Smut Clyde offers a post-pandemic excursion into COVIDiot quack insanity. There are outright mad psychos, those who pretend to be serious scientists, and then there is Steven Kirsch, because money buys everything.

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Right Men and Anti-Cassandras

By Smut Clyde

A stopped clock is right every 37 hours, if (like me) you work by standard Centaurian time. And even a blind pig can find a Ophiocordyceps fungus under the impression that it’s a truffle, which is how the zompig outbreak began. Similarly, Richard “Dr who?” Fleming is seldom a reliable source… but the other day he pointed out that his commercial rival Peter McCullough had been a total Big Pharma whore until his ill-judged enthusiasm for alternative anti-virals earned him a place in the Alt-Med antivax conspiracist pantheon.

Fleming’s right! 2019 was a good year for McCullough, with sundry drug companies coughing up $207,000 of research funds for him to advertise test their products, supplementing the $362,000 of corporate generosity they gave him for speeches and “consulting” gigs, and general hospitality in the course of those chores.

Contributions to the McCullough Benevolent Fund dwindled in subsequent years as he became less popular and wonderfully run after. Down to a mere $21,000 in 2022… dominated by a single $10,842.25 payment from Boehringer Ingelheim, for “publication support services”, i.e. they covered the costs of a paper he signed.

But McCullough has already enjoyed his share of affectionate attention from For Better Science.

Here he only serves as an exemplar of a whole cohort of previously-fêted medical researchers who left the mainstream during the early urgent phases of the COVID pandemic. Collectively they misread some preliminary signs that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) might be a useful treatment, and saw a bright future of hookers, blow and Nobel pageantry waiting for anyone who boarded the HCQ bandwagon early enough. When those preliminary signs turned out to be willy-wispy ignes fatui, and the medical mainstream failed to follow this cohort, they were too far down The Road to Ivermectin² to turn back, having forgotten the special skill of “admitting a mistake”.

In other words, he’s an excuse to look at a few more accidental heroes of the COVID counter-culture!

Remember Maryanne Demasi? She was a Science Journalist for the Australian ABC network until her certainty about the evils of cellphones and WiFi, and statins and Big Pharma and Big Telephony outweighed any lingering concern for “evidence”. Her permanent suspension from the ABC endeared her to the paranoid-ideation conspirasphere, who adopted her as yet another Victim of Principles for Speaking to Power.¹ She was not immediately rehired by the Murdoch media, and I can only suppose that the concept of “science journalism” is too alien for them, or she just isn’t blonde enough.

Demasi’s CV subsequently lost one paper based on her PhD dissertation, on account of faked results. More copy-pasted fabrication in a second and a third publication earned them Expressions of Concern. The thesis itself survived an inquiry by the University of Adelaide, after the inquisitors managed to convince themselves that reassembling images into the results of different experiments was accepted scientific practice at the time. Thus she remains free to include her PhD status in her Twitter handle.

What brings Demasi back into awareness now is a recent interview she conducted with Tom Jefferson on the topic of his Cochrane Collaboration report, on avoiding respiratory diseases. Jefferson’s meta-analysis of studies found no strong evidence overall for the efficacy of mask-wearing-encouragement initiatives.

This is hardly surprising, after Rightwing politicians seized upon “masking” and “COVID awareness” as wedge issues, polarising them into shibboleths of ideological obedience such that to heed a public-health campaign and don a mask would be to fail a purity test. Jefferson contributed to this polarisation, along with some other individuals we will meet below.

“Why,” you might ask, “why didn’t Jefferson perform a meta-analysis of mask-wearing for reducing infections per se, a better-studied topic?” The simple answer is that he possibly did, but found a positive net effect (contrary to the desired conclusion), obliging him to pick cherries from a different orchard. It made little difference, as Demasi and Jefferson – taking turns in the interview to lie about the analysis – described it as a ‘study of mask-wearing’ anyway. Their task was to pre-digest it in preparation for the Human Centipede of the rightwing epistemic bubble.

