Jon Chui

🚨 HOLDEN THORP'S LEGITIMIZATION CATASTROPHES EXPOSED: Amplified lockdowns in scientific discourse—now concedes they were “avoidable” in a striking reversal, amid a $14T U.S. pandemic economic toll (including closures and behavior changes; USC Schaeffer) and $2.14T lost during the first two months of mitigation measures (Mercatus). ⚠️ Thorp’s @ScienceMagazine editorials defended interventions such as lockdowns in the scientific discourse (e.g., the 2022 editorial “Thank you, Tony!”, defending “masks and lockdowns” against “misinformation”; and the separate 2020 editorial “Trump lied about science,” criticizing the downplaying of the pandemic as “devastating”), contributing to the pro-intervention narrative. Yet in February 2026, in “A tale of many twos,” he acknowledges that “anger over the pandemic lockdowns that many Americans now see as avoidable” fueled public distrust—an admission of hindsight amid the $14T U.S. economic toll of the pandemic (2020–2023), according to USC Schaeffer modeling of GDP shortfalls from closures and behavior changes. The first two months of pandemic mitigation measures alone cost $2.14T, according to Mercatus Center analysis. The broader pandemic toll has been estimated at roughly twice the scale of the Great Recession, contributing to the erosion of public trust. 🚨 A pattern emerges: Science magazine has legitimized perpetrators of the PubPeer “PubSmear” Network Mob through news coverage (e.g., 2018 and 2021 articles discussing Elisabeth M. Bik as an “image sleuth”) and through Derek Lowe’s multiple blog posts promoting Leonid Schneider’s reporting. These figures—whose activities have been exposed by the ScienceGuardians™ Legal and Investigative Team—include Schneider, self-implicated in harassment, defamation, academic falsification, and mocking s-e-x-u-a-l abuse survivors—and Bik, a fake 'science integrity consultant' who targets and smears researchers while actively censoring critiques of her own work on the compromised PubPeer platform. 🔗 Link to the evidentiary exposé in the comments. 👉 How much will this legitimization cost academia, science, and the world? 📌 Hold Thorp accountable for using the prestige of Science to legitimize contested actors and narratives. 🔱 ScienceGuardians™ holds no preferences in any fields of science, including various aspects of epidemiology, but strongly believes that politicizing science can lead to severely dangerous consequences, including threats to public health. 🔱 Follow @SciGuardians to be empowered and empower others. @realDonaldTrump @SecKennedy @NIHDirector_Jay @elonmusk @NIH @HHS_ORI @aaas