2022
Essay Three: Politicized Science
John Tierney
COVID-19
Lessons We Should Have Learned
COLLECTED ESSAYS
Series editor: Donald J. Boudreaux
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
Copyright © 2022 by the Fraser Institute.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief passages quoted in critical articles and reviews.
Date of Issue
December 2022
Media
For media enquiries, please contact our Communications Department: 604.714.4582; e-mail: communications@fraserinstitute.
org.
About the Fraser Institute
Our mission is to improve the quality of life for Canadians, their families, and future generations by studying, measuring, and
broadly communicating the eects of government policies, entrepreneurship, and choice on their well-being.
1
Summary
T
here have been worse plagues than COVID, but none has ever done so much damage to the
world’s scientific institutions. In the pre-COVID era, the public health establishment had been
gradually falling under the sway of progressives pushing their agenda, but it retained enough integ-
rity to heed serious scientists—the ones who crunched data from past pandemics and randomized
clinical trials. Those epidemiologists concluded that lockdown measures would do little or no good
against a virus while inflicting enormous social harm.
But then, suddenly, all that peer-reviewed evidence
and advice was discarded. Public health leaders
adopted radical untested strategies without even
pretending to do a cost-benefit analysis or explain
why the pre-2020 plans were no longer valid.
Lockdowns and mask mandates became “the sci-
ence,” and those who questioned this “consensus”
were declared “outside the mainstream.”
Scientific journals became reluctant to publish con-
trary opinions and evidence even as COVID data confirmed the wisdom of the pre-2020 advice.
When three of the world’s leading experts—from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford—independently
published a critique of lockdowns called the Great Barrington Declaration, they were vilified by
activist scientists, denounced by ocials like Anthony Fauci, and censored on social-media platforms.
Why did the scientific and public health establishments forsake their principles? For more than a
century progressives have been using cherry-picked versions of “the science” to justify their plans for
Politicized Science
John Tierney
2 Politicized Science
redesigning society. As they’ve come to dominate universities, professional societies, journals, foun-
dations, and funding agencies, they’ve enforced progressive orthodoxy in one discipline after another.
When COVID struck, these progressives already had well-honed strat-
egies for suppressing scientific debate, and they eagerly seized the
opportunity to expand government control over people’s lives.
As usual, the best evidence was ignored, and those who cited
it were censored or attacked so viciously that most other
researchers were cowed into silence.
But this time the scale of the intervention was unprecedented,
and so was the needless suering inflicted on society. The
public’s trust in scientists rose at the start of the pandemic, but
it has since plummeted—and for good reason. Until scientists
and public health ocials acknowledge their errors and reform their
politicized institutions, there’s no reason to trust them anymore.
Introduction
There have been worse plagues than COVID, but none has ever done so much damage to the world’s
scientific institutions. Prior to the pandemic, those institutions had already been undermined by
decades of political activism, but they still enjoyed widespread public trust. No one expected them
to simply abandon the professional and ethical norms of scientific inquiry and public health. Their
collapse brought to mind the classic line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when a character is
asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Public health before COVID
In the pre-COVID era, the public health establishment had been gradually falling under the sway of
progressives pushing their agendas, but it retained enough integrity to heed serious scientists—the
ones who crunched data from past pandemics and analyzed studies of viral transmission and disease
mitigation. They debated the ecacy of prevention measures, weighing the benefits against the costs,
as the renowned epidemiologist Donald Henderson did in a landmark paper in 2006 contemplating
a pandemic as deadly as the 1918 Spanish Flu (Inglesby, Nuzzo, O’Toole, and Henderson, 2006).
Henderson, who had directed the successful international eort to eradicate smallpox, considered
measures like closing businesses and schools, prohibiting social gatherings, restricting travel, mandat-
ing social distancing, quarantining those exposed to infection, and encouraging the universal wearing
of surgical masks. His paper advised against all those measures, warning that they would do little to
stop the spread but could be “devastating socially and economically” (2006: 368).