The Cochrane Collaboration was not well-pleased with this mendacity and issued a statement disowning the author’s misrepresentations. Perhaps they expected Fox News to devote as much coverage to it as they gave to the misrepresentation.

Recruiting each other for the interview was such not a great scoop as Demasi and Jefferson were already colleagues. Both belong to a broader COVID-denial movement. Readers might recall the Stanford professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya with their confident prediction that the pandemic would crest and disappear with hardly any deaths because the COVID fatality rate is so low. They argued that most people in the US had already caught COVID and recovered without even noticing symptoms, conferring collective immunity on the population.

These people are anti-Cassandras… they are optimistic and always wrong, receiving endless interviews about the censorship of their views, while their confident opinionation is always taken respectively by other Public Intellectuals because they are Serious People.

Bhattacharya and Ioannidis justified their prediction with the meretricious Santa Clara study, using an early antibody test that was inaccurate and prone to false positives, and a “random sample” of the S.F. Bay Area that Bhattacharya’s wife had skewed by offering a free COVID test as a way of recruiting her network of mobile, health-conscious friends. He shrugged off criticism that his study had been financed by rightwing travel-business money: As a Stanford Professor, he is by definition unsusceptible to temptations or conflicts of interest involving the source of funding, and is incompetent for free. This is the academic equivalent of an old apologia for political corruption: that if you can’t take lobbyists’ money, drink their whiskey and bed their prostitutes while ignoring their policy agenda, then politics is not the place for you.

At the instigation of a rightwing lobby group, the cohort’s counsel of urgent neglect and inaction crystallised as the Great Barrington Declaration. A manifesto, but also a conduit for millionaire money.

Bhattacharya went on to advise the Indian gubblement that their population had the same collective immunity, so they could safely drop the social-distancing / mask-wearing policies and save the expense of a vaccination program. “Restoring normality” was what Modi wanted to hear, and a million Indians died in the consequent wave of COVID. Though to be fair, the Hindutva loons would probably have made the same stupid, genocidal decisions without Bhattacharya’s advice.³ More importantly, it had no impact on his career (after all, Stanford professor!).

So it comes as no surprise to find that Jay is now a Senior Scholar and regular writer for the Brownstone Institute (BI) – the dark-money conduit that took the place of the now-deprecated Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed, Maryanne Demasi is also on the BI payroll. I mention all this because Tom Jefferson is also a BI fuckpuppet wholly-owned subsidiary. He blogs there regularly, though his posts follow a predictable pattern:

• COVID is no big deal.
• If COVID exists, it is very rare, and the impression that it’s widespread was deliberately fostered by running RT-PCR for too many cycles to generate a signal out of noise (this does not conflict with the earlier position that everyone has already caught COVID).
• If COVID is common, it’s not serious, and the official fatality rate is inflated by stretching “Died of COVID” to include cases with pre-existing illness who merely died with COVID. “Excess mortality figures”? Never heard of it.
• It’s so mild, it was circulating in Europe for years before people noticed it in China.
• Even if COVID is serious, neither masking nor social distancing nor vaccines could possibly make any difference, and are in fact injurious.
• All you proles needn’t worry your empty Epsilon heads about COVID. Just go on consuming and working and don’t expect a holiday.

Purely by coincidence, these policy points align perfectly with the business-supporting objectives of the Brownstone Institute.

All this is sad because Jefferson was once a respected academic, one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration and a leading exponent of meta-analyses as the royal road to Truth (so he knows exactly how to use it to get the conclusion you want). He has been going Emeritus for a while. ‘Rosewind‘ reminds me that his journey into Emeritus status began when medscammer Gary Null hosted him to downplay the value of ‘flu vaccines (which are undeniably imperfect, some seasons more so than others).

