With school closures, lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates, evidence-based medicine and basic principles of public health were thrown out the window during the pandemic, while alternative views were censored. This has caused both short- and long-term collateral public health damage that we must now live with, and die with. It has also generated distrust in the medicine and academia, as it should, with less public support for scientific research.  While the mess was created by a small group of scientists in medical leadership positions, like Drs. Fauci, Collins, Birx and Walensky, it falls on all of us, including rank-and-file academics in every field, to restore academic freedom and the integrity of the scientific enterprise.

Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Kulldorff is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health at RealClear Journals. He was a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University for thirteen years. His research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. In October 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration with Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, advocating for a pandemic strategy of focused protection instead of lockdowns. Dr. Kulldorff received his bachelor’s degree in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in Sweden, and his doctorate in operations research from Cornell University. Before Harvard, he worked at Uppsala University in Sweden, at the National Institutes for Health and at the University of Connecticut.

In an ideal world, the public would simply accept whatever their leaders told them. They would comply with restrictions and mandates, not as a matter of mere obedience, but as a matter of unquestionable patriotic duty. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Abigail Hall Blanco will discuss her coauthored book, How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (2024), a satirical portrait of America’s contemporary military-industrial complex where leaders must learn: how to control the narrative—every narrative—in their favor; how to completely capture the media and effectively quash dissent; how destroying liberty creates more liberty in the long (long) run; why top-down economic planning, here and abroad, is your best friend; how to flout international, and of course domestic, law and get away with it; and much, much more…

Abigail Hall Blanco is an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida. She is also an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. Dr. Hall is a Non-Resident Fellow with Defense Priorities and a Public Choice and Public Policy Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. She earned her PhD in Economics from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her broader research interests include Austrian Economics, Political Economy and Public Choice, Defense and Peace Economics, and Institutions and Economic Development. Her work includes topics surrounding militarism, the U.S. military, and national defense, including, domestic police militarization, domestic extremism, arm sales, weapons as foreign aid, the cost of military mobilization, and the political economy of military technology. Dr. Hall has written extensively on the domestic consequences of foreign intervention and the economics of propaganda. Her current research relates to the economics of peace and conflict and U.S. intervention in Latin America.