty, which seeks to create a framework for responding to future public health crises. The document has been targeted by right-wing groups and politicians. In January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that momentum in the negotiations was slowing partly due to “a torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories.” Weinstein has contributed with false claims that the treaty would infringe on free speech and national sovereignty. 

Brownstone itself is a signatory to the so-called American Sovereignty Declaration, demanding the U.S. exit the WHO over the treaty. The declaration is a project of the Sovereignty Coalition—a joint project of the Center for Security Policy, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated an anti-Muslim hate group, and Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an organization focused on human rights abuses in China. The group’s founder, Catholic activist Reggie Littlejohn, has spoken at the Opus Dei-run Catholic Information Center.

Alongside Weinstein will be Dr. Robert Malone, who is best known for overstating his role in the development of the mRNA vaccine technology while fear mongering about vaccine harms. Malone saw his star rise after a December 2021 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he compared pandemic mitigation efforts to Nazi Germany and claimed the country was in the midst of “mass formation psychosis.” 

Malone has spawned various fringe groups. He is a founder of The Unity Project and The Malone Institute, a new dark money outfit which claims to want to “bring back integrity to the biological sciences and medicine” and conduct research. As of this writing, the institute’s LinkedIn page promotes a video Malone did with the conspiracy-laden Epoch Times about the Chinese “lab leak cover-up.”

Like Weinstein, Malone has leant his voice to the broader right-wing effort to kill the WHO pandemic treaty. He, the Unity Project, and the Malone institute are signatories of the sovereignty declaration.

Panel 4: Pharma 

The penultimate panel of the day will deal with “pharma.” Panelist Toby Rogers is a Brownstone fellow and advocate of the debunked narrative that vaccines cause autism. He has suggested that the COVID vaccines are “toxic substances” and pushed conspiracy theories about them—like that they killed baseball legend Fernando Valenzuela.

Like many other Brownstone panelists, Rogers’s conspiratorial and contrarian views extend beyond vaccines and COVID into other medical care—particularly related to transgender individuals. He has claimed, for example, that “gender theorists got played by the sex change industry.”

Joining Rogers is Dr. Clayton Baker, an internal medicine physician who is part of the medical freedom movement. Baker has written extensively for Brownstone, attacking COVID mitigation policies like lockdowns, masking, and travel restricts—what he dubbed “soft-core totalitarianism”—and spewing unsupported theories about the pandemic.

In a single co-authored piece, for example, he argued that the pandemic was caused by “a lab-developed, leaked pathogen,” that the global vaccination effort was “the most outrageous, coercive campaign to enforce medical treatment in history,” that the “experimental,” “gene therapy” vaccines were “rushed-to-market,” and “devastating.” Baker has also claimed that Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was funding “bioweapons research” through universities, making them complicit.

Rounding out the discussion will be Jessica Rose, a computational biologist and researcher who has a vaccine skeptical Substack called “Unacceptable Jessica” and has called the mRNA vaccines “experimental.”

Rose has notably co-authored papers about the jabs with cardiologist Peter McCullough, who has earned a reputation for spreading vaccine misinformation and serves as the chief science officer of The Wellness Company, which hawks disproven COVID early treatment drugs and vaccine “detox” supplements. A 2021 paper they wrote claiming, based on data from the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), that myocarditis cases surged in teens after the rollout of the jabs—“injectable biological products”—was retracted. Another VAERS-based paper they partnered on from this year about vaccine-induced myocarditis already has an expression of concern attached to it.

Panel 5: Medicine 

Closing out the first day will be a discussion about medicine. Slated for that panel is Dr. Kat Lindley, a Texas family medicine doctor who serves as the president of the Texas branch of the right-wing American Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, which has long espoused anti-vaccine sentiments. Lindley is also the president and co-founder of the “health freedom” Global Health Project and has been adamantly against the WHO pandemic treaty. Lindley is additionally listed as part of the clinical team for the ivermectin-promoting Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). 

Her co-panelist, Dr. Paul Marik is a critical care physician formerly of Eastern Virginia Medical School and a co-founder of FLCCC, which Brownstone lists as a “friend” organization along with The Epoch Times. FLCCC has pulled in massive sums of money including via shadowy donor advised funds. Prior to promoting ivermectin to treat COVID, FLCCC pushed a hospital protocol for the virus, but their paper on it was retracted after Marik’s former hospital alerted the publishing journal he had inaccurately reported mortality data. 

