Emory Welcomes Contrarian Doctor Who Questions COVID Vaccines and Praises RFK Jr.
“How ‘ethical’ is inviting someone like that?”
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
On Monday, Emory University will host a panel discussion about the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic with a contrarian doctor who has expressed questionable views about the COVID vaccines and praised anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr.
Hematologist oncologist Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, who made a name for himself opposing government efforts to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is slated to speak on October 7 panel called “Masking Mistakes: Lessons from the Science, Policy, and Coverage of COVID-19.” Hosted and organized by the Emory Center for Ethics, the event promises “to analyze the ethics, science, policies, coverage, and communication about COVID-19 in order to provide lessons for ongoing policy (e.g. annual vaccine boosters and seasonal mask mandates in healthcare facilities) and future pandemic preparedness.”
Prasad will be speaking with Dr. Carlos del Rio, chair of the university’s department of medicine, and the moderator will be Gerard Vong, an associate professor and director of the Master of Arts in Bioethics program at the school.
Emory is the latest prestigious university to host a pandemic-related public health discussion featuring prominent medical contrarians. On Friday, Stanford University’s department of health policy held a health policy symposium with panel discussions stacked with fringe medical voices and right-wing political operatives. Prasad participated on a panel. Weeks earlier, Johns Hopkins held a similar conference hosted by its Carey Business School. Some of the same voices participated.
Both the Stanford and Hopkins events featured right-wing political operatives affiliated with well-funded, business-aligned dark money groups that opposed COVID mitigation measures. They coincide with a larger effort by those groups, and the broader American political right, to rewrite the history of the pandemic and validate a contrarian, minimizing narrative that the U.S. overreacted to a virus that has killed 1.2 million Americans to date, according to official numbers.
Prasad was one of the louder voices evangelizing about the harms of government efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic and downplaying the threat posed by the virus. He has even gone so far as to invoke Nazi Germany in his arguments against mitigation measures, suggesting that a strong government response to the worst public health crisis in a century was the road to totalitarianism.
While his rhetoric might suggest he holds conservative beliefs, Prasad has insisted that he is a liberal who just happens to agree with the pandemic policy prescriptions of the political right—and shares their enemies like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who Prasad has accused of spreading “the worst misinformation” and lying to cover up an “accidental lab leak” as the origin of COVID. In fact, available evidence points to natural spillover, which remains the virologist-favored explanation of how the pandemic began.
Much of Prasad’s advocacy appears aimed at driving online engagement. For example, last November, he wrote a Substack post comparing the pandemic claims made by Joe Rogan and Elon Musk during their interview that month to those of Fauci. “Who got more pandemic policies correct?” he asked his readers. His answer was not the former NIAID director.
“Overall, regarding the COVID19 topics discussed on this specific episode, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are more accurate and balanced than Anthony Fauci,” Prasad wrote.
This contrarian tack has helped Prasad build a sizable following on social media, with nearly 300,000 followers on X and 190,000 subscribers on YouTube as of the publication of this article. It has also made him useful to right-wing groups like Brownstone Institute, an opaque, conspiracy-promoting dark money outfit founded in 2021 anarcho-capitalist Jeffrey Tucker to defeat COVID mitigation measures. Important Context has previously reported on leaked emails from Tucker and Brownstone showing that there is support in the group for child labor and youth cigarette smoking.
Brownstone republished posts from Prasad’s Substack between November of that year and May 2022. The last post the group republished is dated May 4, 2022. That same day, NBC News reported that the U.S. had crossed one million COVID deaths.
Prasad has similarly found an ally in fellow contrarian, Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who advocated for COVID herd immunity through widespread infection. Bhattacharya organized the Stanford conference at which Prasad spoke on Friday. The pair were photographed together at the event.
A big focus of Prasad’s has been government efforts to keep young people from getting COVID. While children and teens have generally fared better with the disease than adults in terms of severe illness and death, they are not immune from harm. They can get seriously ill and studies have found that COVID has been a leading cause of death in children, and recently, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association revised the rate of pediatric long COVID upward. Children also spread the virus, and as of December 31, 2022, more than 275,000 were estimated to have lost a primary or secondary caregiver to COVID in the U.S.
