COVID Was a Case Study in Groupthink, Systemic Exploitation and Abuse in US Prisons, The Search for Life's Meaning
April 17, 2025

In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was condemned as a quack and considered a pariah by the medical field for co-authoring a public declaration questioning the efficacy of Covid lockdowns. In an October 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that was later leaked online, [former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis] Collins called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist,” and urged a “quick and devastating published takedown” of his declaration. Bhattacharya is now the new director of the NIH. He [said] Collins has since apologized for his comments—but only in private. Bhattacharya said of Collins: “I’ve been praying for him ever since I found out that he’d written that email. Reconciliation is really possible. Even if people disagree with each other fundamentally, even hate each other—and I’d never hated him and never will.” Bhattacharya “wants to extend [Fauci] the same grace that I want to extend to everybody. I think he was deeply wrong in his scientific ideas in 2020, but I believe ... he was trying to do what he viewed as the best for the American people.” President Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for his extreme Covid response measures. The first step to rebuilding trust, Bhattacharya argues, is transparency. A database on doctors’ relationships with Big Pharma already exists, thanks to the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which allows anyone to search for and view all pharmaceutical money doctors have received since 2013. Producing a similar website that shows where scientists get their research funding, and the results of their research, “would be a really productive way to reestablish trust ... “The work of the NIH in particular affects basically every single aspect of biomedical research. And of course, there are pecuniary interests involved. People make money off of the results of the research.”

In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, [left-leaning political scientists] Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement. The book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic.” A WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined." The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe. Teachers’ unions ... painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” ... despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday launched an online searchable database listing contaminant levels in human foods, reflecting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s ongoing efforts to reduce chemicals in food since taking office. The FDA said if a food product has contaminants exceeding established levels, the agency may find the food to be unsafe. However, it added these levels do not represent "permissible levels of contamination". The Health Secretary has often stressed reducing chemicals in food and, in the previous week, directed the FDA to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision allowing companies to self-affirm food ingredient safety. RFK Jr. also told food companies ... that the Trump administration wanted artificial dyes out of the food supply. The FDA said it is establishing an online database called "Chemical Contaminants Transparency Tool" to provide a list of contaminant levels called "tolerances, action levels and guidance levels" to evaluate the potential health risks of these contaminants in human foods. "Ideally there would be no contaminants in our food supply, but chemical contaminants may occur in food when they are present in the growing, storage or processing environments," said Acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner. The online database also provides information such as the contaminant name, commodity and contaminant level type.

Consultants assessing Covid vaccine damage claims on behalf of the NHS have been paid millions more than the victims, it has emerged. Freedom of Information requests made by The Telegraph show that US-based Crawford and Company has carried out nearly 13,000 medical assessments, but dismissed more than 98 per cent of cases. Just 203 claimants have been notified they are entitled to a one-off payment of £120,000 through the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) amounting to £24,360,000. Yet Crawford and Company has received £27,264,896 for its services. Prof Richard Goldberg, chairman in law at Durham University, with a special interest in vaccine liability and compensation, said: “The idea that this would be farmed out to a private company to make a determination is very odd. It’s taxpayers money and money is tight at the moment. “The lack of transparency is not helpful and there is a terrible sense of secrecy about all of this. One gets the sense that their main objective is for these cases not to succeed. “There are no stats available so we don’t know the details about how these claims are being decided or whether previous judgments are being taken into account.” The Hart (Health Advisory and Recovery Team) group, which was set up by medical professionals and scientists during the pandemic, has warned that Crawford and Company has a “troubling reputation with numerous reports of mismanagement and claims denials across various sectors”.

In his most recent article for The Atlantic, [Journalist Derek] Thompson writes that the trend toward isolation has been driven by technology. Televisions ... "privatized our leisure" by keeping us indoors. More recently, Thompson says, smartphones came along, to further silo us. In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a report about America's "epidemic of loneliness and isolation." We pull out our phones and we're on TikTok or Instagram, or we're on Twitter. And while externally it looks like nothing is happening internally, the dopamine is flowing and we are just thinking, my God, we're feeling outrage, we're feeling excitement, we're feeling humor, we're feeling all sorts of things. We put our phone away and our dopamine levels fall and we feel kind of exhausted by that, which was supposed to be our leisure time. We are donating our dopamine to our phones rather than reserving our dopamine for our friends. I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. Donald Trump has now won more than 200 million votes in the last three elections. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years, perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land, by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and more to the point, within your neighborhood, to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. But getting along with and understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about.

