[acdha]

> Berenson did a turn on the pharmaceutical and healthcare beat at the New York Times, that has to count for something.

Not really, he was a business reporter with no medical training — he came to the NYT from The Street, and after he left to become a novelist his only subsequent non-fiction (kind of) work was a book alleging that cannabis usage causes psychosis, which got him considerable criticism from actual scientists.

> However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative

It's not censorship to suggest being less credulous and finding people who know what they're talking about to get advice from. It's not hard to find scientists who disagree with each other — it's a defining characteristic! — but he's not a scientist or even amplifying a significant group of scientists, and the ones who mention him do so to say that he's dangerously wrong. The most obvious giveaway is that he started with a paranoid conclusion rather than a falsifiable theory and when whatever he's saying is debunked he switches to something else which conveniently still supports the same conclusion. Even Fox News backed away from giving him a pulpit!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...