Medical Researcher Urges Scientific Community to “Admit We Were Wrong About Covid”

An op-ed penned by medical researcher and student, Kevin Bass took a controversial stance on the scientific community’s response to COVID-19.

The article, titled ‘It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives,’ was shared on Newsweek and has since been going viral.

Bass admits that he was previously in agreement with the mainstream scientific community’s response to the pandemic, stating that he “believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.”

He traced his change of heart back to a few key points, stating “I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.”

He noted that the scientific community took a backwards approach to collecting and analyzing the scientific data and acknowledged the division that it caused. “We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil. We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting. We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.”

He also admitted to suppression of alternative solutions to the pandemic– something the scientific community has persistently denied.

“Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.”

Bass went on to describe the negative effect that these actions caused.

“We have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system; a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites; a rise in suicides and gun violence especially among the poor; a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders especially among the young; a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children; and among those most vulnerable, a massive loss of trust in healthcare, science, scientific authorities, and political leaders more broadly.”

He proactively mentioned his reason for writing the controversial opinion piece, stating “

My motivation for writing this is simple: It’s clear to me that for public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and where we could have done better. It’s OK to be wrong and admit where one was wrong and what one learned. That’s a central part of the way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.”

You can read the full op-ed here.