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   >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,   
   >we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But   
   >according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies   
   >that might refute CDC recommendations.   
   >   
   >Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For   
      
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   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)