As the pandemic recedes, and leaves U.S. media pundits to survey the wreckage, we are already seeing a myopic, revisionist tendency to circumvent the details. Bob Woodward, appearing recently on Ari Melber’s show, “The Beat” on MSNBC, focused almost exclusively on Donald Trump’s infamous role in the passive U.S. response to urgent public health challenges. This inaction, according to The Lancet Commission on Public Health and Policy in the Trump Era, caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.

Woodward, who had the tapes from his hours of interviews with then-president Trump, hammered upon the contradictory character of Trump’s public depiction of COVID as an illness “no worse than the flu,” and his private acknowledgment (to Woodward) that he had been briefed about the serious threat that COVID posed to the country.

The Woodward segment, unfortunately, left viewers with no context, and no reason to suspect that the COVID apocalypse involved anything more than the incompetence and self-serving motives of Trump alone. Trump, however, was pnly the most visible part of a much larger structure designed to sabotage public health.

The American Institute of Economic Research, a libertarian think tank located in Great Barrington sponsored The Great Barrington Declaration. The GBD notoriously made no recommendations to wear masks or social distance, but instead argued that older people (and the ill-defined infirm) were the only populations at risk from COVID. All others ought to live normal lives until the numbers of infectees reached the pandemic ending threshold of “herd immunity.”

One of the three authors, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University, opined that such herd immunity would be reached in mere months. She stated in April 2020 that herd immunity had already been achieved throughout Europe. Subsequent immediate global spikes, leaving millions dead, should have disabused Dr. Gupta of her fantasies about the ease of achieving herd immunity, but they did not. She co-authored the GBD a half-year after absurdly declaring that the pandemic had ended.

The recruitment of prostitutes with academic credentials has a long and murderous history in American corporate schemes —  toxicologist, Robert Kehoe, invented the narrative design for all future pseudo scientific denial a century ago, arguing, on behalf of GM, that leaded gasoline posed no harm to the public. Physicist, S Fred Singer (the godfather of climate change denial) used his credentials on behalf of both the tobacco and oil industries. The GBD is nothing more than another notch in the libertarian aspiration to sacrifice lives in the interest of corporate greed.

Many scientists have observed that the GBD is pseudo-scientific gibberish — 50% of Americans have pre-existing conditions making them vulnerable to deadly COVID consequences. It is critical to understand that the GBD is not a spontaneous product of a few like-minded scholars, but an inevitable product of an enormous propaganda empire with access to unlimited corporate funding.

Koch Industries, which funneled cash to the Institute of Economic Research through The Koch Foundation, has holdings of $110 billion. Many of the vast number of right-wing think tanks that pushed laissez-faire COVID policy, have tens of millions each in revenues. 

Legal scholar Patricia Williams noted that the GBD, via the influence of Trump advisers Scott Atlas and Alex Azar, became the de facto template for Trump administration public health policy. In libertarian rhetoric, the mandate for government, whether the issue is lead, climate change, smoking, gun violence or illness, is always the same — do nothing. If libertarian tropes appear to cede authority to Mother Nature, the absence of governmental action defers to corporate plunderers. 

It is a mistake to simplistically blame Trump for the miserable state of the country, a noxious habit that liberal media has taken on as a default reaction. Capitalism, over the past century, has evolved an impossibly well-funded, multi-pronged system to unleash industrial levels of pro-corporate propaganda. The GBD is the smoking gun linking Trump to his accomplices.

The transaction of trading human life for corporate profit is never punished in America. The authors of the GBD were lambasted by student editorialists, but were not even censured by the universities that employ them. Trump may eventually be convicted for his legal indiscretions, but his role in the pandemic will never bring charges.

Patricia Williams commented on Trump’s adherence to the principles of the GBD as follows: “As intentional policy, this ends up not looking like “survival,” even of the fittest, but instead like an intentionally induced avalanche of slaughter. For the Trump administration to have pursued such a path as a ‘goal’ constitutes, in my opinion, a crime against humanity.”

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker from Northampton. He has written for Current Affairs and Common Dreams.

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