09-05-2025
NPR reporter says she was censored by boss during Covid lockdowns
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An NPR reporter says she was censored by a boss at the public radio network after suggesting they report on anti-lockdown proposals during COVID. Meghna Chakrabarti, host of On Point, said earlier this week that she wanted to do a show on the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 as the pandemic raged. The declaration dismissed most lockdown and social distancing measures as superfluous. But Chakrabarti says an unnamed boss shut the idea down.
'There was a point in time where I wanted to actually do a show on the Great Barrington Declaration,' the NPR longtimer revealed. 'I wanted to do a very just a rigorous analysis... [and] try to bring some evidence to scrutinize it [either] positively or negatively... 'There was one person in particular that was a colleague of mine, who just said, we cannot talk about it,' she said of the declaration. 'That even talking about it in a rigorous objective manner is spreading misinformation.
'I'll never forget that,' she continued - leading Zweig to remark: '[The] hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.' 'But this person is someone I deeply respect and admire, and their decisions are top notch, highly, highly intelligent,' Chakrabarti went on to explain. '[But] I wanna bring up this story,' she asserted. 'I wanna bring up this story specifically because fear.' Chakrabarti did not name her colleague, but discussed the incident during a chat with New York journalist David Zweig about the harmful effects of lockdowns five years on.
Zweig, Chakrabarti's guest, has written extensively on the US' COVID-19 response for publications for like Atlantic, New York Magazine, and The New York Times . His coverage has been critical, framing the closures of public schools and other social distancing measures as 'one of the worst American policy failures in a century'. Chakrabarti said she was troubled by school closures during fall 2020, around the time three doctors created the Great Barrington Report, which was slammed by most in the liberal media.
She then brought up how figures like Francis Collins - the then director of the National Institutes of Health - 'wanted to squash the declaration' perhaps prematurely, on the basis it was 'a bad idea.' Penned by Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta, and the NIH's Jay Bhattacharya it preached the notion of 'focused protection', and that those most at risk of dying should only undergo measures to be kept safe - no one else.
Collins, 75, left his post in December 2021, and Anthony Fauci - a figure who also framed the well-cited open letter as 'nonsense and very dangerous' - resigned a year later. Both played integral roles in the US government's widely ridiculed pandemic response, which Chakrabarti said created 'political pressures' in NPR's newsroom. She added how the anecdote proved Americans, at the time, could not have 'certain conversations', as fears permeated during the pandemic's early days. Many have since accused members of the media of perpetuating that fear - all at the behest of the federal government.
World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus - who still holds his position - bashed the herd immunity concept proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration as 'scientifically and ethically problematic.' David Nabarro, a special envoy of the health agency, claimed lockdowns could only be avoided 'if governments [first] impose some reasonable restrictions like social distancing and universal masks and install test and trace strategies.'
Such a response - the one the government ultimately went with - has since been questioned by a steady stream of scientists. Others have slammed the government's decision-making process at the time, saying it negatively affected healthy citizens who were at lesser risk of infection. 'Herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination,' the WHO continues to maintain on its website. '[N]ot by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease.'
