The United States faces a national emergency of scientific distrust, said Dr. Scott Atlas, a founding fellow at Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

Atlas joined Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff to discuss COVID-19 policy failures and the scientific status quo at a colloquium held last week in Plaster Auditorium by ASF. 

“The government and what I call the credential class leading these essential institutions — and I mean public health agencies, universities, doctors, scientists, schools, the media — have been exposed,” Atlas said. “They’ve been exposed as non-experts and politicized.” 

Early in the COVID pandemic, Atlas along with Bhattacharya and Kulldorff developed alternative methods to the COVID guidelines of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. In 2021, the three partnered with the college to create ASF. 

“The goal of the academy is to teach, just like the college,” College President Larry Arnn said. “I’m proud of those guys.” 

According to its website, the academy aims to help repair the scientific system by “educating the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The academy will host lectures, offer internships, and propose and promote implementable policies within science, Atlas said.

“There is now an unprecedented denial of fact rampant in science and public health leadership,” Atlas said. “As a society, during the pandemic, we have broken the social contract with our most precious resource, our children, harming them directly and failing as role models.”

The fellows reported that minorities, children, and poor communities carried the burden of COVID- lockdowns. 

“It was poor families that faced the worst of it,” Bhattacharya said. “And it is poor families in blue states that closed their schools that caused the pandemic learning-loss that is happening.”

When the fellows began laying out alternative strategies, they discovered how closely grant money was linked to scientific journals and publications.

To draw accurate conclusions based on data that was more objective, they analyzed academic peer reviews that were distanced from the monetized and politically biased “cartel system.” 

“There needs to be a bright wall between scientific funders making decisions about who to fund and their participation in health policy,” Bhattacharya said. “It is a deep conflict of interest that silences scientists, creates an illusion of consensus that doesn’t exist, fools the American people, and fools the world population into doing things that are very, very dangerous.”

Some attending the talk questioned the value of salvaging and reforming failed institutions with deep-seated financial, media, and political ties. Ph.D. candidate Brett Waite asked the panelists why they are striving to restore faith in public institutions and what makes them deserve it. 

“I do not think they deserve our trust or our respect,” Kulldorff said. “We have to restore the integrity of science and with our generation of scientists, I’m not very hopeful. But future generations hopefully can restore how science should operate.”

Atlas explained the necessity to create new scientific institutions that challenge the status quo and preserve scientific truth. 

“If we are a society that doesn’t believe in facts anymore,” Atlas said. “I don’t even know where to go from there. We need to fix science. It’s broken.”