Does the King of the COVID-19 Contrarians Have a Case?
Published April 16, 2020 in
Alex Berenson, thriller writer, former Timesman, and marijuana alarmist, thinks scientists, politicians, and the media are fueling coronavirus hysteria. Some scientists think he’s dead wrong. “He should go back to school to learn some science,” says one.
The first Alex Berenson tweet of the day usually comes roughly seven hours after the last one from the night before. But they soon tumble out like cannon fire, complete with charts, graphs, links to epidemiological studies, extended Twitter threads dunking on anybody who dares express concern about the rising death rate or parrots mainstream news analysis, especially if the poor tweeter happens to be a reporter with the New York Times, where Berenson worked for more than a decade until 2010.
“At this point @nytimes is just making stuff up. Where is the data that lockdowns have slowed the spread of #COVID?” he wrote just a few minutes after 6 a.m. earlier this week, comparing the U.S.’s approach to that of Sweden and Japan, which had only partial lockdowns, and sharing screenshots of a couple of Times stories about Americans’ frustration with social distancing measures. (Japan declared a state of emergency Thursday). A Vice reporter was in Berenson’s crosshairs Wednesday night: He considered her follow-up questions to be a violation of their interview ground rules and proceeded to publish their email exchange. In it, he accused major media outlets of adopting “a tone of near-hysteria for the last month.”
Public health, as with most aspects of American life these days, has become another battleground in the culture wars, with MAGA–hat–wearing protesters flouting social distancing in states such as Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky. Some governors in red states have balked at restrictions in blue states, as Republican politicians and conservative hosts have suggested members of the media are somehow enjoying the pandemic. Amid the outrage, Berenson’s contrarian takes have found an audience on the right, with his tweets picked up by Breitbart and the Daily Caller, and his reach extending to Fox News, where he appeared last week with Sean Hannity, and reportedly, to the West Wing, just as Donald Trump and his team try to reopen the country.
Berenson’s perspective is that Americans have worked themselves into a frenzy over the coronavirus, helped along by journalists, politicians, and public health experts. He argues that models have been off and that the threat to younger Americans is overblown; that the disease is being used as cover for brazen attempts at government overreach, and despite—as Berenson maintains—the coronavirus being not much worse than the flu, it is killing the American economy, something which will lead to more devastation than even the disease. There are many references to “The Dept. of Pandemia,” a vague Orwellian–sounding government agency that wants to keep Americans afraid and inside their homes, entreaties for people to join him on “Team Reality,” and, at times, a brazenly cavalier attitude toward those who may get seriously ill or even die.
On Hannity’s show last week, Berenson said that hospitals were “emptier now than they were a month ago,” that “there has been no surge” in cases, and that “we need reporters who are…not just [making] things look as bad as possible.” He suggested that no one under the age of 30 is at serious risk of dying from the virus, a comment that led Hannity to finally push back against his guest’s conclusion. Vanity Fair highlighted the Hannity interview in a Friday piece on Berenson’s recent popularity in conservative media.
Berenson declined to be interviewed for this story. He said he would answer factual questions over email, but then said he was too busy for even that and sent along a statement instead (although later in the course of the reporting he did say he was again available to answer questions over email) and which he asked that it be printed in full. “Mr. Freedlander—I don’t know you, and it is possible you plan to write an entirely fair piece about me. However, given last week’s Vanity Fair article on me, I have no reason to believe so, and I do not have time to engage in a dance with you,” he wrote. “My focus right now is trying to figure out what is really happening in and to hospitals and families and businesses nationally, and whether the course of action we have chosen makes any sense. My goal is to provide policymakers and everyone else with accurate and truthful information that for whatever reason they are not receiving elsewhere.”
But public health experts, presented with Berenson’s views, disputed his recent analysis, such as COVID-19 presenting little threat to young people. “There are millions of young people who would be at risk,” said Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine. “Think of all of the young people who have had cancer or are obese or used to smoke. The probabilities of being of 25 versus 85 are better, but even if the death rate is .04 for people under 50, that means tens of thousands of people could die if nothing was done.”
“Models are not crystal balls,” added Gonsalves. “A modeler is giving you a range of potential outcomes. What he is doing is what a lot of people who don’t understand science do, they take the uncertainty built into a model and say, ‘Oh, well, it shows these people don’t know what they are talking about.’ He is playing with scientific uncertainty in order to say, ‘See, I know what is right here.’ He is somebody with a messianic complex. And to be clear, all of the models say this is going to be one of the worst epidemics we have ever faced.”
