Billionaire Charles Koch Funds Anti-Vaccine, Anti-Lockdown Movement: Report

So, as early as April 2020, you see groups like FreedomWorks, which was instrumental in the tea party protests in 2009, begin promoting protests against lockdowns. Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council were calling on Trump to keep the country open. AFP started in March 2020, like really shortly after the virus arrived stateside. And Trump was receptive to those messages. On March 24th, he said that he was going to — that he wanted to reopen America by Easter.

In addition to those efforts, Koch-backed groups have funded and supported academic research that is against lockdowns and other public health measures. The Great Barrington Declaration, which arose in October 2020, came out of a conference hosted by the Koch-backed American Institute for Economic Research...

That document recommended that countries around the world, governments around the world, adopt a strategy of herd immunity through natural infection, where only focused protection is implemented to protect the most vulnerable, but, otherwise, the virus should be allowed to rip through the younger, healthier populations.

That document was extremely influential in a number of countries, including the United States. Obviously, Trump was very interested in the quick fix it promised to his pandemic woes during his reelection campaign. And his senior officials in his White House were promoting the document to him, like Scott Atlas, his COVID adviser… He’s a neuroradiologist, not a public health expert, but he was the head of Trump’s COVID team. And he promoted the Great Barrington Declaration and its message…

So, Hillsdale College is now setting up a new Academy for Science and Freedom, which features as its initial fellows two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as Scott Atlas, that Trump adviser who pushed the herd-immunity-through-infection strategy. And yeah, that’s sort of where we’re at. It’s the latest effort to provide an academic cover to this sort of fringe theory of public health…

So, the Mercatus Center is another Koch-funded institution, out of George Mason University. And in June, Mercatus started funding the research of professor Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor and parenting blogger who has been really prominent throughout the pandemic calling on schools to reopen. She’s been amplified by The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone did a feature on her. Her views have been controversial. She was calling to bring children back into classrooms before we even vaccinated teachers, saying there’s very low risk and it doesn’t spread in schools. And, you know, her ideas, as well, I mean, have been shown to be wrong. I mean, when Delta first arrived in the U.S., one of the first places it spread were schools. And now we’re seeing again Oster reemerge. And her research is being funded by this Koch-backed institution…

You know, I was surprised to see Oster’s name come up. Obviously — and we’re not saying that everybody who is being backed by the Kochs is doing so — is espousing the views that they espouse because they’re getting funded. But it is interesting to me that all of these people who have been pushing sort of this return to normalcy, get back to that pre-pandemic normal, are being backed by this network.

And we see that sort of through — again, through the lens of trying to maintain corporate profit at the expense of human life. I mean, we have lost 800,000 Americans, by the official count, and those numbers are, according to the epidemiologists that I’ve spoken to, an undercount. And I think the CDC, as well, says that those numbers are — there’s probably a 30% — that they’re off by 30%.