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Gregg GonsalvesMay 26, 2025 at 5:53 AM EDT

I subscribe to the @newyorker.com, I was part of ACT UP, I knew Larry Kramer well and know Tony Fauci too. Daniel Immerwahr's piece on RFKJr, features this and other passages that need a reponse. 1/

The resurrection of Charles Ortleb here as a heretic with nonconformist beliefs on AIDS floored me. But Immerwahr is doing this for a reason, which I'll describe shortly. But first, denying HIV was the cause of AIDS wasn't just a "non-conformist belief," it killed. 2/ nytimes.com

I know those discussions about the cause of AIDS because I took part in them during that era. I also lived in South Africa when the President took up these views. I wrote about it here. 3/ nytimes.com

And sorry Daniel, RFK Jr. does not resemble Larry Kramer. I spent hours with Larry as part of the Treatment & Data Committee of ACT UP. He had deep respect for science and data and we debated it together every week. Larry didn't hold on to the conspiracy theories, pseudoscience that RFK embraces. 4/

Now here you see what Immerwahr is setting up: COVID skeptics were like Larry, why didn't we listen to them? This is the fatal flaw or perhaps deception in Immerwahr's argument. AIDS activists, including Larry, including me, challenged Fauci and others, but in the context of the existing science. 5/

If you want a good description of that era, read Steven Epstein's book. Immerwahr is using Larry and Fauci to prop up an argument, which now appears in his piece. 6/ ucpress.edu

Immerwahr now pivots to full-on COVID skepticism, with a long encomium to to Frances Lee and Steven Macedo's In COVID's Wake. For Immerwahr, the book is revelatory, for many scientists though it's a frustrating book, not because it is truth telling but because it gets so much wrong. 7/

And here Immerwahr really takes off. He embraces the lab leak, the establishment is 'rigid' and the heretics are being persecuted by Fauci. Here again it would help to know the science, but that's not the point here. 8/

In fact, we may never know the origins of SARSCoV2, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests a natural origin. But the lab leak is now embraced by many in the mainstream media. Immerwahr gets on the bandwagon in this piece. 9/ thenation.com

If Immerwahr was playing fair, he would have talked about the lab leak controversy with less gullibility, but he's making a case against the medical establishment here. Facts are incidental. Read @philippmarkolin.bsky.social on the controversy, for the details: lab-leak-fever.com 10/

But here Immerwahr, gets out the big ax to grind. Macedo and Lee, victorious truth-tellers figured out that non-pharmaceutical interventions didn't work! I wonder why other scientists hadn't tried to study this question before. Thank god for Princeton. 11/

In fact, it's hard to figure out the effects of NPIs from a methodological perspective. 12/ thelancet.com

The scientific literature shows too that Macedo and Lee are not the first to try to figure this out. There are plenty of studies that belie their conclusions. An honest appraisal would confront these open questions not sweep them under the carpet. 13/ nature.com

And on masks? Macedo and Lee have the answers once again. They do not work at a population level. First, let's say this again, it's hard to study masking in real-time in a pandemic at the population level so the certainty with which the topic is dealt with here is worrisome to say the least. 14/

My take? Let's go back to AIDS. Condoms prevent transmission of HIV. Did they have a population level effect? Who knows. But did we eschew safer sex for that reason? No. The same goes for masks.They prevent transmission of respiratory pathogens. And they likely kept many of us safe and still do. 15/ Again, there are lots of competing studies out there about masking and it is disingeneous not to deal with them, try to understand the complexities. But if you're making a straw man argument, which Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee do, it's again beside the point. 16/ Here we go. It's the public health mindset that forced us all into bunkers for no reason at all, the villany of it all....17/

Except, many in public health early on were saying this. That we needed to meet people where they were at, take a harm reduction approach to preventing COVID. 18/ theatlantic.com

In fact, I was saying this too in May 2020 to @michellegoldberg.bsky.social. Macedo and Lee, Immerwahr again, don't care about the details here. They want to paint public health as a monolith and raise up the heretics as heroes. 19/

And here is where Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee go all-in on the Great Barrington Declaration. 20/

Again, please. Just look at the data. It's complex and requires close reading, which Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee do not do. Nor do they confront the real, underlying differences in risk in the US vs Sweden to begin with. 21/ sciencedirect.com

Immerwahr, Macedo & Lee's embrace of the Great Barrington Declaration is just sad to me. Here is why we said it wouldn't be wise to do this back in 2020. These three don't confront any of the issues we raised because they are looking for heroes & villains. 22/ washingtonpost.com

@joho.bsky.social takes a deeper dive into this part of the Macedo and Lee book, which Immerwahr embraces here. 23/ sciencebasedmedicine.org

This is probably the most terrible piece of Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee's argument: they wrap themselves in the mantle of the working class and the poor. 24/

I leave it to the brilliant Beatrice Adler-Bolton to tackle this despicable move by Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee. 25/ bsky.app

Beatrice Adler-Bolton03/13/25

This classic shallow argument runs cover for real ways that the response to the Covid pandemic has been all out class warfare, and is the perfect example of lazy, superficial “class analysis” that ignores the basic material conditions which actually define class under capitalism.

And again, Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee avoid any complexities of debates that don't allow them to cast "public health" as this all-powerful, elite-fueled malevolent force. @tressiemcphd.bsky.social talks about this kind of "scam artistry" here. nytimes.com

The best piece I've read looking backwards at those days is by @dwallacewells.bsky.social. But this isn't about ancient history, it's about how the present is being constructed. This is why David's piece is so important. 27/ nytimes.com

Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee cast their votes for the COVID contrarians. Immerwahr botches the history of the AIDS epidemic in the process, but they are doing something far more frightening yet. 28/ Macedo and Lee in the process of writing their book have become champions of Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of the National Institutes of Health, championing him in his nomination to that post. 29/ compactmag.com

When I read this I gasped. This is fan-boy and fan-girling of the highest order and represents an error of judgment, which I think is profound. 30/

Their man at NIH is now dismantling the entire edifice of biomedical research in this country. This is the champion of in their words, the "basic values of science and liberalism." 31/ thenation.com

And Immerwahr uses this piece in @newyorker.com to make RFK Jr. a foil for his own crusade against what he calls the power of "scientific insiders." But like Macedo and Lee he relies on caricature, on cherry-picked quotes and evidence and does a disservice to the magazine's readers. 32/

I've tried to figure out why COVID contrarianism is catnip for some liberal commentators like Immerwahr, Macedo and Lee. It's baffling in the extreme and has sent at least the last two into the arms of a man who is helping to destroy American science. 33/ Some of it is displacement of their own anger, grief about the pandemic on to "scientific insiders," the field of "public health," rather than a virus that has killed over a million people in this country. 34/ Some of it was the fact that many of the well, laptop class, had their lives turned upside down like everyone else but had never had to think of their liberalism in terms of any real sacrifice before and they resent it deeply. 35/ Whatever it is, the wave of COVID contrarianism sweeping through places like the @NewYorker is troubling because so much of it is scientifically illiterate, representing clear-cut cases of motivated reasoning. 36/ And articles like Immerwahr's, Macedo and Lee's book are playing footsie with the right, and claiming progressive bona fides for doing so. 37/ They are driving a narrative that is unhelpful in preparing us for future threats as @weparmet.bsky.social, @drsinhaesq.bsky.social & I discuss in @NEJM. While it may feel good to find someone to blame for COVID, in the end these pieces lead us dangerously astray. end/ nejm.org

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