Another expert, from the Yale School of Medicine, Joseph Vinetz, M.D., disputed Berenson’s contention that the health care system in the U.S. isn’t under strain. “Why is this guy even getting any oxygen?” he said. “People are under-using the system in terms of the regular catastrophic circumstances like heart attacks or strokes or elective procedures, so we don’t overwhelm the hospital system, so that’s why some medical workers are being laid off,” he added. “The fear of getting COVID-19 [is] why people are not coming into the hospitals for other health issues and for elective surgeries. It’s to free up the facilities for COVID patients. He should stick to his novel writing. He should go back to school to learn some science.”
Friends and former colleagues say that Berenson genuinely believes in what he is doing, that he believes that he has found the data that backs up his argument and thinks he must warn the world of the mistake they are making. (He recently tweeted a list of the top five greatest policy failures in American history, among them slavery, the Vietnam War, and only a few weeks into it, the government’s COVID-19 response.) But they also see a guy cast out from his old media world, living in the upstate media enclave of Garrison, New York, and playing to his newfound friends on the right, a trajectory that began with his contrarian book last year on marijuana, Tell Your Children, and accelerated amid the pandemic.
Former colleagues speak of someone who has a significant ego, and a sense of embattlement. “He always seemed to me like the kind of a guy who is a legend in his own mind,” said one former fellow business reporter, who wrote in a text that after the marijuana book came out, Berenson “got all defensive and convinced himself that The Politically Correct were trying to Silence him for having Different Opinions. And the next thing you know all these people with Deplorable in their bio are like ‘Yeah! You are a Truth Teller!’ And that becomes your new identity, you become the Rebel leader in this gang of dipshits.”
Millions of Americans who aren’t necessarily glued to the Twitter cycle got a taste of Berenson’s views earlier this month, as Rush Limbaugh praised him for “essentially saying that the models, in addition to being wrong about the way over-projection of deaths were also very wrong about places like Florida.” Berenson, he added, “is a leftist, his leftist résumé is perfection. But apparently he can independently and critically think. Apparently he is curious along with being a leftist. Makes him an oddity. He has been sounding the alarm on numerous fronts. I’m sure he’s been kicked out of all the clubs now.”
Berenson’s upbringing seems tailor-made for the media elite, growing up in Englewood, New Jersey, and attending Horace Mann and then Yale, where he graduated in 1994. He joined the Times five years later, after cutting his teeth at the Denver Post and Jim Cramer’s financial start-up, TheStreet.com. Around the Times, which he joined in 1999, Berenson was known as a dogged reporter, according to friends, former colleagues, and former friends.
He knew his way around complicated data sets and corporate accounting logs. He covered hedge funds and later the pharmaceutical industry, but liked to go out drinking with cops and law enforcement figures, hanging around with people for whom the stakes were higher than the bottom line. He is remembered as an almost obsessive fan of Trump’s The Apprentice when it first aired. He was headstrong and seen as difficult to work with, but with a contrarian streak that led him to look in places others weren’t. He realized back in 2002 that companies were cooking their books and wrote a series of articles about it, which eventually led to Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski storming into the Times’ offices with a handful of associates to accuse Berenson of printing lies; Berenson wrote a book on these fraudulent accounting practices while Kozlowski spent more than six years in prison for stealing nearly $100 million from the company.
Berenson later moved into the fiction world, where he’s written 12 spy novels that center around a character named John Wells, a super spy with “excellent language skills, extreme physical capabilities, and an unquestionable loyalty to the United States,” who, while working for the CIA, infiltrates al-Qaida, over time becoming indoctrinated in the terrorist organization, adopting the Muslim faith, and questioning U.S. policy in the Middle East, according to the website Book Series in Order. As the novels progress, Wells returns to the U.S., then back to the Middle East, falls in love with a fellow CIA operative, courts danger, and staves off global disaster, left “questioning his belief in human kind,” but remaining “the ultimate warrior as he combines unrelenting loyalty to his country and the physical traits necessary to get the job done at any cost,” someone “consumed with a violent streak of revenge as he tracks down those responsibility [sic] for innocent violence and brings justice to the world. As each novel begins, a new threat is unleashed and only John Wells has the knowledge and expertise to save the United States.” Wells is “a 210-pound, Montana–raised, one-man Team America,” in the words of one reviewer, but he is also a reluctant spy, at one point going on a cruise with his girlfriend to prove his commitment to her, only to find himself pulled back into espionage, sometimes against his better judgment.