Feeding incarcerated people has become big business. The food behemoth Aramark (which also services colleges, hospitals, and sports stadiums), as well as smaller corporations like Summit Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, have inked contracts in the last decade worth hundreds of millions of dollars in prisons and jails across the country. The industry was worth almost $3.2 billion in 2022. Cell phone images smuggled out of jails and prisons across the country reveal food that hardly looks edible, let alone nutritious. At a jail in Cleveland, staff warned administrators in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity were so disgusting, that they put staff in danger. A 2020 study by the criminal justice reform advocacy group Impact Justice found that 94% of incarcerated people surveyed said they did not receive enough food to feel full. More than 60% said they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables. Meager portions have left desperate people eating toothpaste and toilet paper. Most states spend less than $3 per person per day on prison food — and some as little as $1.02. The Food and Drug Administration’s “thrifty plan” estimates that feeding an adult man “a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” costs about $10 per day. The major private food providers also have a stake in the booming prison commissary business, where incarcerated people can buy staples like ramen, tuna and coffee. Poor food served in the chow hall drives hungry prisoners to the commissary.

Of the 17 years that I’ve been incarcerated for killing an abusive boyfriend, I spent eight — from 2016 to last May — in what the state calls “restrictive housing,” but I call “solitary confinement” or “the hole.” In women’s prisons, sexual intrusion, harassment, coercion and violence are daily realities. And in solitary confinement, this conduct is so routine that many women — particularly the younger ones — don’t even think of it as abuse. They believe it’s simply an inevitable part of their incarceration. In 2023, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TCDJ) reported over 700 allegations of staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse and harassment to the PREA Ombudsman, an independent office that tallies up and investigates complaints. Almost 90 of those cases involved sexual harassment, nearly 150 were categorized as voyeurism, and a little more than 500 were classified as sexual abuse. Of the 505 abuse claims, only 20% met the prison system’s onerous criteria for sexual assault or “improper sexual activity with a person in custody.” On the outside, fewer than half of sexual violence cases are reported to police. Given the power dynamics of prison, underreporting is likely more severe here. Guards use a variety of methods to retaliate against women who complain about their abuse. They can write bogus disciplinary infractions that can lead to ... a longer sentence. Officers can also turn off the electricity and running water in women’s cells and refuse to serve them meals.

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. The number of young people behind bars increased steadily in the 1970s and 1980s and then rose more sharply in the 1990s. In the last two years for which we have data, 2021 and 2022, the number of incarcerated juveniles rose 10 percent. But even factoring in that increase, the country locked up 75 percent fewer juveniles in 2022 than it did in 2000. With fewer juveniles behind bars, many states have shuttered youth facilities. Today America has 58 percent fewer of them than it did in 2000. Beginning in 2008, New York State closed 26 juvenile jails; over the next 12 years, juvenile crime in the state declined 86 percent. [Susan Burke, director of Utah’s juvenile justice system from 2011 to 2018] sees it similarly: “When judges worried that crime would go up if we closed the assessment centers, I could show them data that it was already dropping. Then I could go back and show them data a year later that it was still declining. At that point, what could they say?” Exposé after exposé piled up to prove to the public what many insiders already knew: The biggest recidivists in the system were the institutions. In early 2004, a series of expert reports documented rampant violence and cruelty. Custom-built individual cages where youth deemed violent received their school lessons. Video footage from a facility in Stockton showed counselors kneeling on the backs and necks of prisoners, beating and kicking the motionless young people. Six months later, The San Jose Mercury News published a multipart exposé revealing that youth were regularly tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed and forced into solitary confinement.

There’s a popular saying in Mexico. Without corn, there is no country. This week, Mexico’s leaders voted to enshrine that concept in the Constitution, declaring native corn “an element of national identity” and banning the planting of genetically modified seeds. The measure, which aims to protect Mexico’s thousands of varieties of heirloom corn from engineered versions sold by American companies, has become a nationalist rallying cry. “Corn is Mexico,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said recently, describing the reform as a way to secure Mexico’s sovereignty. “We have to protect it for biodiversity but also culturally, because corn is what intrinsically links us to our origins, to the resistance of Indigenous peoples.” The amendment to the Constitution comes after the defeat in December of a related effort that sought to phase out all imports of genetically modified corn. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a presidential decree in 2023 banning the use of genetically engineered corn in dough and tortillas and for animal feed and industrial use, but a trade dispute panel ruled that it violated the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Mexico agreed to abide by the panel’s ruling, and this week’s action targets seeds, not all products. “There’s a disturbing level of contamination of native maize with genetically modified traits,” said Timothy Wise, a researcher at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

Tom was in the fourth grade when he first googled “sex” on his family computer. It took him to one of the big free porn sites. According to a study released by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner in September, Tom’s experience is similar to many young people: 36% of male respondents were first exposed to porn before hitting their teens, while 13 was the average age for all young people surveyed. Only 22%, however, admitted to intentionally seeking it out, with more accidentally stumbling upon X-rated material via social media or pop-ups on other parts of the internet. When Tom started having sex years later, he found it difficult to connect to his real-life partner. “Functionally, I almost couldn’t have sex with her. Like the real thing almost didn’t turn me on enough – the stimulation just wasn’t quite right. Even now if I go through a phase of watching porn, closing my eyes during sex is much worse. I sort of need that visual stimulation.” When Dr Samuel Shpall, a University of Sydney senior lecturer, teaches his course, Philosophy of Sex, he isn’t surprised to hear young men like Tom critique their own experience of porn. “The internet has completely changed not only the nature and accessibility of pornography, but also the nature and accessibility of ideas about pornography,” he says. “It’s not your desire moving your body, it’s what you’ve seen men do, and added to your sexual toolkit,” [Tom] says. “But it takes you further away from yourself in those sexual moments.”

