This is a fascinating article about an “academic” organization with shallow roots but a prestigious name. It was created in 2022. It confers awards on award-worthy recipients and on fringe academics. Its purpose seems to be to add luster to the latter.

Take the recent Trump nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health:

On October 24, an organization called the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (AASL) honored Stanford University Professor and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya with its Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom. 

Announcing the award, the group praised the professor for “resolutely” resisting “enormous pressure to compromise his scientific findings” and risking “his own personal and professional self-interest, repeatedly, without hesitation, to take a stand for the public’s right to unrestricted scientific discussion and debate.” A few days later, The New York Post picked up the story, running it with the headline, “Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award.” 

“Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award,” the article began. “The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.”

It is true that Bhattacharya is a controversial figure for his contrarian stance on the COVID-19 pandemic. He first burst onto the national scene in 2020 as the co-author of an inaccurate and bias-prone, but influential, seroprevalence study that significantly underestimated the dangers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Later, he was one of three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, awidely rebuked document that outlined the failed pandemic herd immunity strategy embraced by the Trump administration. Since then, the professor has been a go-to expert for Republican politicians and right-wing groups working to politicize public health and government efforts to control COVID. He has taken to claiming that he was censored by the federal government for his views and even unsuccessfully sued the Biden administration over his claims.

Bhattacharya has also cultivated alliances with anti-vaxxers. Last month, a health policy symposium he organized at Stanford came under fire for featuring a number of them along with minimizers and lab leak enthusiasts. He spoke at the Robert Kennedy Jr. campaign’s vice presidential announcement, has been proposedby RFK Jr. for a leadership role in CDC, and is currently listed on Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again website as a potential pick for director of the National Institutes of Health.

But Bhattacharya’s reputation is not the only explanation for the lack of media attention given to the award ceremony, which took place in the vaunted Library of Congress. Another is the fact that the AASL is largely unknown. The group only emerged in 2022, fueled by the private family foundation of an investment fund CEO. A closer look at AASL and its origins and activities provides a disturbing window into how wealthy business interests are working to reshape academia in support of their agenda.

You should read the rest of the article. Can money buy prestige? Read on.

AASL borrows prestige by honoring well-known figures in the arts, sciences, and letters, then confers prestige on rightwing academics who have been scorned by the mainstream.