Four high-profile doctors who are challenging the COVID-19 response

Medicine has long benefited from robust debate among practitioners, scientists, and scholars, but the response of the United States and other nations to the COVID-19 pandemic has left some highly acclaimed doctors believing their field is in the grip of dangerous groupthink. 

White House COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have aggressively silenced doctors who don't toe the government line on matters including vaccine mandates, natural immunity, and the safety and efficacy of inoculations. But the questions haven't gone away, and doctors who have been asking them at their own professional peril haven't, either. Below are the stories of four esteemed physicians who have challenged the COVID-19 status quo and the medical establishment they know well.

Malone is a vaccine scientist who, in the late 1980s, performed foundational research that helped establish mRNA vaccine technology used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. He appeared on a New Year’s Eve episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which rocketed him to viral stardom. In the podcast, which has been scrubbed from YouTube and Twitter but uploaded to the Congressional Record by Texas Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, Malone characterized the all-hands-on-deck federal vaccination push as an example of “mass formation hypnosis,” a psychological phenomenon that gave rise to the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany. 

Malone, troubled by what he argued is the federal government’s adamant push for adherence to a single school of thought about COVID-19, called this a “coordinated campaign of censorship and propaganda.”