That led him, less excusably, into opposing HPV vaccination as well. Though being demonstrably, completely in the wrong, this did align him with the well-moneyed antivaxxers of the Christianist far-right for whom Human Papilloma Virus and the possibility of cervical cancer are God’s way of punishing sex. So now Jefferson is in bed with Robert F. Kennedy and the other abject grifting garbage of CHD, “Children’s Health Defense”. It remains to be seen if he follows the CHD on its latest conspiratorial crusade against walkable cities and bicycles, as well as mercury aluminium salts all vaccines.

This provides a convenient segue to Peter Gøtzsche, another COVID skeptic who provided expert testimony for the CHD’s vexatious litigation. He is obliged to spend much of his time trying to distance himself from the overt antivax rhetoric of his avid fan-base. Gøtzsche never heard the old adage that “He who lies down with dogs should probably not smear himself with peanut butter and meat paste beforehand”. If I had a dollar for every time that he accepted an invitation to speak at an antivax rally, only withdrawing at the last moment on realising the theme of the meeting (while the organisers use his name and reputation to advertise it), I could drop the Patreon beer-funding account. HA HA not really.

This report 😂😂😂
“The fact that Gøtzsche had inadvertently organized a kind of impromptu anti-vaccination convention became clear during the first Q&A…”https://t.co/wUYDz68UHu

— Rosewind (@Rosewind2007) September 20, 2020

Gøtzsche is of course an old mate of Jefferson’s from the old days of the Cochrane Collaboration and the Nordic Cochrane. He left Cochrane in an acrimonious cloud over a point of principle (no, they left him!!)… the principle being that “Gøtzsche is always right and no-one should gainsay his brainfarts” (though his fight to save the Human Papilloma Virus against the threat of vaccines was another trigger). Jefferson resigned from the Cochrane as well to protest their high-handed refusal to agree with him; Demasi was there as Gøtzsche’s colleague to report his side of the Cochrane bust-up; while Ioannidis involved himself in the imbroglio, testifying for Gøtzsche’s integritude and importance. Patricia Greenhalgh narrates the story here. “Acrimonious”, as any fule kno, is the word for the acrid smoke produced by burning dried acrimony.

Unusually, Gøtzsche has not taken Brownstone coin to further his independent career as a freelance contrarian and maverick, obliging him to remind his followers that they really need to Buy His Books. He displays the same character trait as others mentioned here, though – a paramount motivation to be in the right, and if facts fail to support his intuitions then Reality must yield. Skepticism is a wonderful thing but one needs to apply it especially to one’s own confident convictions.

You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?

Arguably the Rightest of In-the-Right Men and the least open to skepticism about his own wisdom is Steven Kirsch. Kirsch previously had a cameo role in the context of Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, as the latter’s sugar-daddy. I am not absolutely certain that it was Kirsch who bankrolled TrialSiteNews – a high-production-standards aggregation outlet for antivax fiddle-faddle Alternative Medical Journalism with a prestigious Advisory Board of whatever the opposite is of “luminaries” – but if not, it was someone with a similar excess of money.

Kirsch’s descent into COVID-denial hell began early in the pandemic when he was using his powers for good, recruiting a board of science advisors to search for pre-existing drugs that could be repurposed as antivirals. The partnership fell apart when the board members insisted on actually offering advice, on the basis of evidence, not realising that their role was to applaud Kirsch’s enthusiasms.

Kirsch’s most memorable trait is his hostility to admitting error and his determination to win any argument by any means necessary, the High-School Debating Club mentality. He is not concerned with arriving at the truth through good-faith intellectual engagement and the mutual sharpening of viewpoints (he already knows that his view is the truth, by virtue of being his) so any argument or any ally is valid, from rhetorical sophistry to outright lies.

It is not clear when Kirsch progressed from his initial counterfactual insistence that HCQ and IVM are effective treatments for COVID, to a broader but equally wrong-headed certainty that vaccines are counterproductive and masks / social distancing are useless at best. These are logically unrelated concepts but it is rare to find one without the other, and Kirsch fits neatly into the circular Venn diagram. I can only suppose that once you reject ‘experiments’ and ‘reasoning’ as routes to reliable information (because they conflict with your brainfarts), you slip the surly grip of Reality and you become fair game for any other belief-meme drifting around in the Noösphere and offering the same frisson of transgressive contrarian heresy. Suffice to say that Jefferson’s anti-mask mendacity found fertile soil in Kirsch’s brain, on account of its openness to the air.