But Prasad argues that mitigation measures like school closures and masking lacked sufficient high-quality research behind them and did more harm than good. He was one of the medical professionals behind the error-plagued “Urgency of Normal” toolkit, which aimed to arm parents with the information they needed to fight COVID mitigation measures in their kids’ schools.
Like his right-wing allies, Prasad’s contrarianism has extended to his positions on the COVID vaccines, which have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S. alone. The UCSF professor has repeatedly claimed the jabs were insufficiently tested, overstated their risks while downplaying their benefits—especially for young people.
In September 2022, he was featured in a Mother Jones report about viral misleading claims related to the newly released bivalent boosters for a tweet declaring the jabs were “NOT LIKE the annual flu shot” and that “human studies (not 8-10 mice) are needed.” Accompanying Prasad’s post, which was amplified by Bhattacharya, was a 14-minute YouTube video he’d made laying out his arguments for why experts could not deem the boosters safe. As Mother Jones noted at the time, claims like Prasad’s had been thoroughly discredited.
Prasad has even embraced notorious anti-vaxxer and former independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. Where other medical experts saw a conspiracy theorist and dangerous misinformation spreader, the UCSF professor apparently saw opportunity for online engagement. In May 2023, he did an 11-minute YouTube video “fact checking” a podcast interview Kennedy had done. Of the seven arguments from the then-candidate he reviewed, Prasad found fault in just two of them and his overall tone was laudatory.
For example, the professor praised Kennedy’s opposition to lockdowns, calling school closures “the most devastating and boneheaded policy decision ever made in the last 20 years of domestic policy.” He said the candidate had “a point” questioning the Food and Drug Administration over regulatory capture, stating, “when you’re in government and you rubber stamp a perpetual booster campaign in men who are 20 years old who’ve had COVID, that’s a dubious decision. It’s very likely they’re going to have myocarditis.”
Myocarditis is a very rare side effect from the vaccines in any demographic. It is also generally more common from COVID itself and is usually self-resolving and less severe compared when caused by a jab.
Prasad did “fact check” Kennedy’s promotion of quack COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, in the process, but in doing so, he falsely claimed that the U.S. was probably overcounting COVID deaths. In fact, studies have found that deaths from the disease are most likely undercounted. Meanwhile, Prasad’s critique of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine positions was merely that they were “unconvincing” because they were too broad. The professor proceeded to offer unsolicited advice to the candidate: focus on young men who were previously infected by COVID and required to take COVID vaccine boosters.
“That’s a population that’s clearly had a net harm signal, and that’s a place you can really put your finger on as a misuse of government power—an abuse of government power—and I think he would have a much stronger argument if he focused there and sort of stopped painting with such a broad brush,” he said.
The month after Prasad made his video, Kennedy appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The interview sparked fierce backlash from the scientific community. Renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez, who helped developed a patent-free COVID vaccine for use in poor countries, took to X to lament that Kennedy had been given such a large platform and to fact check his claims. In response, Rogan offered the doctor, who was named to TIME’s 2024 list of the 100 most influential people in global health earlier this year, $100,000 to come on his show and debate the anti-vaxxer. Far-right billionaire X owner Elon Musk, an outspoken critic of public health measures, soon joined in. Hotez’s decision to decline the offer sparked a days long harassment campaign that saw individuals show up outside of his home.
While many medical and public health experts agreed with Hotez’s refusal to debate Kennedy, Prasad took a different approach. The UCSF professor wrote a blog post praising the anti-vaccine candidate for “pushing against corporate interests and outright governmental corruption.”
“The Democratic party is supposed to hold power to account, but they largely appear to be corporate sell-outs, beholden to Pfizer and other companies,” Prasad wrote. “In many ways RFK Jr. embodies the true populist spirit of the Democratic party, as his father and uncle once did.”
