On July 22, 2021, Hillsdale College launched its new Academy of Science and Freedom. For some reason, this momentous step slipped under the radar and was essentially ignored. A year later, the fact that this program was established is even more important, especially in light of the public health apparatus seeking to use both Monkeypox and the Marburg virus to frighten the public, force certain behavior, and get people in line with their chosen goals. This is the type of anti-science and agenda-oriented nonsense that has destroyed the public’s trust in the medical community and public health systems. Most of us are looking over the damage done by the past two years of so-called COVID response, with its subsequent forced vaccine policies and, we are saying: Never Again. Not on my watch.
Many average citizens who simply wanted to be left alone to live their lives have risen up in opposition to these draconian agendas wrapped in “the common good.” The Academy of Science and Freedom seeks to spearhead and equip those who are pursuing medical, scientific, or public health careers with resources and means to focus on scientific discourse and life-giving solutions, not political agendas.
The program’s overview states:
“Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread and aggressive moves have been made against both the individual and academic freedom required to conduct and interpret science. This pandemic has exposed grave problems in the essential functioning of science, research, and debate. Institutions, including elite research universities, public health agencies, and top scientific journals, quickly fell in line with herd thinking about remedies for the pandemic. They loudly and publicly supported solutions like lockdowns that continue to generate enormous collateral public health damage to this day. Moreover, many important clinical trials were suppressed for political reasons. This is because policymakers were unduly influenced by what they understood to be a consensus in the scientific community, a false notion that resulted in draconian policies.”
In creating the Academy for Science and Freedom, Hillsdale desires to:
“provide a framework for study and discourse that will serve to educate and inform the citizens and leaders who will be faced with the inevitable public health crises to come.”
Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff were chosen as founding fellows of this program. These doctors are not only at the forefront of COVID-19 research, but they worked hard to disseminate facts and truth about COVID and the COVID vaccines when Big Tech, the scientific community, and governments were doing their utmost to censor information and push their agenda. The overreaching powers in governments and public health departments worldwide worked to control the public narrative and, in turn, control people’s behavior. These powers were determined to lie, gaslight, and push campaigns that waged war against people’s individual liberties, and stamp out their ability to thrive socially and economically.
Dr. Scott Atlas is the best known of the three founders, thanks to his bravery in stepping into the COVID Task Force team under President Donald J. Trump; he took a tremendous amount of slings and arrows for daring to actually “follow the science.”
My colleague streiff did an incredible breakdown of recent revelations by former COVID Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, about how she undermined and deceived the White House in order to serve her own COVID wet dreams. Dr. Birx revealed that she despised Dr. Atlas and considered him an enemy.
During his short White House stint, Dr. Scott Atlas called me every day to discuss new covid papers. Often, he'd complain about Birx and Fauci's incuriosity about collateral lockdown harms. Great review by @jeffreyatucker of Birx's self-incriminating book.https://t.co/nZYv25q64B
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) July 16, 2022
Dr. Atlas spoke about the damage caused by the pandemic in his opening remarks for the program.
“The scientific process has been damaged. The free exchange of ideas are under threat.”
Now that we are two years into the failures and abuses of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Birx, we can see why. Probably due to Birx’ duplicity, Dr. Atlas left the task force and was also banned from Twitter for his vocal opposition to lockdowns and school closures. Dr. Atlas is now being vindicated, but with the lives lost and destroyed, it’s a pyrrhic victory. His leadership as a founding fellow in this new school is to ensure that what happened during the pandemic never happens again.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff is a Biostatistician and epidemiologist, and was instrumental in the development of Sweden’s COVID response. We all know how Sweden maintained and thrived throughout 2020, while the United States, and the majority of other countries, did not. Dr. Kulldorff was also constantly under threat by Big Tech and Fauci himself, especially after authoring the crucial and world-changing Great Barrington Declaration.
Dr. Atlas said of Martin Kulldorff:
“Martin is really one of the most courageous people of all the colleagues I’ve come to know during this pandemic—I was going to say ‘this fiasco.’ Martin Kulldorf was the only scientists in the country to go public and write a letter to Stanford, not only in defense of what I said, but to challenge all the signatories to debate the issue.
