accuracy.org Home
  • News Releases
  • Blog
  • News Items
  • About Us
    • Board
    • Staff
  • Subscribe
  • ExposeFacts
  • Calendar
twitter facebook donate

Latest News Release – Interviews AvailableRSS

Report: Trump Era Covid Strategy “Likely Resulted in Many Deaths”

June 30, 2022

Last week, the congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a report on the Trump administration’s embrace of a herd immunity strategy via mass infection in the second half of 2020 and first months of 2021. The report details how the strategy was promoted by Dr. Scott Atlas while he was a Special Advisor to the President. In October 2020, Atlas—along with other Stanford professors affiliated with the university’s right-wing think tank, the Hoover Institution––signed onto the highly controversial Great Barrington Declaration. At the time, experts argued that the Declaration, which advocated for a “focused protection” strategy, would leave millions vulnerable to the virus. 

The subcommittee report now states that the strategy advocated by the signatories of the Declaration “likely resulted in many deaths that would have been prevented by an effective national mitigation strategy.” 

BILL HANAGE; please direct media requests to Nicole Rura at nrura@hsph.harvard.edu 
    Hanage is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

MALLORY HARRIS, contact via Twitter DM @malar0ne
    Harris is a PhD candidate in biology at Stanford. 

The report is the first installment of the Select Subcommittee’s findings “showing that the Trump Administration’s political interference was rampant and degraded every major facet of the nation’s public health response during the first year of the pandemic.” Hanage told the Institute for Public Accuracy today that “there will be much more to be written on this sorry period, but this [report] is an eye-opening start.”

Hanage said the report “depicts crucial missteps in pandemic management and the way they came about… This was achieved by appointing the likes of Dr. Scott Atlas [in July 2020], who had no relevant experience in infectious disease but did have a history of making scientifically unfounded statements belittling the severity of the pandemic. 

“The Select Subcommittee reports new evidence that in March 2020, Dr. Atlas was in contact with officials claiming that Covid would lead to about 10,000 deaths in the United States. That milestone was in fact passed within a few weeks… Dr. Atlas was not in any position to provide expert guidance to forecast the course of the pandemic or produce a sustainable pandemic management strategy. He did, however, provide cover in the form of a medically qualified individual prepared to support the chosen policies of the administration: policy-based evidence, if you will, instead of evidence-based policy.” In particular, Atlas successfully pressed the administration to weaken and reduce testing and undermined and politicized mask-wearing. 

Hanage added: The report offers “important insights into how ‘herd immunity’ strategies came to dominate the conversation and become a major––if unstated––component of the U.S. response to the pandemic prior to vaccination.” Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, also notes that these strategies have essentially been taken up by Democrats and the Biden administration this past year. 

Hanage said: “In the simplest epidemiological models, in which recovered individuals have lifelong immunity against future infection, epidemics eventually burn themselves out once they’ve exhausted the supply of available hosts––a point which is referred to as the ‘herd immunity threshold.’ A small minority of scientists proposed that enough infections in relatively low-risk individuals would allow this to be attained, and for society to then reopen once the virus had burned itself out. The difficulty is that the virus would not be expected to be eliminated by such a strategy, and there was (and is) no evidence that recovery from Covid-19 produces durable protection against future infection. So seeking herd immunity through infection would only defer the danger to older/high risk individuals, at the cost of significant morbidity (and mortality) in the young.” 

Harris has also followed how professors and scientists, especially from Stanford and including Atlas, were able to shape federal and state policies on the basis of data that was unsupported by the rest of the scientific community. Here, she details how the Great Barrington Declaration and Atlas influenced federal policy. Harris told the Institute for Public Accuracy today that it is not “new information that [these professors] were in direct contact with the federal government,” but that the report “gives us a better sense of the extent of [their activities]” as well as the extent to which Atlas had access to top officials in the White House.” Harris said that it has been “frustrating to see the name of the university” used to leverage Trump’s policies, in contrast with the public health policies that the majority of experts on the Stanford campus support. 

Blog Posts

Internships and Volunteer Positions Available

August 15, 2021 by journalist ·

Noam Chomsky: "The Institute for Public Accuracy has been regularly providing the media with informed and expert commentary on the crucial events of the day, compensating for the inevitable distortion and significant omissions that trace to reliance on official sources and on a narrow spectrum of opinion, among other factors. Apart from its constructive contributions to media comprehensiveness and accuracy, for individuals who are seeking a better understanding of evolving world events IPA has been an incomparable source of critically important news that had escaped notice or received inadequate or misleading coverage, as well as acute analysis that is hard to find or completely missing in the mainstream. Speaking personally, I have found it invaluable as a source of insight and information, and for leads to pursue that I would otherwise have missed."[more]

Amazon Union Vote

April 9, 2021 by sam ·

MIKE ELK, mike.elk@gmail.com, @MikeElk Elk i…[more]