“As usual, the best
evidence was ignored,
and those who cited it
were censored or attacked
so viciously that most other
researchers were cowed
into silence.”
Politicized Science 3
“Experience has shown,” Henderson
and his colleagues at the University of
Pittsburgh wrote, “that communities
faced with epidemics or other adverse
events respond best and with the least
anxiety when the normal social func-
tioning of the community is least dis-
rupted” (2006: 373). The researchers
stressed the need for leaders to “pro-
vide reassurance” to the public, and
specifically cautioned them not to be
guided by mathematical models of the
pandemic, warning that such models could not reliably predict either the spread of the disease or
the consequences of measures like closing businesses and schools.
This sensible advice was incorporated into pre-2020 pandemic plans developed by the Public Health
Agency of Canada, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the United Kingdom’s Department
of Health. The UK plan flatly declared, “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pan-
demic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt
to do so” (UK Department of Health, 2011: 28.) The CDC’s planning scenarios didn’t recommend
extended school or business closures even if the fatality rate were as high as during the Spanish Flu
(Qualls, Levitt, Kanade, et al., 2017: table 8), and the other agencies reached similar conclusions.
None of them urged universal masking, either, because randomized clinical trials had shown that,
contrary to popular wisdom in some Asian countries, there was “no evidence
that face masks are eective in reducing transmission,” as the World
Health Organization (WHO) summarized the scientific literature
(WHO, Global Influenza Programme, 2019: 14). Canada’s plan
for a pandemic specifically rejected masks as well as eorts
to disinfect surfaces in public areas (Public Health Agency of
Canada, 2006).
Public health after COVID
But then, suddenly, all that peer-reviewed evidence and sensible
advice was discarded. Instead of reassuring the public, public
health ocials went into full panic mode when a team of research-
ers at Imperial College in London released a computer model in March
“Canada’s plan for a
pandemic specifically
rejected masks as well as
eorts to disinfect surfaces
in public areas.”
4 Politicized Science
of 2020 projecting that within three months there would be 30 COVID patients for every one bed
in the intensive-care units of hospitals in Great Britain (Ferguson, Laydon, Nedjati-Gilani, et al.,
2020). This, of course, was precisely the sort of mathematical model that Henderson had warned
against—and this model was based on obviously unrealistic assumptions. Yet public health leaders
in Europe and North America immediately embraced not only the doomsday numbers but also the
modelers’ conclusion that the “only viable strategy” was to impose drastic restrictions on businesses,
schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine became available.
Silencing critical scientists
The Imperial College team gave no reason to reject the conclusions of scientists with far more
expertise who had spent years devising plans for a pandemic. The modelers didn’t even pretend to
weigh the costs and benefits of a lockdown, and neither did the public health ocials who adopted
the policy. Their sole justification was the Chinese government’s claim that its lockdown had halted
COVID. Given the communist government’s history of skewing and suppressing public health data,
there was every reason to doubt this claim—and no reason to look to China’s authoritarian decrees
as a model for policy in a free society.
Yet lockdowns immediately became “the science,” and those who
questioned this “consensus” were denounced despite their ster-
ling credentials. One of the first victims was John Ioannidis of
Stanford University, whose studies of the reliability of medical
research had made him one of the world’s most frequently
cited authors in the scientific literature. Early in the pandemic
he published an essay presciently titled, “A Fiasco in the
Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are
Making Decisions Without Reliable Data” (Ioannidis, 2020,
March 17). He echoed the longstanding concerns of Henderson
and other experts, but was immediately savaged on Twitter and in
the media by scientists and journalists accusing him of endangering lives.
“I was very disappointed to see these attacks coming from knowledgeable people,” he said. “Scientists
whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy” (Tierney, 2021).
Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has published more than 350
papers, submitted a critique of lockdowns early in the pandemic to over 10 journals and finally
gave up: it was the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said
(Tierney, 2021). Another early lockdown critique by Harvard’s Martin Kulldor, one of the fore-
most authorities on tracking infectious diseases, was rejected by so many journals and media outlets
“Lockdowns
immediately became ‘the
science.’ and those who
questioned this ‘consensus’
were denounced
despite their sterling
credentials.”
Politicized Science 5
that he ended up posting it on his own
LinkedIn page—and heard privately
from many epidemiologists who said
they also opposed lockdowns but were
afraid to say so publicly.
Two of his more courageous colleagues,
Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, joined
Kulldor in the fall of 2020 to issue the
Great Barrington Declaration, which
rejected general lockdowns in favour of “focused protection” (Kulldor, Gupta, and Bhattacharya,
2020, October 4). It was clear that the doomsday projections—30 patients for every hospital bed—
were wildly wrong and that COVID posed a risk mainly to the elderly. For everyone under 70, the
odds of surviving a COVID infection were 99.9 percent. Why not concentrate resources on pro-
tecting those at risk while allowing “the normal functioning of the community,” as Henderson had
recommended? Why not go back to the ocial plans that had been calmly prepared before COVID
hysteria set in?
The Great Barrington Declaration
Thousands of scientists and doctors went on to sign the Great Barrington Declaration, and they
were vindicated as the pandemic wore on. The lockdown strategy failed, both in China—its “Zero
COVID” strategy was a social and economic disaster—and in the rest of the world. Except in a few
isolated spots, the lockdowns didn’t halt the spread, as demonstrated by dozens of studies and by the
relative success of places that ignored the “consensus.” Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the state of
Florida kept schools and businesses open, without mask mandates, while doing as well as or better
than average in measures of age-adjusted COVID mortality and overall “excess mortality.”
But “the science” continued to trump actual science in most other places. The Great Barrington sci-
entists were espousing longstanding principles of public health and had plenty of new data on their
side, but the lockdown advocates had powerful allies in the media as well as in the public agencies
and private foundations funding much of the infectious-disease research around the world. Early
in the pandemic prominent virologists privately expressed concern that the coronavirus had been
created in a laboratory in Wuhan, but then they publicly dismissed that possibility after a telecon-
ference with the chief scientific advisers to the UK and the US governments—governments that also
just happened to be funding some of the virologists’ research.
6 Politicized Science
The teleconference included the ocials in charge of the two chief funding agencies in the US:
Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins of
the National Institutes of Health. Their private emails showed their determination to silence dis-
cussion of the theory that the coronavirus had escaped from a Chinese lab while it was conducting
research funded by the US (Wade, 2022, January 23). They succeeded for nearly a year, aided by the
mainstream media and censors on social-media platforms, until the possibility of a lab leak finally
became too obvious to dismiss.
Fauci and Collins were also determined to prevent a debate over lockdowns. Shortly after the Great
Barrington scientists issued their declaration, Collins emailed Fauci urging “a quick and devastating
published takedown” of the “three fringe epidemiologists” (Carlson and Mahncke, 2021, December
28). Both ocials went on a media oensive, dismissing the Great Barrington strategy as “very dan-
gerous” (Yahoo News, 2020, October 15), “not mainstream science” (Achenbach, 2020, October 14)
and “total nonsense… to anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases”
(Hellmann, 2020, October 15). Public health ocials in the UK launched similar attacks, going on
television to describe the Great Barrington Declaration as not “scientific”—never mind that one of
its authors was an Oxford expert in infectious diseases.
The international media went along with that narrative, either ignoring
the Great Barrington Declaration or denigrating its authors. Their
strategy was routinely described as “dangerous” and “reckless”—
as if shutting down schools and the rest of the society were not
the most radical and risky experiment ever performed. The
declaration was shadow-banned initially at Google, so that
a search for “Great Barrington Declaration” yielded a page
of links criticizing it but not the declaration itself. For a time,
Twitter suspended Kulldor’s account, Facebook shut down the
Great Barrington page, and moderators at Reddit banned men-
tions of the declaration in COVID discussion groups. When the
Great Barrington scientists discussed their ideas in a panel discussion,
YouTube took down the video on the grounds that it “contradicts the consen-
sus” (Kornfield, 2021, April 9).