To say the same thing in even more words: Kirsch believes that everyday conversations are a zero-sum game, making him the victor if other people concede defeat, which happens when they don’t bother responding to his argumentation gambits. From his perspective, hassling a next-seat passenger on air travel makes him the WINNAH! The cherry on the turd here is the “I started the bidding” insinuation that his neighbour was a prostitute. Does he have any friends? Imagine what living with him must be like!

As such, our man delights in challenging actual medical experts to Debate with him – even epidemiologists and virologists – then claiming victory when they don’t play his games, while unleashing a horde of supporters and bots to swarm their social media accounts. Unless they accept his invitation which is when he blocks them.

We find him exulting that an ill-informed, statistically-innumerate Letter-to-the-Editor is peer-reviewed science proof that vaccines are lethal. Kirsch knew perfectly well that the failed outsider-physicist author engarbled his analysis by imposing Simpson’s Error on the numbers; he knew that a fraudy identity-stealing shit-spigot from the OMICS scampire cannot honestly be described as ‘peer-reviewed’; but all that mattered was that Twiddle allowed him to weaponise Šorli’s paper-shaped declaration of ignorance. He backpedalled slightly in later celebrations of Šorli’s nescience, deleting the ‘peer-review’ tweet and feigning an inability to judge the truth of Šorli’s unreasoning, though he did cite an anonymous collaborator who assured him of its probity.

I was tempted to make Šorli the lead-in for this post, for the sake of the title.

Šorli you’re not serious!
I am serious. And don’t call me ‘Shirley’

TrialSiteNews is now just a sad shabby blog like this one, crying the poor mouth and soliciting donations, though with a paywall. Kirsch still extrudes his opinions there, which is (I intuit) how he knows about Šorli’s obscure efforts in the cause of dumbth. The seed capital must have run out so the Prestigious Advisors and the actual journalists moved elsewhere. Robert Malone left because it sullied his dignity to be seen in the company of bare-faced grifters like McCullough… he would rather stay home, raising Portuguese thoroughbreds on his family estate.

But wait! Despite the paywall, we are able to read one essay of TrialSiteNews journalism, because Robert Malone reprinted it on his own site. The author reports on Peter McCullough’s various schemes to profit from “the COVID-19 backlash”, and to grow the medical-mistrust market to the point that his own brands of garbage “Wellness” supplements replace the American health system. Malone feels more disdain than most for déclassé money-grubbing oiks, but even within the antivax movement he is not alone in feeling some concern that McCullough’s unabashed greed might influence his objectivity. Must credit Orac for writing at exhaustive length about the emergent quackfight.

Don’t start me about the “wellness” movement – a natural outgrowth of New-Age solipsistic entitlement and QAnon conspiracism – that McCullough is trying to capture for himself.

Anyway… Steven Kirsch was in the news not long ago. He had decided on “citizen journalist” as the correct professional title for his brand of shouty advocacy. So when a NZ douchewagon stole personal medical information from govt. archives – expecting acclamation as the new Edward Snowden (though without the “living in russia” part) – he passed the file onto Kirsch to torture an antivax confession out of the data. Our host Leonid Schneider is also a Citizen Journalist, and so am I, which gives us the journalistic right to call Kirsch a slapdick dunderhead.

The rise of predatory publishing has been a great boon for political lobbyists. They can pay a mock-scholarship magazine to launder their press releases, then parade their contentious fact-free fiddle-faddle as Real Science across social media and through pukefunnel churnalists. Between this and Kirsch’s vanity, it was inevitable that he would also don the cosplay lab-coat of a Real Scientist so that he will never again need to listen to ignore Scientific Advisors.

To assuage his need for his signature on a Paper, he joined a veritable Voltron of Stupidity.