FLCCC members promote COVID vaccine skepticism along with ineffective treatment. Marik and his FLCCC co-founder Dr. Pierre Kory did an interview with Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense to discuss a new protocol for the COVID “vaccine injured.” (Vaccine injuries have been documented but they are extremely rare, while over 200,000 Americans died preventable unvaccinated COVID deaths) Both Marik and Kory have recently had their board certifications revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine for spreading COVID misinformation.

Alongside Lindley and Marik will be Dr. Meryl Nass, a Maine-based internal medicine physician who sued her state’s medical board for suspending her medical license in January 2022 over unprofessional conduct and spreading COVID-related misinformation online. The board also recommended a neuropsychological evaluation. The allegations against her included prescribing the unproven COVID treatments ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to patients, lying to obtain a hydroxychloroquine prescription, and not keeping proper records. In July, a Trump-appointed federal judge dismissed Nass’s claims in part, without prejudice.

Nass is a vaccine skeptic and contributor to Children’s Health Defense (the group has aided her in the lawsuit). She has claimed that the shots were “evidence-free,” “experimental,” and “unlicensed.” Nass has also called the COVID tests “experimental,” and repeatedly referred to the COVID pandemic as a “plandemic,” including as recently as earlier this month.

Rounding out the discussion will be Petra Beuskens, a libertarian psychotherapist, academic, and freelance writer. She is listed in a directory of therapists on the website of the detransition support group Beyond Trans—a project of Genspect, an international organization that opposes gender-affirming care.

In a piece for the Australians for Science and Freedom (ASF), an Australia-based nonprofit with a significant amount of personnel overlap with Brownstone, Beuskens lamented a landmark decision by the Federal Court of Australia that the social networking app Giggle for Girls—originally set up for cisgender women—discriminated against transgender women. “The landmark case has answered the question: ‘What is a woman?’ And come down categorically on the side of gender-identity, paradoxically discriminating against natal women in the process,” she wrote.

Beusken also identifies as a member of the anti-vaccine “medical freedom” movement. She has decried lockdowns and the “biomedical surveillance state,” and made a number of false claims about the vaccines, including calling them “novel gene therapy.”

Day 2

Panel 1: Economics

The second day of the Brownstone 2024 conference will begin with a panel on economics featuring Jeffrey Tucker in conversation with Aaron Day, a former chairman of the Free State Project who has run multiple unsuccessful races for federal office, including a write-in 2024 presidential campaign as a Republican. Day has since endorsed Trump despite previously criticizing him for “lockdowns” and the COVID vaccines. 

Economist Matt Kibbe will also participate on the panel. The president of the libertarian dark money group Free the People Fight the Power Foundation, Kibbe has called both COVID lockdowns and vaccines “experimental.” 

Preventable unvaccinated COVID hospitalizations cost the US healthcare system billions. Long COVID, meanwhile, which the jabs provide protection against, has been estimated to cost the global economy $1 trillion per year.

Panel 2: Public Culture and Censorship 

Next will be a panel on ”public culture and censorship” between Brownstone writers Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Harrington, and Rebekah Barnett.

Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow and ASF contributor who has made apocalyptic claims about the pandemic response, including the declaration that the “Covid crisis…ushered in a new level of authoritarianism, much of it made possible by digital technologies, but also by a new ‘progressive’ culture that craves the hammer of state power.” 

He is the founder of a website called Liber-Net, which purports to use “journalism, research, media-making, events and network building” to fight back against encroaching public health tyranny and censorship arising from a sordid alliance between “governments, NGOs, academics, and Big Tech.” Lowenthal has suggested that moderation of anti-vaccine content on social media was done to protect “Big Pharma” and “quite possibly criminal.”

Harrington is a Hispanic studies professor at Trinity College and a Brownstone senior scholar. He authored “The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class,” which Brownstone published. An Amazon summary of the book shouts out the “great reset” conspiracy theory.

Barnett is a Brownstone fellow and also a contributor to ASF. Her focus has been bringing the right-wing war on public health to Australia. Her Brownstone bio calls her an “advocate for Australians injured by the Covid vaccines.” Like other panelists, she opposes lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and “censorship” on social media. She has also called the jabs “experimental” and vaccination an “experimental medical procedure.”