The British Medical Journal (BMJ), published a scurrilous ad hominem attack on the Great Barrington
scientists, absurdly accusing them of being somehow linked to “climate denialists,” the libertarian
billionaire Charles Koch, and the fossil fuel industry (Yamey and Gorski, 2021, September 13). Bill
Gates, whose foundation was a major source of research funding, dismissed the “crackpot theories”
of another prominent lockdown opponent, Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and
“The international media
went along with that
narrative, either ignoring
the Great Barrington
Declaration or denigrating
its authors.”
Politicized Science 7
the Stanford faculty senate passed a resolution declaring Atlas’ actions to be “anathema to our com-
munity” (Chesley, 2020, November 20). The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA),
published an article recommending that Atlas and other doctors who publicly criticized COVID
orthodoxy should lose their medical licenses, and the General Medical Council of Britain actually
restricted the privileges of one doctor who did so (Pizzo,Spiegel,andMello, 2021, February 4).
Questioning mask mandates
It became taboo to question the ecacy of masks, as a team of researchers in Denmark discovered
early in the pandemic. They recruited more than 6,000 adults and randomly assigned some to wear
surgical masks all day long. As the world’s first large randomized controlled trial of mask ecacy
against COVID, it was obviously a study of major importance, but its publication was delayed until,
as one of the researchers put it, they were able to find a “journal brave enough to accept the paper.”
After it was rejected by The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the research-
ers finally found one journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to publish their heretical conclusion:
A mask oered no significant protection to the wearer against a COVID infection (Bundgaard,
Bundgaard, Raaschou-Pedersen, et al. 2021).
It was also taboo to suggest that
masks could be harmful. A peer-re-
viewed German study reporting
harms to children from mask-wear-
ing was suppressed on Facebook
(which labeled my City Journal
article “partly false” because I cited
that study (Tierney, 2021, May
17) and also at ResearchGate, one
of the most widely used websites
for scientists to post their papers.
ResearchGate refused to explain its
actions to the German researchers, telling them merely that the paper was removed in response to
“reports from the community about the subject-matter” (Tierney, 2021).
What did scientists succumb?
Why did so many scientists, scientific journals, and journal editors succumb to panic? Why did they
needlessly terrify people at minimal risk, promote catastrophically harmful policies, and silence dis-
sent? It’s easy enough to explain why journalists and politicians were so eager to distort and exploit
8 Politicized Science
COVID. They’ve long been the main drivers of what I call the Crisis Crisis—the endless series of
crises, real or imagined, fomented by opportunists looking to profit from public hysteria (Tierney
and Baumeister, 2019). Journalists can’t resist fearmongering because it generates ratings and clicks,
and politicians can’t resist an excuse to gain publicity and power. It’s not surprising that the media
and political classes seized so enthusiastically on the doomsday computer projections from Imperial
College, and then kept up the crisismongering for two years. But why did so many scientists go along,
ignoring the previous warnings of experts like Henderson and betraying their professional standard
of evidence and conduct?
The scientists gave in to the fearmongers because the scientific and
public health establishments had been gradually weakened by
a preexisting pathology. Their collapse during the pandemic
came suddenly, but it was the culmination of what Marxists
call the long march through institutions—more specifically,
what I call the Left’s war on science (Tierney, 2016). For
more than a century, from the eugenics movement of the
1920s through today’s “climate emergency,” progressives
have been using their cherry-picked versions of “the science”
to justify their plans for redesigning society. As they’ve come to
dominate universities, professional societies, scientific journals, and
the mainstream media, they’ve enforced progressive orthodoxy in one
discipline after another, squelching debate by demonizing dissenters on topics like IQ, sex dierences,
race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.
