Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Alex Berenson was primarily known for one thing: His 2019 book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, which received overwhelmingly negative reviews and was widely lambasted in the scientific community as an alarmist diatribe that disingenuously misinterpreted and cherry picked data to make wild claims about the link between marijuana use and severe mental disorders. The covid-19 pandemic provided Berenson with an entirely new audience for his brand of contrarianism.

Dubbed the “Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by the Atlantic, Berenson has no scientific background but has spun himself on Twitter and Fox News as a master interpreter of epidemiological and medical research fearlessly challenging nanny-state chastising about the coronavirus. (While he markets himself as the lone rational man standing in opposition to Big Epidemiology-Media Complex, Berenson is also fond of bragging that he used to be a reporter for the New York Times.) He’s been extraordinarily confident in his own abilities and regularly compares scientists and health authorities to cults, even as he struck out on prediction after prediction.

In October 2020, Berenson mocked Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predictions of a U.S. death toll of over 500,000 by spring 2021. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine estimates the current death toll at 605,000, a number that studies have indicated is almost certainly an underestimate. Berenson has pointed to data showing vaccines are safe as evidence they are actually causing severe illness; displayed a complete lack of understanding as to how vaccines affect the immune system; and regularly suggested that the non-elderly are worse off vaccinated than not, despite the CDC’s weekly mortality report now pegging the U.S. death toll under the age of 65 from the virus at over 122,000. He claimed that data from early in Israel’s vaccination program proved coronavirus vaccines were underperforming disastrously, even though it later became known as one of the most effective programs in the world.

Berenson has, at least in the short term, benefited immensely from his hard pivot to crank. He regularly appeared on Fox News shows such as Sean Hannity’s and Tucker Carlson’s, even scoring a special Fox Nation program called (we shit you not) Covid Contrarian. This fall, he’s releasing a book called Pandemia, which claims that the pandemic was an excuse for government officials to deprive citizens of their rights and impose draconian control over everyday life.