M. Nathaniel Mead , Stephanie Seneff, Russ Wolfinger , Jessica Rose , Kris Denhaerynck , Steve Kirsch , Peter A McCullough COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign Cureus (2024) doi: 10.7759/cureus.52876

Senior author is McCullough but other familiar names include Jessica Rose and Stephanie Seneff. The journal they chose to grace with their manifesto is Cureus. This is a journal with standards: it might be familiar to readers from the Matthew Stephenson debâcle and for the gullible acceptance of 56 extrusions (that the editors recently had to depublish) from a Saudi university papermill.

[Cureus also published proxalutamide-for-COVID fraud by Brazilian killer doctors – Cadegiani et al 2021. But Cureus editors are real men and will never retract it like Frontiers did -LS]

Was this an attempt to cross the streams of Stupid? This is generally regarded as a bad thing. Anyway, if anyone wants to trawl through the authors’ thoughts in the hope that traces of integrity and good faith might linger, be aware of Orac’s exhaustive exegesis.

Enough of that digression; more Twitter-based research beckons! Here is Aseem Malhotra, in conversation with Neil Oliver – archaeologist turned far-right conspiracist opinionator – offering his professional cardiological opinion that the injuries wrought by COVID vaccines include a kind of induced psychosis or anosognosia whereby the delusional vaccinees refuse to admit that they have been injured. They stubbornly insist that they’re healthy.

I should note that Robert Malone has similar skills in long-distance psychological diagnosis. He invented a mental illness called “Mass Formation Psychosis” that afflicted one-third of the US population and hypnotised them to wear masks and get vaccinated and not get sick. I would have chosen an academic journal to announce such a discovery; Malone chose the Joe Rogan Conspiracy Podcast.

This ‘pro-vaccine psychosis’ theme has a long history. One could trace it back to the discovery of ‘drapetomania‘ – a pre-US Civil War mental illness observed in slaves, causing them to seek freedom in preference to their God-ordained enslavement (see also Dysaesthesia aethiopica). Though not a gastroenterologist, I still feel qualified to diagnose Malhotra and Oliver (and Malone) as suffering from “being so full of shit that their eyes turned brown”.

Malhotra began as another proponent of the view that dietary fats are unfairly scapegoated as the cause of heart disease and obesity when the real culprit is white sugar… a perfectly cromulent stance IMHO though it is not yet a majority view. He was widely acclaimed, but his father’s fame far outshone his own. So he joined forces with Demasi in the War against Statins, and followed the same rabbit-hole of unreason into a ‘Choose Your Own Facts’ adventure and a broad-spectrum embrace of crackpottery. Inflammation is bad… but statins (which control inflammation) are also bad, because reasons. And now he’s in bed with annoying antisemitic conspiracists like Oliver, and a quack-dietician anti-lectin supplement pimp (Steven Gundry), and lowlife white supremacists like Tucker Carlson. And more.

Malhotra initially blamed the shortcomings and structural racism of the UK’s National Health System after COVID killed his father. Subsequently, after the hindsight realisation that COVID isn’t serious, he repurposed his father’s death and blames it on vaccines. Because of course he does.

As it happens, I am a psychologist, which is why I feel no shame from speculating about what is going on in these anti-Cassandras’ heads. I was going to use the term ‘Ardnassac’ but it sounds like a cheap knock-off of Normandy apple brandy, and our host has enough strife with defamation lawyers without me calling down the wrath of French Appellation laws.

When anti-Cassandras are not whining about how thoroughly they have been silenced, they’re revelling in expectant triumph about the acceptance by governments of the Brownstone Institute platform of inaction and neglect. It is not enough, though, to dominate public discourse in the rightwing radicalising echo-chamber previously known as ‘Twitter’. Intellectual vindication can only be sustained by the prospect of the execution of one’s opponents. Until there are Nuremberg-II show-trials of every researcher, academic and gubblement advisor who ever argued for lockdowns or masks or vaccination programs, nothing can assuage their injured amour-propre, or distract from their own role in calling for children to be deliberately infected.

