[continued from previous message]   
      
   >> scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the   
   >> public,” Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans   
   >> have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the   
   >> public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that   
   >> fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job.   
   >>   
   >>   
   >> “It was a kind of pinch-me moment,” said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data   
   >> 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 vo   
   unteers—“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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)