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   and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few   
   weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment   
   of the “fringe epidemiologist,” as he was baselessly called by former   
   NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency.   
      
   Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and   
   Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a   
   one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking   
   conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views.   
      
   Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks   
   to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after   
   reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and   
   professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things   
   they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that   
   public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good   
   data and calling the Covid response a potential “fiasco in the making.”   
      
    From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great   
   Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two   
   colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable   
   to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society.   
   The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag   
   community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream.   
      
   “We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people   
   who were very conservative Republicans,” said Hart. “It’s amazing how   
   unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids   
   and impinging our freedoms.”   
      
      
   Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes   
   himself as a right-of-center, “insatiably curious”   
   artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)   
   Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives   
   outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The   
   Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of   
   Covid’s impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a   
   right-of-center, “insatiably curious” artificial-intelligence engineer   
   with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his   
   data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a   
   “full-time Covid hobby,” he said. Shapiro joined other volunteers—“good   
   people trying to do an important thing”—to input data, analyze trends,   
   and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health.   
      
   But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease   
   Control and Prevention’s recommendations, for example, that Covid spread   
   as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without   
   them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. “All   
   my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just   
   like, ‘Not touching that,’ ” he recalled.   
      
   Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant   
   narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More   
   alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for   
   society. “That’s not the story we’re telling ourselves about who we   
   are,” he told me.   
      
      
   Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiro’s “full-time hobby” during the   
   pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)   
   It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group   
   worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the   
   first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC   
   assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid   
   task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal   
   lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all   
   Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued   
   grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found   
   them.   
      
   In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. “We’ve had   
   people rage-quit,” said Hart. “Like in any human endeavor, we definitely   
   have our moments where people don’t see things in the same way, but we   
   had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss   
   things.”   
      
      
   Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional   
   reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership   
   of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want   
   safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government   
   authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing   
   transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health.   
      
   To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be   
   robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis   
   of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even   
   in emergency situations.   
      
      
   “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth,” NIH   
   director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty   
   Images)   
   “Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence   
   demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of   
   imposition,” said Krohnert. “With Covid, we got the opposite:   
   low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with   
   massive impositions and untold costs.”   
      
   They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during   
   Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven   
   science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be   
   publicly available. “If you collect data with our taxpayer money, it’s   
   our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing   
   it if it achieves some end-policy goal,” he said.   
      
   Bhattacharya agrees. “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on   
   the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded   
   investigation, including by members of the public with access to the   
   same data as public-health officials,” he told me.   
      
   Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but   
   Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things   
   wrong. “On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed   
   and corrected government agencies,” he told me. “Rational Ground often   
   relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to   
   correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.”   
      
      
   Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the   
   predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and   
   businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press)   
   Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data   
   and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said   
   Krohnert. “Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors   
   from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire,   
   because they can make up what they want and claim it’s from some study   
   the government ‘doesn’t want you to see,’ ” she said.   
      
   Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. It’s about what   
   gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with   
   enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart,   
      
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   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)