I had planned to round off this cavalcade of chicanery with Martin Kulldorff, another author of the Great Barrington Declaration and Brownstone Institute beneficiary. Alas, I can only offer Paul Alexander… Kulldorff seems to have thought better of his calls for violent retribution and deleted most of them. He and Bhattacharya shifted to a position of high-minded above-the-fray objectivity – clinically observing various responses to COVID, categorising them into six tribes.

I had not previously encountered the ‘Tablet’ website that they chose as a conduit for their combination of vengeance fantasies and smug tendentious self-congratulation. I had no idea what hot garbage it is. They aren’t just lying down with dogs; they’re flinging dogs to one side and the other in their haste to reach the absolute bottom of the pile.

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff created a separate Tribe #4 for themselves (“The Apostles of Evidence-Based Science“). They want to distance themselves from Tribe #5 (“Advocates of Nuremberg 2.0“), despite sympathising with the lynch-mobs and imagining rationales for them. As they wrote in November 2023:

“Members of this group share the dismay about the unscientific and damaging public health policies and censorship imposed during the pandemic. They demand more than just a simple accounting of the errors and reforms to public health. They want scientists, government officials and pharmaceutical companies who misled the public to be punished. Some seek dismissals or fines. Considering the enormous collateral damage caused by lockdowns, mandates, and other policies promulgated by the Associates of the Regime, some seek public trials with jail sentences for the collective actions that led to unnecessary excess deaths worldwide. […] While we understand this logic, there are also drawbacks.”

These Rorschach-themed vindication fantasies seem rather creepy even by my louche standards, but they are what one can expect from the personality style.

Hat-tips (or hats-tip) to Rosewind and to Alison Campbell for Kirsch-related material. Full disclosure: only one of them is my smarter grown-up sister.

Further reading: The Pandata File, from Counter Disinformation Project.

UPDATE: ex-Dr Richard Fleming popped up with the most theatrical vengeance fantasy yet – quoting Skaldic verse in veiled anticipation of the execution of his foes with a form of Viking torture that was bloodthirsty though fictitious.

He may just be searching for a new audience among the “runes = white supremacy” aryan-brotherhood crowd.

H/t Cheshire

UPDATE #2: To the pleasant surprise of everyone, Cureus actually retracted that Kirsch-McCullough vanity vehicle, on account of incompetence and fraudulence, but mainly because the editors now answer to Springer. McCullough responded by stinking up the Retraction Watch comment thread with an escalating series of pompous perorations (up to 5500 words long!) in which he diagnosed his critics as beset with “an intellectual disability or some form of cognitive impairment”. Just saying, one of the classic symptoms of frontal-lobe damage is perseveration – not knowing when to stop.

McCullough went on to remind any remaining readers of his credentials and publication record and to insist that no-one is qualified to criticise his work, all while consistently addressing himself in the majestic 3rd person and refusing to accept the retraction. He chooses to substitute his own reality.

Kirsch’s response was equally characteristic. He threatened the publisher with a combination of (1) vague meritless litigation intended to cost them legal fees, and (2) on-line harassment from his squadron of social-media flying monkeys. Behold the moral: never accept a paper-shaped dumpster fire from grifting antivax shitweasels.

The ‘SIQ’ of 9.2 that McCullough and Kirsch both brandish as proof of the value and truthiness of their work is (I am not making this up) an Upvote count across Cureus readers who bother to register.

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1. Demasi was not completely de-employed for her principles, for she sometimes contributes to the British Medical Journal. The BMJ aspires to speak for the entire British medical profession, including the quacks and the antivax grifters [cough Peter Doshi cough]… in practice, it has lower standards than the Murdoch press.

2. Worst Bing Crosby / Bob Hope movie EVER.

3. The imperatives of theocracy are never compatible with the needs of public health. From the perspective of theocrats, preventable epidemics are valuable tools for thinning the numbers of their subjects and keeping them pious, sunk in superstitious savagery, and fearful of a demon-haunted universe.

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