Those anti-science guys

I have some family and friends who assert that anybody who questions the Biden administration's policies on COVID is an anti-science Trump-worshiping conspiracy nut who get all their information from the Internet. How's that for some labeling and name-calling?

Let's meet some of those "anti-science" people.

Dr. Harvey Risch, MD, PhD 

Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD from the University of Chicago. Dr. Risch is Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Editor of the International Journal of Cancer, and was for six years a Member of the Board of Editors, the American Journal of epidemiology. Dr. Risch is an author of more than 350 original peer-reviewed research publications in the medical literature and those research papers have been cited by other scientific publications more than 44,000 times. Dr. Risch has an h-index of 94.

What's the h-index you ask?  It is a metric that measures the productivity and citation impact of a science scholars publications. Its developer Professor Jorge Hirsch, "suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a "successful scientist" would have an h-index of 20, an "outstanding scientist" would have an h-index of 40, and a "truly unique" individual would have an h-index of 60." (Wikipedia) Once again, Dr. Risch has an h-index of 94. In other words, he is a world-class scientist specializing in Epidemiology. For those who don't know, "Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined populations."

Here's some of what Dr. Risch has to say about COVID:

Natural immunity is needed "to combat other viruses, other strains [of coronavirus] that may be coming as well. And for longer-lasting protection, natural immunity is much longer lasting that vaxxed immunity”

"The vaccine immunity has a finite lifespan of somewhere between three and six months and it’s losing that over time, and more people are getting infected again." (Laura Ingraham Show)

“Some months ago, the CDC stopped counting breakthrough cases … the large numbers of cases in people who had been vaccinated. So, of course, those cases don’t register for the CDC’s counts....”

“What the doctors are telling me is that more than half of the new COVID cases they are treating are people who have already been vaccinated. They have estimated that 60% of the new patients they have treated are people who have been vaccinated."

MARTIN KULLDORFF, PhD

Professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Professor, Medicine, Brigham And Women's Hospital

Kulldorff is a member of the scientific council for drug safety and risk management at the Food and Drug Administration, and a member of the Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is author or co-author of 201 Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles.

“I don’t think children should be vaccinated for COVID. I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children.” 

“They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they’re not a big threat. They don’t die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk.

“And there are other things that we should make sure [of] to keep children safe. But COVID is not a big risk factor for children.”

“Hospitals should hire nurses & other staff with natural immunity…They are the ones who are least likely to infect the residents. [Yet] we’re doing the opposite. They’re being fired.”

“One example is from Sweden, during the first wave in the spring of 2020, which affected Sweden quite strongly,” Kulldorff said. “But Sweden decided to keep daycare and schools open for all children ages 1 to 15. And there are 1.8 million such children who got through the first wave without vaccines, of course, without masks, without any sort of distancing in schools.

“If a child was sick, they were told to stay home. But that was basically it. And you know how many of those 1.8 million children died from COVID? Zero. Only a few hospitalizations. So this is not a risky disease for children.” (EpochTV)

Kulldorff is one of the three authors, along with Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting COVID-19 spread in lower-risk groups to promote herd immunity while advocating "focused protection" of older, high-risk groups.[7][8] The World Health Organization (WHO) and many other academic and public-health bodies said the declaration's strategy lacked a sound scientific basis,[9][10] and warned that it could cause many unnecessary deaths and could result in recurrent epidemics.[11][12] (Wikipedia)

Kulldorff has opposed lockdowns, contact tracing and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has appeared at media events to support the Great Barrington Declaration.[13][14][15][16][17][18] He has spoken out against COVID-19 vaccine passports,[19] but supports COVID-19 vaccinations.[20] In 2021, Kulldorff questioned the strategy of vaccinating younger people, citing scarcity of vaccines to more vunerable older people in developing countries.[20]" (Wikipedia)

Dr. Scott W. Atlas, MD. 

Senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. MD from University of Chicago. From 1998 to 2012 he was a professor and chief of neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Atlas is also the editor of the leading textbook in the field, the best‐selling Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine, now in its 5th edition and officially translated from English into Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese.