Ron DeSantis's contrarian committee
An absence of integrity funded by dark money in MAGA/AFLDS Florida
As Rep. Jamie Raskin discussed at the Covid Oversight hearing last week, Governor Ron DeSantis and his Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo have launched a “Public Health Integrity Committee” full of familiar anti-vax names. This “integrity” committee is coming from the man who squandered the state’s Covid funds on an inhumane Martha’s Vineyard migrant stunt after his state suffered one of the worst pandemic responses in the nation thanks to his lack of leadership. He has bullied kids over mask wearing and targeted LGBTQ youth with his “Don’t Say Gay” policy influenced by LibsOfTikTok. According to the GOP, who have apparently learned nothing from Trump, this is presidential material.
DeSantis’s committee pulls from the same small circle of disinformation doctors we have discussed at length here.
America’s Frontline Doctors: Ladapo
Ladapo himself is an alum of Dr. Simone Gold’s America’s Frontline Doctors and, alongside signers of the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, took part in secret meetings about Covid policy in the Trump White House.
Ladapo’s colleague Dr. Scott Atlas had an entire Covid Oversight report named after him for his work with Jared Kushner to push the Great Barrington Declaration in the early days of the pandemic. This was done in hopes of keeping the economy open from Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Great Barrington Declaration/Pandata: Bhattacharya, Kulldorff
Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff were involved in Pandata internationally as well as the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration in the US. In addition to their Koch funding, Jay Bhattacharya has been amplified by GOP mega donor and personal friend Peter Thiel. The GBD off-shoot the Brownstone Institute has been a premiere source of political Covid disinformation and a platform for absurd revenge fantasies of these men unable to cope with having become the laughingstock of the medical community.
Urgency of Normal: Høeg
Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a fellow member of the larger Brownstone network via the Urgency of Normal - a misguided second attempt at pushing the Great Barrington Declaration’s debunked economy first policy with a focus on kids - has been working remotely from California as a “consultant” to the Florida Health Department. Please note the irony in Bhattacharya having decried the “laptop class” while working with Florida’s bought off, work-from-home epidemiologist.
In addition to fighting accountability, Høeg has been busy networking with a who’s who of Covid contrarians who find foreign pre-prints to misinterpret and run up the ladder to policy makers and the media.
As for her concerns over pediatric myocarditis, Covid, and vaccines, Dr. Frank Han - an actual pediatric cardiologist - has addressed those here.
Arguably the worst Høeg study, called an “epidemiological nightmare” by DropCite founder Dr. Robert Morris, was her paper on masks. Her analysis was just right for DeSantis and the GOP’s ongoing use of children and Covid safety policy in schools as political pawns. “Integrity.”