Today, Stanford University is hosting a day-long gathering on the Covid pandemic, with its new president giving a keynote address. It is the second such meeting at a prestigious university in recent months, after Johns Hopkins hosted a “health policy symposium” in September. On the surface they may seem fine, but both events should be a source of embarrassment for the institutions involved. (I have a personal interest in the first meeting: I’m spending my time at Stanford this fall with a group of wonderful, really talented researchers who hopefully won’t have the stench of this botched affair.)

Although the organization and financing of these two meetings are not explicitly linked, the characters in both are eerily similar. They each represent a collection of familiar Covid opponents: those who, in the early days of the pandemic, thought we should “go wild” and infect as many people as possible, with a performative allusion to protecting the vulnerable; suggested that vaccination and mask mandates were somehow akin to Nazi totalitarianism; told us not to worry about variants (“variants, schmariants,” as one of them remarked months before Delta and Omicron made their way through the U.S.); and said we would have herd immunity by April 2021.

If you want just one piece of evidence of the kind of weirdos we’re talking about, consider this: A late addition to the Stanford meeting is a senior editor of the Epoch timesa right-wing extremist publication that not only deals with Covid conspiracies, but also frequently promotes climate change denial.

Although the organizers tried to bring a few reasonable voices into the meeting, this does not change the overall focus of these gatherings. As former Texas Governor Ann Richards said, “You can put lipstick and earrings on a pig and call it Monique, but it’s still a pig.”

Health reporters like Michael Hiltzik am Los Angeles Times leaked the Stanford conference in mid-September, and others focused on debunking that group’s pseudoscience have written about the meetings on both coasts. The faculty at both institutions who are calling for and behind these convocations have defended them on the grounds of academic freedom—a defense that neither Stanford nor Hopkins would have had an easy time overcoming in our current era of freak-outs about “cancel culture.” You have to blame the opponents for putting these schools in an impossible situation — although that still doesn’t explain why Stanford’s president feels the need to show up in person today.

The organizers of these meetings come with tons of right-wing funding, some of which is laundered through think tanks and other institutions. They met with Trump officials at the White House and advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Covid-19 policy. Some of them even received a shout-out from Bret Stephens The New York Times last week.

They continually complain about how horribly they were treated, but far from being persecuted, they are celebrated by the right, even as mainstream members of their professions have continually reconsidered their ideas and roundly rejected them on their merits .

My question is: Why should these meetings take place now and in these places?

Some have suggested that this is as much about a “bid” for the next Trump administration as it is an attempt to rewrite the history of the pandemic. Both are probably partly true. But when you zoom out and think about these meetings in the context of the right’s war on higher education, I think the purpose becomes clearer.

These Covid opponents, who have found little support for their views among their peers, have concluded that science has been turned into a “dogmatic tool of oppression” in order to reject it. In their eyes, they are Galileos against the church, and now they are directing their anger at the institutions themselves. This approach is, of course, reminiscent of the right’s attacks on universities as bastions of woke, left-wing ideology that either need to be reformed (by hiring more conservative ones lecturers) or have to be gutted and rebuilt according to their wishes (e.g. the New College of Florida). ).

With that in mind, these two meetings are about establishing a beachhead – building credibility in what many of the organizers would describe as liberal bastions of academia. If you can’t convince your colleagues of the merits of your arguments, you can scream that you are being discriminated against simply because you have “different views.” But that’s not how it works in science: we don’t teach intelligent design alongside evolution, nor alternative theories about the cause of AIDS. Proponents of these discredited ideas would say we must “teach the controversy” and not be dogmatic, but there is no controversy: the vast majority of evidence supports evolution and HIV as the cause of AIDS. Likewise, many of the favorite claims of Covid opponents have withered in the sunlight of scientific scrutiny.

But just as the Federalist Society has gained influence in law schools and the judiciary, Covid opponents and their supporters want to do the same for medicine and public health by promoting their views – both in the academic environment and then in the public one Politics – enforce pure brute force. They will not give up and have the money and resources to continue their campaigns. Should former President Trump win back the White House, their fortunes will rise and these threats to academic integrity and public health itself (by adopting their views into practice) will go into overdrive.

And for anyone who thinks this is all academic, in mid-September, Florida’s surgeon general recommended against the use of mRNA Covid vaccines, just as we are heading into respiratory virus season that is disrupting the lives of residents of the State endangers quackery and pseudoscience. Of course, these are the same Covid opponents who organized these meetings and who have been advising the DeSantis administration on pandemic policy for several years. Too bad for her.