Public health institutions have been especially corrupted, as James T. Bennett and Thomas J.
DiLorenzo chronicled two decades ago in their history of the profession, From Pathology to Politics.
“Since 1968,” they write, “a top priority—if notthetop priority—of the public health establishment
has been to promote the idea that more government control and intervention is the surest route to
sounder health” (2008: 25). These interventions have often been disastrous, like the past campaigns
to restrict fat in the diet, which led to more obesity and diabetes as people substituted carbohydrates.
Leading nutrition researchers criticized this intervention as unsupported by evidence, but public
health activists prevailed in the public debate by falsely portraying the critics as tools of the food
industry.
The profession’s activists went on to justify more harmful interventions by misrepresenting the
scientific evidence on dietary salt, trans fats, carcinogenic chemicals, the spread of AIDS among het-
erosexuals, smokeless tobacco, and vaping. Public health professional societies expanded their goals
beyond mere health, openly lobbying for minimum wage laws, gun control, income redistribution,
“The scientists
gave in to the fear-
mongers because the
scientific and public health
establishments had been
gradually weakened
by a preexisting
pathology.”
Politicized Science 9
and other left-wing causes. The progressive domination became so complete that public health schools
began requiring students to take courses in “health equity” and “social justice” preparing them to
promote the progressive agenda wherever they worked.
So when COVID struck, the public health establishment was
already eager for new opportunities to expand government
control over people’s lives—and, not incidentally, expand
funding for public health budgets. As usual, the best
scientific evidence was ignored, and those who cited it
were smeared in the media and vilified by their activist
colleagues. But this time the scale of the intervention was
unprecedented, and so was the needless suering inflicted on
society.
Conclusion
The public’s trust in scientists rose at the start of the pandemic, but it has since plummeted—and
for good reason. The lockdowns were the worst public policy mistake ever made during peacetime.
Until scientists and public health ocials acknowledge their catastrophic errors and reform their
politicized institutions, there’s no reason to trust them anymore.
References
Achenbach, Joel (2020, October 14). Proposal to Hasten Herd Immunity to the Coronavirus Grabs White
House Attention but Appalls Top Scientists. Washington Post. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/
covid-herd-immunity/2020/10/10/3910251c-0a60-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html>, as of November
30, 2022.
Bennett, James T., and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (2008). From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America.
Routledge.
Bundgaard, Henning, Johan Skov Bundgaard, Daniel Emil Tadeusz Raaschou-Pedersen, et al. (2021). Ef-
fectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2
Infection in Danish Mask Wearers: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Annals of Internal Medicine (March).
<https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817>, as of November 22, 2022.
Carlson, Je, and Hans Mahncke (2021, December 28). New Emails Reveal Evidence of Government
Eorts to Suppress Free Speech. The Epoch Times. <https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_eet/new-emails-
reveal-evidence-of-government-eorts-to-suppress-free-speech_4171310.html>, as of November 22, 2022.
Chesley, Kate (2020, November 20). Faculty Senate condemns COVID-19 actions of Hoover’s Scott
Atlas. News. Stanford University. <https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/20/faculty-senate-condemns-ac-
tions-hoover-fellow-scott-atlas/>, as of November 30, 2022.
Ferguson, Neil M., Daniel Laydon, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, et al. (2020). Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical In-
terventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand (March 16). Imperial College
London, COVID-19 Response Team. <https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/
gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf>, as of November 22, 2022.
“When COVID
struck, the public health
establishment was already
eager for new opportunities
to expand government control
over people’s lives—and, not
incidentally, expand funding
for public health
budgets.”
10 Politicized Science
Hellmann, Jessie (2020, October 15). Fauci Blasts Herd Immunity Proposal Embraced by White House as
“Total Nonsense.” The Hill. <https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521220-fauci-blasts-herd-immunity-pro-
posal-embraced-by-white-house-as-total/>, as of November 30, 2022.