Stop Tightening the Thumb Screws, A Humanitarian Message

March 17, 2020 by journalist ·

U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. “maximum pressure” policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.[more]

Timeline: How DNC Manipulated 2016 Presidential Race 

February 13, 2020 by journalist ·

April 25, 2017: In class action lawsuit alleging DNC fraud, DNC attorney argues the party has the right to ignore primary voters: “The party has the freedom of association to decide how it’s gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party. Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I’ll put it that way... We could have voluntarily decided that, ‘Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.’” (See Newsweek: "Was the Election Rigged Against Bernie Sanders? Dnc Lawsuit Demands Repayment for Campaign Donors.")[more]

News ItemsRSS

Scrutinizing Mueller and Russiagate

July 26, 2019

Following being on a pair of accuracy.org news releases, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and journalist Aaron Maté appeared on several programs just after Robert Mueller's long-anticipated testimony on Capitol Hill. See Rowley on The Real News, where, among other things, she gives critical background on Mueller. And see Maté on the Jimmy Dore Show and CGTN's "The Heat"scrutinizing much of the conventional wisdom on Russiagate.[more]

Manuel Pérez-Rocha in “New York Times”

July 5, 2018

After appearing in a recent IPA news release, Manuel Pérez-Rocha, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, was quoted in the article "Trump and Mexico’s New Leader, Both Headstrong, Begin With a ‘Good Conversation’."[more]

Activist Kathy Kelly talks Afghanistan on Democracy Now!

June 8, 2018

After appearing on an IPA press release, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was interviewed by Democracy Now! today to discuss the significance surrounding Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's announcement of an unconditional ceasefire with the Taliban.[more]

ExposeFacts Panel Discussion on War, Journalism and Whistleblowers on “Flashpoints”

March 23, 2018

Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, and other key 21st century whistle blowers featured in a special panel discussion sponsored last week by the Institute for Public Accuracy, on the radio program "Flashpoints," 15 years after Katherine Gun blew the whistle on U.S. dirty tricks to try influence the UN on the invasion of Iraq.[more]

Pat Elder on JROTC and the NRA in U.S. Schools on Democracy Now!

February 21, 2018

After appearing on an IPA news release, Pat Elder, author of Military Recruiting in the United States and director of National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, @studentprivacy (studentprivacy.org) was interviewed this morning on Democracy Now! He spoke about the role of JROTC and the NRA in U.S. Schools, including the one that trained the Parkland Shooter, Nikolas Cruz.[more]

From the NYT: Robert Parry, Investigative Reporter and Founder of ConsortiumNews, Dies at 68

February 1, 2018

Robert Parry, a tenacious investigative reporter and author who exposed details of the Reagan administration’s secret support for Nicaraguan rebels in the 1980s, died on Saturday in Arlington, Va. He was 68.[more]

Recent News ReleasesRSS

Migrants Dead in Trailer “Predictable”

June 30, 2022

Author Tod Miller recently spoke of the billions the US has invested into making the border as militarized and dangerous as possible. He said, "Between 8,000 and 10,000 people have died crossing the U.S. Mexico border since the mid 1990s."[more]

Maxwell Sentenced to 20 Years for Conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein: Will Powerful Men be Held Accountable?

June 30, 2022

While Ghislaine Maxwell has been sentenced for sex trafficking minors and consorting with Jeffrey Epstein, the scores of powerful men involved remain unpunished.[more]

Michigan Supreme Court Uses “Star Chamber” to Kill Flint Water Charges Against Officials

June 29, 2022

In regards to the Michigan Supreme Court reversing the charges of the officials responsible for the Flint water crisis, Flint Rising, a project aimed to help those harmed says, "This leaves no one criminally responsible for poisoning 100,000 people in one of the largest public health disasters in this nation’s history."[more]

Covid Behind Bars Project Finds Failure of Geriatric Parole Reform

June 28, 2022

Since the start of the pandemic, UCLA Law’s Covid Behind Bars Project has tracked, collected and analyzed public information about Covid-19 in prisons, jails, youth facilities and immigration detention centers. Now, the project has released analysis showing Nevada’s emergency medical use mechanisms failed to provide a single geriatric parole hearing during the pandemic. [more]

Blinded by “Russiaphobia”

June 28, 2022

Professor of Political Science at University of Arizona, John "Pat" Willerton says, "The Russian economy is stronger than westerners thought and it shows minimal stresses from sanctions...outside of the West, most of the world refuses to apply sanctions."[more]
National Office
1714 Franklin Street #100-133
Oakland, CA 94612-3409
Voice 510-788-4541
ipa[at]accuracy.org
Washington Office (journalist contact)
Voice 202-347-0020
Fax 615-849-5802
ipa[at]accuracy.org