The COVID Contrarian Playbook Is Winning. But It’s Built on Bad Faith.

A professor recently posted on social media that he was blocked by a prominent COVID-19 contrarian who has now been appointed to a senior position at the FDA. His post struck a nerve for me, because I’ve seen the same pattern play out again and again since the pandemic started.

Loud voices from this community and now the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) community build influence by touting principles that seem legitimate, but, when challenged, they fail to apply those principles and to debate in good faith. The most celebrated COVID contrarians rarely mean what they say.

When they claim they’ve been “censored,” it’s not that they were actually silenced and not permitted to speak. They were, in fact, amplified across conservative media, state legislatures, and even the Trump White House. What they really mean is that liberal institutions and media outlets didn’t celebrate them. What they wanted was a louder microphone and widespread praise. What they got was legitimate criticisms that their recommendations were rarely practical, ethical, or effective.

When they demand “free speech,” it usually comes with an important caveat. Speech is only free when it doesn’t promote anti-racist policies, LGBTQ rights, or public health interventions that they deem too “woke.” Here is a long list of words that have been flagged at NIH, CDC, and National Science Foundation as problematic when awarding grants, conducting research, naming programs and job titles, and communicating to the public. Can you really be an advocate of free speech and open scientific debate when you restrict words and ideas that you find problematic?

And when they call for “evidence-based policy,” it’s often the inverse; policy-based evidence. Data is cherry-picked to justify a predetermined belief and a policy outcome they want. For example, the voice of people who died from COVID are ignored in favor of those who lived and escaped without severe health consequences of infection.

These tactics have proven alarmingly effective. The goal, unfortunately, is not to generate objective evidence about how to advance knowledge and improve health. Or to generate scientific consensus about the best approaches to study and solve a problem. The goal seems to be power. And the costs are real: trust in science, advancing health equity, and protecting the public from infectious and environmental threats. As someone who has spent a career trying to improve public health through evidence and community engagement, I find this shift deeply troubling. Once bad faith becomes the currency of influence, the public and public health lose.