Inglesby, Thomas V., Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Tara O’Toole, and Donald A. Henderson (2006). Disease Miti-
gation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy,
Practice, and Science 4, 4: 366-75. <https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/10.1.1.552.1109.
pdf>, as of November 22, 2022.
Ioannidis, John P.A. (2020, March 17). A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold,
We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data. STAT. <https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-
in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/>, as
of November 22, 2022.
Kornfield, Meryl (2021, April 9). YouTube Pulls Video of Desantis Panel Discussion Urging No Masks
for Children. Washington Post. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/09/desantis-you-
tube-coronavirus/>, as of November 30, 2022.
Kulldor, Martin, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya (2020, October 4). The Great Barrington Declara-
tion. <https://gbdeclaration.org/>, as of November 22, 2022.
Pizzo,Philip A.,DavidSpiegel,and Michelle M.Mello (2021, February 4). When Physicians Engage in
Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health. JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] 325, 8:
723–724. <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2776293>, as of November 22, 2022.
Public Health Agency of Canada (2006). The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan for the Health Sector.
Public Health Agency of Canada. <https://www.longwoods.com/articles/images/Canada_Pandemic_Influen-
za.pdf>, as of November 22, 2022.
Qualls, Noreen, Alexandra Levitt, and Neha Kanade, et al. (2017). Community Mitigation Guidelines to
Prevent Pandemic Influenza — United States, 2017. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 66, 1 (April
21). US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. <https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.
htm>, as of November 22, 2022.
Tierney, John (2016). The Real War on Science. City Journal (Autumn). <https://www.city-journal.org/html/
real-war-science-14782.html>, as of November 22, 2022.
Tierney, John (2021, May 17). This Article Is “Partly False.” City Journal. <https://www.city-journal.org/
facebook-and-its-fact-checkers-spread-misinformation>, as of November 28, 2022.
Tierney, John (2021). The Panic Pandemic. City Journal (Summer). <https://www.city-journal.org/pan-
ic-pandemic>, as of November 28, 2022.
Tierney, John, and Roy Baumeister (2019). The Crisis Crisis: Bad Ascending. The Power of Bad: How the
Negativity Eect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. (Penguin Press): 207-238.
United Kingdom, Department of Health (2011). UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011.
Government of the United Kingdom. <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/
uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf>, as of November 22, 2022.
Wade, Nicholas (2022, January 23). A Covid Origin Conspiracy? City Journal. <https://www.city-journal.
org/covid-origin-conspiracy>, as of November 22, 2022.
World Health Organization, Global Influenza Programme (2019). Non-Pharmaceutical Public Health Mea-
sures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza. World Health Organization.
<https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf>, as of November 22,
2022.
Politicized Science 11
Yahoo News (2020, October 15). Fauci on Herd Immunity: “Quite Frankly, that Is Nonsense.” Yahoo
News. <https://www.yahoo.com/now/fauci-herd-immunity-quite-frankly-131828997.html>, as of November
30, 2022.
Yamey, Gavin, and David H. Gorski. (2021, September 13). Covid-19 and the New Merchants of Doubt.
The BMJ Opinion [British Medical Journal]. <https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-
merchants-of-doubt/>, as of November 22, 2022.
About the Author
John Tierney is a journalist and bestselling author whose
books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He
is a contributing editor toCity Journal,a former columnist at
theNew York Times,and has written for dozens of magazines
and newspapers.During more than two decades at theNew
York Times, he was a science columnist, an Op-Ed colum-
nist and a sta writer for theTimes Magazine.Together with
the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, he wrote aNew York
Timesbest-seller titled,Willpower: Rediscovering theGreatest
HumanStrength.His latest book, also co-authored with Roy
Baumeister, isThe Power of Bad: How the Negativity Eect
Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.