Panel 3: State and Law 

Discussing “state and law” will be Debbie Lerman, listed on Brownstone’s website as a 2023 fellow. Like other speakers at the conference, she has made conspiratorial statements including about COVID mitigation measures. She has claimed, for example, that “lockdowns” were a plot from a “biosecurity cabal” and called mRNA jabs “genetic vaccines” and suggesting they are ineffective. In a leaked email to Tucker about changes to his Wikipedia page, she said he was being targeted by “THE NATIONAL SECURITY/BIOSECURITY NETWORK.” She has also accused Important Context of working on behalf of “the Censorship industrial complex.”

Joining Lerman will be Brownstone fellow and attorney Bobbie Anne Flower Cox. Cox represented three New York Republican lawmakers and a citizens' group in a lawsuit against the NY Department of Health over quarantine and isolation protocols it adopted at the height of the pandemic. A favorable lower court ruling was reversed on appeal.

Cox is currently focused on defeating Prop 1 in New York, which proposes to add new protected classes to the Equal Rights Amendment in the state’s constitution including gender identity and sexual orientation.

Also joining is vaccine skeptical attorney Warner Mendenhall, who brought a lawsuit against Pfizer and contractor Ventavia on behalf of a purported whistleblower claiming to have exposed serious protocol violations in the COVID vaccine safety trials which amounted to fraud. Last spring, the fraud claims were dismissed with prejudice on the grounds that the plaintiff “had not demonstrated that the companies made false statements or engaged in a fraudulent course of conduct, or that their alleged misrepresentations were material.”

Mendenhall frequently posts on X about vaccine injury and has declared that “the mRNA platform is an overriding threat.” Last month, he promoted a video of anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf claiming that Pfizer knew its mRNA vaccines were killing babies and calling it “demonic.”

Panel 4: REPPARE 

The fourth panel centers on an effort by Brownstone to steer global efforts to craft frameworks for responding to future pandemics like the WHO pandemic treaty. The project is called “Re-Evaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda,” or REPPARE, and it represents a partnership with the University of Leeds in the UK. The University of Ghent in Belgium is also listed as a collaborator. Brownstone funded the venture.

The REPPARE group put out a 114-page report in February called “Rational Policy Over Panic,” arguing that international agencies involved in pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response were overstating the risk of future outbreaks and pandemics for money. The report rewrites the history of COVID, claiming, for example, that in terms of COVID origins, “natural spillover is widely questioned.” A majority of virologists and epidemiologists agree—and evidence has consistently suggested—that natural spillover is the likely origin of SARS-CoV-2. 

The report also suggests COVID did little to harm the young and healthy while dismissively addressing deaths in vulnerable and elderly populations, arguing that mortality alone gives a “poor measure of overall impact” of pandemics. 

“If most death from a disease occurs in old age and and in those with comorbidities expected to shorten life, such as COVID-19, recorded deaths may be high but the impact on average life expectancy will be small,” the report reads. “Most would likely have died due to age and/or comorbidities within a few years if COVID-19 had not occurred.”

According to the WHO, COVID cost the world a decade of progress in terms of average life expectancy, including global healthy life expectancy.

REPPARE put out another report this month arguing against putting too much stock in modeling of future pandemic risks. 

Two individuals involved in REPPARE will appear at Brownstone’s conference to discuss it. Dr. David Bell, a senior scholar at Brownstone and physician who previously worked for the WHO, but has taken a turn to public health contrarianism with the COVID pandemic, opposing “lockdowns” and other mitigation measures and making false claims about vaccine safety. In a May 2023 piece, he claimed that the administration of Pfizer mRNA COVID vaccines to pregnant women is “extremely high risk and unjustifiable.”

Bell has also been a longtime contributor to the international anti-vaccine group PANDA, which denies that COVID was ever a pandemic. He is also a contributor to ASF and appears as an active participant in leaked internal chat logs of the UK-based Health Advisory and Recovery Team, another anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine group.

Bell’s co-panelist will be political scientist Garret Wallace Brown, who serves as chair in political theory and global health policy at the University of Leeds. Last June, both men spoke to The Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK, which is stacked with conservative members of Parliament and the House of Lords. A summary of the meeting was posted online with the title, “Time for MPs to challenge the World Health Organization’s power and money grab.”

Panel 5: Global Health and Bureaucracy 

The penultimate panel will feature Bell, Brown, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and a former Brownstone senior scholar.

Bhattacharya, who Kennedy recently floated for a CDC position, is a professor at Stanford University and the organizer of the highly criticized health policy conference his school held earlier this month stacked with fringe voices. He has spent years waging an ideological battle against public health, promoting a narrative that the government response to the pandemic did more harm than the virus itself. He has made numerous false and misleading claims about the risks of COVID, the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and shutdowns against transmission, the safety of the jabs for young people, and the extent of government efforts to combat online misinformation. 

