Well, here’s a surprise: NPR’s “On Point” podcast, hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti and transmitting out of NPR member station WBUR in Boston, featured, on its May 5 show, an interview with author David Zweig highly critical of the hysterical and harmful reaction by the liberal “public health” establishment to the COVID pandemic.
What's more, around the 26-minute mark, Chakrabarti herself revealed that an NPR higher-up cut off her pitch to do a story on 2020’s Great Barrington Declaration. That brief manifesto became a target of anti-science liberal hysterics for arguing against lockdown and social distancing as “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” An unidentified colleague told Chakrabarti, “We cannot talk about it” for fear of spreading misinformation.
The Great Barrington Declaration was coauthored by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University (now head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump, replacing Dr. Francis Collins, who sought to undermine Bhattacharya as “fringe”). Bhattacharya was notoriously targeted for censorship by Collins and the Biden Administration for his efforts to tamp down COVID fear and hysteria -- a crusade that, according to Chakrabarti, NPR joined as well:
CHAKRABARTI: David, I just want to add a little transparency-based anecdote here from our own experience about like this feeling that you just can't have certain conversations right, in 2020 because there was a point in time where I wanted to actually do a show on the Great Barrington Declaration.
ZWEIG: I was there.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I wanted to do a very like sort of just a rigorous analysis of what the basis of the recommendations from the Great Barrington Declaration, what the basis was and you know do what you said, try to bring some evidence to scrutinize it positively or negatively. And for folks who don't remember, I guess David, you could actually explain even better, but the Great Barrington Declaration was this, was a group of professionals who met and said there's a different way to approach pandemic control. But the key thing is, Francis Collins very quickly, it was discovered later, wanted to squash the Declaration, saying it was like a bad idea. The reason why I bring it up is these political pressures. There was one person in particular that was a colleague of mine, who just said, “We cannot talk about it.” That even talking about it in a rigorous objective manner is spreading misinformation. I'll never forget that!
ZWEIG: Hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.
CHAKRABARTI: But this person is someone I deeply respect and admire, and their decisions are top notch, highly, highly intelligent. I wanna bring up this story. I mean, feel free to answer anything you want, but I wanna bring up this story specifically because, fear. Not just political fear, but fear of the virus and being part of any decision that would potentially increase its lethality was very, very real in people, not just in policy circles, but in the media as well.
Zweig explained the roots of that fear: The Democrats that run the media and public health are quick to clamp down on dissent:
ZWEIG: When you think about who are members of the legacy media generally, who are members of the public health establishment, generally? They tend to lean in one direction politically, and it made this sort of groupthink and tribalism incredibly hard for people to break out of. But because of that dynamic, tremendous harm was done to our children….
Not the kind of censorious impulse that tax-funded NPR wants to parade before the public just now, with its federal funding in jeopardy by President Trump’s executive order.
Chakrabarti is no conservative outlier; she was on board for Biden’s Orwellian, thankfully aborted online media censor, the "Disinformation Governance Board" which would have been run by cringeworthy songbird crusader Nina Jankowicz.