In September 2015, I was unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad’s caravan, wondering what the meaning of life was. I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers. "I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we’re seeking isn’t a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive," [replied journalist Oliver Burkeman]. "There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are "why I’m here" – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who’ve found liberation in something I have written. I would struggle, though, if I were to try to argue that any of these will "mean something" in some kind of timeless way. What’s changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That’s all – but, then again, I think that is everything. And so I try, on a daily basis, to navigate more and more by that feeling of aliveness – rather than by the feeling of wanting to be in control of things, which is alluring, but deadening in the end."

Tina imagined the sound of Ira’s key in the door, and then she realized she would never hear that sound again. It had all been stolen from her. Someone would have to pay the price. “Whoever killed my son,” she said, “they were gonna get it.” In the days after Ira’s death, there were other things besides retribution to keep Tina busy. Tina had wondered for a while about $50 that disappeared from her bank account. Then a woman approached Tina at a vigil for Ira and told her a story. Her boyfriend had been beating her, and Ira found out, and he gave her $50 for a bus ticket so she could get out of town. Turned out he had his own little ministry. And Tina continued that ministry: listening to Ira’s friends, having them over for lunch or dinner, occasionally giving someone a place to crash. She thought less and less about revenge. That December, a grand jury indicted two men for the murder of Ira Hopkins. On October 27, 2017, following guilty pleas, [Jy’Aire Smith-Pennick] appeared in court for his sentencing. Almost seven years passed from Jy’Aire’s sentencing until the day Tina saw him in person again. “I’m in prison for participating in a murder,” he would later say. “And the mother of this man is here, present, on behalf of me, watching me receive my degree.” When Jy’Aire gets out, he plans to study sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Tina will work together on the IRA Foundation, teaching at-risk kids that there are better options than drugs and violence.

By the time I was 24 years old, my life was in complete shambles. I had long-standing substance abuse problems. I sold drugs and trafficked guns. My addiction and illegal business culminated in an incident in which an innocent bystander was killed. I was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to just under 30 years to life. Once in prison ... I lost even more of myself in drugs, violence and jailhouse politics. I knew that I had to change, but I didn’t think it was possible. Furthermore, I didn't know how to start. Then one day, at age 30, I did the most benign-seeming thing that changed everything: I quit drinking soda. I had read some articles about how soda can contribute to health issues like diabetes and obesity, and how it can weaken tooth enamel. This was the first time in my life that I had made that kind of change. Quitting soda was my step one. That simple act allowed me to trace the catastrophic outcomes of my life back to my lack of self-discipline, and it convinced me that change was possible. Step two was to make more behavioral changes related to self discipline, like lifting weights and learning to play chess. By choosing relatively minor changes at first, and implementing them incrementally, they were easy for me to sustain. This led to step three: My new behaviors becoming habits, and those habits elevating my level of self-discipline. This elevation allowed me to tackle more significant behavioral changes like quitting smoking and drugs.

Latin America is the world’s most dangerous region due to cartel and gang violence. It has 9% of the global population but one-third of the world’s homicides. Kidnapping and extortion are on the rise. The trend is driving a turn toward increasingly militarized solutions. El Salvador, for example, has incarcerated some 75,000 people – nearly 2% of its population – in recent years on suspicion of being involved in gangs. In Colombia, by contrast, exchanging the threat of arrest for dialogue is a key part of the government’s painstaking strategy of negotiating peace simultaneously with some 20 armed factions to end 60 years of conflict. That process, known as Paz Total (“total peace”) and launched less than two years ago by President Gustavo Petro, has been marked by reversals and unintended effects. But a key distinction lies in its emphasis on both empathy and the rule of law. The strategy’s first example of “restorative incarceration,” launched earlier this month, shows how. In exchange for admitting guilt for violent acts and seeking forgiveness from victims and the families, 48 military and former guerrilla leaders are now serving “sentences” by planting trees and helping heal the communities they once dominated through fear. “We’re going to sow life to try to make amends and build peace,” [said] Henry Torres, a former army general. As Colombia’s new attorney general put it, “our mission will be ... a mission for the dignity and well-being of our people.” Peace requires patience, said Juan Manuel Santos, a former president who negotiated a 2016 peace accord with Colombia’s main guerrilla faction that still serves as a template for Mr. Petro’s broader peace plan. “You need to convince, to persuade, to change people’s sentiments, to teach them how to forgive, how to reconcile,” he told The Harvard Gazette.

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