In his piece, Prasad called the decision to vaccinate previously infected people “insane” and wrote that “pushing repeat mRNA COVID vaccines on young men at high risk of myocarditis and college mandates resulted in net harm,” and declaring that “RFK Jr is correct about many of Tony Fauci's lies. One has to give RFK Jr a lot of credit for speaking openly about these topics.”
Later, he stated, “I totally agree with him that vaccine manufacturers should not have indemnification. They should be able to be sued. When it comes to covid-19 vaccines, they should have their asses sued. Every young man who had vaccine myocarditis it should be filing a class action lawsuit against them, and the school that mandated it.”
Prasad continued on to address Kennedy’s claims about childhood vaccines—framed as “RFK Jr’s more troublesome points of view”—stating “I think the only solution is to agree that the current surveillance system—and the current epidemiologic evidence is limited in many ways.”
“We need to improve the current surveillance system on vaccine safety, so that we can adjudicate whether or not even some of his claims are true,” he wrote. “I personally believe that most will not hold up, but I think one must acknowledge that the current surveillance system is flawed, and some may hold up.”
While he was generally supportive of Kennedy, and, critics argued, overly conciliatory to his conspiracy theories, Prasad ripped into Hotez, writing that “any single public health expert to advocated for lockdowns, school closure, vaccine mandates, lowering the regulatory standards to rubber stamp, covid-19 vaccines and young populations, using non-inferior geometric mean antibody titers, will be obliterated.”
“Any person in public health who has gotten everything wrong the last 2 years will not survive such a dialogue,” he wrote. “RFK Jr would mop the floor with Peter Hotez, and the no one will be defending the truth.”
Sharing his post on X, Prasad tagged Rogan and reiterated his position that “RFK Jr would flatten” the vaccine doctor, adding “Any [public health] person wrong about COVID has 0 credibility.”
Medical experts expressed alarm at the news that Emory would be hosting Prasad. In a Threads post on Friday sharing his new editorial in The Nation criticizing the Stanford health policy symposium, epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves called out Emory as one of the schools “boosting COVID conspiracy theories and misinformation by hosting these gatherings.”
John Lysaker, the director of the Emory Center for Ethics, however, defended the decision to host Prasad, telling Important Context that there was merit in the forthcoming discussion.
“This series concerns institutional ethics, which I take to involve questions about how institutions best realize goods and avoid harms,” Lysaker wrote in an email. “The handling of CoVid merits review on both counts.”
According to Lysaker, the involvement of del Rio and Vong meant that Prasad’s appearance would be occurring in “a context of accountability,” adding that “ethics work should be dialogical.” He bristled at the idea that Prasad was too fringe to host, calling the professor “a well-established medical researcher at a major university” who “is qualified to assess the quality of evidence used for public health initiatives.”
Lysaker also noted that Prasad’s views “are shared by a significant number of people in the country” and “in that sense, he is anything but fringe.”
“I think subjecting broadly held views to expert level scrutiny is appropriate, particularly in a siloed world,” he said.
But Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist with Wayne State University School of Medicine, was not convinced.
“Just because [Prasad] believes what a lot of Americans do doesn’t mean that he isn’t fringe in the relevant sciences of public health, virology, and vaccinology that he regularly makes false or misleading claims about,” he wrote in an email. “In those sciences, he is fringe.”
Gorski, who runs the blog Science-Based Medicine and has been highly critical of Prasad throughout the pandemic for his public health contrarianism, offered a sharp criticism of the event.
“The head of Emory’s Center for Ethics is confusing science denialism rooted in right-wing, libertarian beliefs, which is what almost all of Dr. Prasad’s complaints about [the] COVID response and vaccines consists of, with legitimate minority scientific viewpoints,” he told Important Context, noting that Prasad had “shown sympathy to RFK Jr.’s misleading claims about the childhood vaccine schedule.”
“[Prasad] has also portrayed those still concerned about COVID-19 as having irrational anxiety to the point of being mentally ill and embraced the old antivax message of ‘do not comply’ when it comes to vaccinating children against COVID,” Gorski added. “How ‘ethical’ is inviting someone like that?”
NOTE: An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci as the “former NIH director” even though he was correctly identified in the previous paragraph as the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.