Back on May 6, 2020 at the Gem State Patriot News Dr. John Livingston had blogged about What IS Real? Media Madness. On July 23, 2021 he recycled that title with another post on What is Real? John says you should begin to assess data by considering the messenger, and then assess the message. Based on that criterion he flunks miserably. The worst part of a paragraph is his current post says:
“…. I supported and still support Dr. Hahn’s role in advising our Governor, but people like Dr. Ryan Cole who had impeccable academic credentials should have received wider coverage. Nationally people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Marty Makaray, Dr. Scott Atlas, and the signers of The Greater Barrington Project should have been front and center in the media coverage precisely because they were offering non-conventual contra opinions.”
First, let’s look at Dr. Ryan Cole’s lack of credibility. At KTVB7 on April 2, 2021 there is an article by Brian Holmes titled St. Luke’s chief medical officer fact checks a doctor’s anti-vax claims. Another article by Saranac Hale Spencer at FactCheck dot org on April 19, 2021 is titled Idaho doctor makes baseless claims about safety of Covid-19 vaccines.
Second, let’s look at Dr. Marty Makaray. Oops – Dr. John Livingston instead meant to refer to surgeon Marty Makary.
Third, let’s look at the Greater Barrington Project. Oops again! When you Google it nothing comes up since it really is the Great Barrington Declaration. That document is discussed by David Gorski in a long article at Science-Based Medicine on December 28, 2020 titled 2020 and the pandemic: A year of (some) physicians behaving badly:
“Perhaps the most despicable propaganda being promoted by some physicians is that, because COVID-19 is known to be much more lethal in older people and people with comorbidities such as type 2 diabetes, we should simply, in essence, let the virus rip through the ‘young, healthy population’ and used ‘focused protection’ to keep it from killing the elderly in nursing homes. Yes, I’m referring to the Great Barrington Declaration, a document produced by an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a Stanford physician basically advocates doing just that, never mind that it’s impossible to achieve herd immunity without a vaccine, unless you are willing to accept millions of deaths, and then it’s debatable whether it’s possible at all. Basically, the Great Barrington Declaration is a eugenics declaration, the denials of its authors notwithstanding, and a physician was one of the three authors who collaborated with the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a right wing think tank advocating ‘opening up’ the economy. Even more sadly, although it is true that there were a lot of fake signatories to the declaration, spoofs done to demonstrate how lax the website’s procedure for signature verification was, it is also true that a lot of apparently real physicians did sign it.”
An article by Kate Ng at the Independent on October 9, 2020 is titled Coronavirus: ‘Dr Person Fakename’ and ‘Harold Shipman’ signatures on scientists’ letter calling on government to embrace herd immunity and also subtitled Other names in list of Great Barrington Declaration include ‘Dr Johnny Fartpants’ and ‘Professor Notaf Uckingclue’
Fourth, let’s look at Dr. Scott Atlas. He also is discussed by David Gorski in that long article at Science-Based Medicine:
“Arguably the absolute worst example of a physician behaving badly during a pandemic is Dr. Scott Atlas, who rose to prominence advising President Trump on his coronavirus response during the summer. Atlas is a neuroradiologist and, so it seems, a formerly well-respected one, having served as the chief of the neuroradiology section at Stanford University. Unfortunately, later he became a political hack working for the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a conservative think tank that’s been a font of bad takes on COVID-19. The reason Dr. Atlas so quickly gained Trump’s ear even though he had no relevant expertise in infectious disease, epidemiology, or public health, of course, is because told Trump what he wanted to hear, that COVID-19 was not deadly, that we could achieve herd immunity, and that the cost of the ‘lockdowns’ was far worse than the ‘disease’ of COVID-19 being addressed.
…. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Atlas was entirely on board with the Great Barrington Declaration, and, as a result, in October the Trump administration was seriously considering a herd immunity-based strategy before there was a vaccine. Truly, when the history of the pandemic is finally written with the perspective of a decade or two from now, Dr. Atlas will likely end up being one of the worst of the worst in terms of physicians promoting misinformation, largely because of his outsized influence in the Trump administration before he finally - and mercifully - resigned a few weeks ago, when it finally became absolutely clear that Trump’s legal challenges of the election results would fail and that there would be no second Trump administration, at least not in 2021.”
And fifth, Dr. Livingston meant to write nonconventional but instead wrote non-conventual. The definition for conventual in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is:
“of, relating to, or befitting a convent or monastic life.”
Back on September 11, 2020 I blogged about Editing tips for speechwriters and other writers. In that post I mentioned Dr. Livingston misspelling flu as flue, which he again did in his current article.
The image was photoshopped from a 1922 book cover for Elizabeth Rhodes Jackson at Wikimedia Commons.
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