The books have become best sellers, and garnered Berenson an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, even as some reviewers chafed at the book’s apparent endorsement of torture and their graphic depictions of violence. “It’s rare to go more than a few pages without encountering a sickening passage like this,” read a Times review of The Secret Soldier, the fifth book in the series. “‘Shrapnel tore open his face and neck, and one jagged piece chopped through his skull and cut into the arteries around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. He died, but not soon enough.’”
They also borrow from real-life events, and occasionally tragic ones that some writers may feel conflicted about repurposing for their fictions (“Maybe I should, but I don’t,” Berenson once told an interviewer about the matter). He traveled to global hot spots such as Kandahar and Cairo to pick up the mood and feel of the place. But they also rely on Berenson’s experience as a reporter with the Times, where he mostly worked at the business desk, but also traveled to Iraq at the start of the war, where he was briefly taken captive by insurgents, blindfolded, tied up, and threatened with death before being released.
Last year Berenson switched gears again, away from spy novels, publishing a nonfiction book that warned about the dangers of marijuana. The book sprang from a conversation Berenson had with his wife, Jacqueline, a forensic psychiatrist, who, he writes in the book, mentioned studies that seemed to suggest that marijuana can cause schizophrenia, and who chalked up some of the horrific murders she saw to marijuana usage. The book was intended as a corrective to the headlong rush to legalization and the increasingly accepted claim that marijuana is relatively benign. But it was slammed for junk science, cherry-picking some data, and deliberately misrepresenting scientific studies in others. A group of 75 doctors and scholars from schools such as Harvard Medical School, Columbia University, and elsewhere cowrote an open letter slamming the book as “based on a deeply inaccurate misreading of science,” while the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization advocating for the decriminalization of responsible drug use, accused the book of trading in some of the worst stereotypes about pot use among people of color.
“A master of keeping his name in headlines,” as the New Republic put it, Berenson began posing on Twitter as a “self-satisfied devil’s advocate, crushing the Libs with logic, perpetually goading his most high-profile critics to publicly debate him.” The book garnered Berenson a number of one-on-one interviews, and he was written up favorably by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, but was not formally reviewed in many of the places where high-concept book readers go for recommendations, like the Times, Washington Post, and NPR. But it did find an audience on the right. Ann Coulter called it “magnificent.” He responded to media critiques of his book on Fox & Friends, and last August, prime-time host Tucker Carlson brought Berenson on his show and the two discussed whether or not marijuana could be the cause of mass shootings. He was invited to speak at the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College.
And in such appearances, Berenson is typically referred to not as a spy novelist, his primary writing role for the past decade, but as a former “New York Times reporter.” Indeed, it is the words of his Twitter bio, and how he was referenced in recent coronavirus-related profiles in The Blaze, the Daily Wire, and FoxNews.com—the apostate from the other side who can speak to the decadence and corruption of the elites because he was once a charter member. “I went to Yale and I worked for the New York Times, the people on the left hold themselves out as being science-driven, as being smarter, they think they’re smarter but they won’t look at facts that won’t meet their narratives,” he told FoxNews.com.
Friends going back years told me they are mystified at this most recent turn. Not at the cause, which could be a worthwhile one, but at the tone, the air of superiority that Berenson takes over actual scientists and doctors, and also the casual way in which he dismisses rising death counts. Some have speculated that it is what happens when a reporter leaves a newsroom, where layers of editors and colleagues can tone down an excitable reporter’s instincts. There are loud echoes of John Wells, his lone hero with the courage to save the world from global collapse. “I am not mystified that he is examining the numbers,” said one friend, “but I am completely mystified that he has taken this tone given the sensitivity of the moment, and how hard it is for people.”
Steven Johnson, a science journalist and the author of 11 books, including The Ghost Map, the story of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London and how a doctor and a minister without proper scientific training set out to prove that the outbreak stemmed from a neighborhood water pump even though the guiding consensus was that the disease was airborne, said he had sympathy for Berenson’s outsider status in attempting to shed light on the disease.
Johnson started following Berenson’s analysis early on, and thought he made some sense, but not any more, as the disease has become far more contagious than anyone realized, which means that even a relatively low death rate could lead to a staggering number of fatalities. “I don’t know how you could look at the situation in New York and say we made the wrong call,” Johnson said. “And I don’t know how you can compare it to the flu. Even the worst flu season isn’t going to overwhelm the health system.” Berenson’s obsession with early models that turned out to be wrong don’t account for the fact that behavior changed because those very models were put out and governments responded accordingly. “It’s not like a model of the path of a hurricane,” Johnson said. “In this case, we are the hurricane, and we can change its path.”
— Diana Falzone contributed reporting.