As Important Context has covered extensively, the professor is well-connected in the world of right-wing dark money—not merely in the U.S. with groups like the Hoover Institution, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, or Council for National Policy, but overseas organizations as well. For example, he is a contributor to ASF; has been promoted by the Institute of Public Affairs, another Australia-based group; serves in a number of high-ranking roles at the UK-based anti-pandemic mitigation charity Collateral Global; and has advised PANDA.

Panel 6: Freedom

The final panel of the conference will be focused on “freedom.” It will feature a number of anti-vaccine and regressive voices. Alongside right-wing neuroscientist Chris Martenson, a former pharma executive and promoter of the discredited narrative that vaccines cause autism, is Moms for Liberty co-founder and Unity Project member Tiffany Justice, who appears to be gunning for the role of Trump’s new education secretary. Justice has made statements about the COVID vaccines that are contrary to the recommendations of major medical organizations and public health agencies, including that children do not need to be vaccinated against COVID and pregnant women should not be. Justice has falsely claimed that children are “not at risk of severe illness from Covid.”

Justice’s Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an extremist group, began in Florida in 2021 in response to COVID mitigation measures in schools—though it quickly expanded its focus, attacking schools over the teaching of subjects like race and LGBTQIA+ inclusivity and pushing book bans. The organization’s meteoric rise nationally has been propped up by large, anonymous donations, right-wing media, and Republican politicians. 

Joining Martenson and Justice will be Father John Naugle. A member of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, Naugle has been a contributor to Brownstone since September 2022, opening with a piece calling COVID mitigation measures “the golden calf” and arguing that they were the result of mass hysteria and were responsible for the pandemic’s high excess deaths. The priest has repeatedly claimed that the COVID vaccines, which studies have shown saved millions of lives and prevented even more hospitalizations, do not work.

Naugle’s views on other issues are also regressive—particularly his views on women. He has claimed that “the drive for abortion is the resentment of one's own body for it welcoming with joy a child” and bemoaned  women having careers and ‘fornicating,’ writing that “feminism has taught them that uncommitted inebriated fornication is better, as that won't interfere with the myriad of career options afforded by a sociology or women's studies degree.”

In another post on X, he appeared to suggest that women’s suffrage was an unfortunate byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, writing, “In this country, women's suffrage and prohibition were basically the same movement. A correct sense that something was very wrong, but a completely wrong diagnosis. Prohibition helped urged the sexual revolution on; men and women didn't drink together until it was illegal.” Naugle has also bemoaned “wicked suburban women” who do not take their children to church.

The priest has also made anti-trans statements and criticized public schools for allegedly becoming “cesspools of leftist indoctrination, even to the point where boys and girls think they can be something other than the boy or girl they were born as.”

A particular target of Naugle’s has been Admiral Rachel Levine, MD, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services who is transgender. Naugle has called her “a bad man” and a “wicked man” who “abandoned his marriage (with children) in order to pretend to be a woman which he then used to advance his career despite his obvious lack of intelligence and talent.”

The final speaker on the “Freedom” panel is “medical freedom” podcaster Shannon Joy, who identifies as part of Kennedy’s pro-Trump “Make America Health Again” movement.

On Monday, she circulated a petition on X with demands for a second Trump term. The petition calls on the president to withhold “certain federal funding“ from states that do not allow “as-of-right philosophical exemption for current and future vaccines for all citizens in every setting” and to “end liability protection for the vaccine industry and restore America’s Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury.”

She ended her tweet tagging “giants in our medical freedom community”—anti-vaccine voices like McCullough, Kory, Malone, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, and activist Steve Kirsch.

Gala Keynote

Delivering the gala keynote will be internist and media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky, known by his stage name “Dr. Drew.” Pinsky, who was revealed to have taken money to talk up the antidepressant Wellbutrin in 2013, now serves as chief patient officer for The Wellness Company. Of all the conference speakers, he was the best known entering the pandemic, having hosted television programs and authored multiple books. 

Pinsky’s reputation took a hit in early 2020 when he famously said COVID was not as dangerous as the flu. Although he later apologized, he has continued pushing anti-vaccine and COVID-minimizing narratives. He now hosts a Rumble podcast which has featured guests such as Drs. Malone and Bhattacharya as well as far-right personalities like Alex Jones.