“Needless to say, zero accepted that challenge to debate Martin Kulldorff.”
While Klaus Schwab’s WEF and the WHO would beg to differ, Sweden is nothing less than the success story of the pandemic. Healthy children were allowed to stay in school and interact in an organic fashion. After a brief set of directed closures, those closures were lifted, and the majority of Swedes were allowed to work, go out to eat, and live their normal lives. Most importantly, the elderly, which were the most at risk from COVID, were protected. Sweden can boast lower COVID infection rates, and even lower death counts than countries that locked down, stripped their economic engine by forcing people to stay at home, and destroyed their young through school closures and forced isolation.
This flew in the face of the “experts,” who deemed Sweden’s “light touch” approach a disaster, according to The Washington Monthly. Sweden is a sterling example and also a stark contrast between respecting freedom and doing actual scientific exploration, versus bureaucratic, top-down control.
The closing school disaster was expected by 900,000+ signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, which @TheEconomist called "risky" and "premature".@gbdeclaration https://t.co/cJr1vlAh8P
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) July 9, 2022
In his remarks, Dr. Kulldorff declared that science needed to be saved from itself.
“Science is broken, and we need to build new institutions that can help save science for the long term.”
The pandemic fiasco will be used to discredit science, but the problem was a lack of scientific thinking. True enlightened science with open minds and open discourse was replaced by dogmatic "follow the science" that is the very opposite of science.
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) July 18, 2022
Dr. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, and was intimately acquainted with not only Sweden’s COVID model, but the COVID responses of developing nations. The horrible outcomes that Dr. Bhattacharya saw with the lockdowns and economic takeovers prompted him to join Dr. Kulldorff in signing the Great Barrington Declaration, which expressed the grave concerns of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists about the damaging physical and mental health impacts caused by COVID policies worldwide. The letter also recommended a different approach to pandemic management called, “Focused Protection.”
All of the signatories were widely maligned and targeted as “anti-science.” The now-retired NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins labeled them “fringe epidemiologists,” and called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of the information. The signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration are more than 930,500 signatures, and counting.
At the end of the introductory remarks, the three founders did a roundtable discussion with the Hillsdale students and faculty present at the opening ceremonies. Dr. Atlas emphasized that imposing lockdowns was a
“complete change in the accepted management of a pandemic.”
“What I saw in the White House was a combination of gross incompetence, tremendous hubris, people with bureaucratic motivations, a complex web of funding science—this is one of the things we want to expose, and fix, if we can. People who have massive power over not just the funding of the research, but over people’s career.”
Dr. Bhattacharya emphasized,
“They wanted to create an illusion of consensus over the lockdowns.
“Early in the pandemic, actually even now, there was this idea that if you came out with results that underplayed the lethality of the virus, you were going to cause people to act irresponsibly.
“It’s a use of science to control people that has absolutely no basis in scientific discussion.”
Dr. Atlas decried the unprofessional behavior or Dr. Birx and others on the task force.
“That’s not the mark of a scientist. Science is the debate. Science is being able to know the material enough so you win on the basis of knowing more. And if you don’t know more, your opinion doesn’t carry the day.”
Dr. Kulldorff spoke about the lack of trust and partnership with the people affected that fueled much of the policy:
“Trust the public, if you want to be trusted. Be honest on what you know, be honest with what you don’t know.”
In discussing how the world can circumvent another public health failure, Dr. Atlas said,
“It requires courageous leaders.”
Dr. Atlas praised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his response and success in managing the COVID crisis in a manner that preserved lives and freedoms.
“You need people who are not afraid.”
With global powers seeking to destroy countries economically in the name of climate change, and more health threats being promoted as worldwide crises, the battle over public health, medical freedom, and how we preserve our economic solvency and autonomy continues to be waged.
It is forward thinking of Hillsdale College to tap these brave medical professionals to lead medicine and the medical personnel currently being trained with a fresh lens.
