Speaking at Friday’s Academia’s COVID Failures symposium at the University of Chicago, Health Freedom Defense Fund founder Leslie Manookian emphasized the “human impact” of COVID-19 policies. She lamented that “academia has truly, potentially, and irreparably suffered damage that we will see unfold in the coming years.”
Considering the firsthand experience of students at UChicago and Stanford University, Manookian reminded the audience that, at the former, students testing positive for COVID (even those who were asymptomatic) were “transported by ambulance” to Stony Island for isolated quarantine. In the latter, they were “locked in their dorms for two weeks.”
Manookian’s critical point, however, was that such medical mismanagement preceded COVID. She cited legislation that created perverse economic incentives—namely, by shielding government-funded scientists and pharmaceutical companies from proper accountability.
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, for instance, enables government scientists to compete directly with the private sector. Thus, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the government own half of the patents for the Moderna vaccine, Manookian claimed.
More broadly, Manookian expressed alarm at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) significant share of patents, implying that the CDC is motivated by the pursuit of profit despite being a government entity.
Manookian contended that another alarming piece of legislation is the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which compensated families whose children were harmed by the effects of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DPT) vaccine. Problematic for Manookian was the source from which the compensation was drawn: taxes collected from DPT vaccine sales. This reliance on government funds meant that pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccine were effectively shielded from liability.
Laws were not the only problematic element that Manookian diagnosed; she cited a 2019 incident in which Congressman Adam Schiff (D., California) “wrote to big tech companies,” requesting that any material that questioned “the official narrative on vaccines” be removed. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, complied, selectively removing media on their streaming services.
Manookian emphasized that pandemic-era policymaking was a “catastrophe we don’t fully appreciate today.” Though it was not a novel assertion of bureaucratic rule and favoritism, it was an unprecedented realization of longtime internal issues. The greatest victims, for Manookian, were the youngest generation: “The students lost everything.”
