Outrage Overload

A Connors Institute podcast

Outrage BONUS – Could we have done better to avoid the politicization of COVID? – Kevin Bass

Kevin Bass, an M.D./Ph.D. student, recently wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek titled It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives.

He says:

the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young.

In the name of transparency, this article has been widely criticized, including these comments:

Newsweek must retract this Opinion piece and issue a formal apology for platforming a fascist. …

Anyone who platforms, or shares his work, damns themselves with this action, and betrays their fellow American in doing so.

Note, Bass disputes the above in his own post. Bass has been accused of being a grifter and worse. He’s been heralded as a hero on the right, even appearing on the popular Fox News Tucker Carlson program.

Despite this, I invited Kevin Bass on the show. Not to debate his arguments point by point, but to focus on the following, also from his Newsweek piece:

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

It’s a fair question. We discuss the issue of trust between the scientific community and the public, that the temperature needs to be lowered, and that perhaps the scientific community should be more open to criticism in order to rebuild trust. Listen and you decide.