An open letter to CDC Director Walensky: Can we talk about it?

The best way to reduce the impact of so-called "misinformation spreaders" is to engage them in an open public dialog. Censorship has made things worse. Are you open to trying a new approach?

Executive summary

Misinformation costs lives.

Attempts to censor opposing views has only made the problem worse.

We are interested in meeting with the CDC, FDA, and NIH to discuss the evidence and see if we can agree on how to interpret the data. We are interested in exposing the truth about the COVID mitigation measures.

We hope you will agree that dialog to resolve our differences and find the truth is more productive than attempting to censor us.

The open letter

Dear Dr. Walensky,

Hi. My name is Steve Kirsch. There are some people who believe that my friends and I are responsible for generating most of the world’s misinformation in regards to COVID mitigation policies.

I am reaching out to you because both of us have a common interest: we both strongly agree that misinformation is a problem that costs lives and should be reduced.

Where we differ, however, is in who we believe is responsible for spreading misinformation.

There are two basic ways to resolve this conflict and achieve consensus:

1. Censorship: You can censor, deplatform, threaten, demonetize, gaslight, and intimidate the other party.

2. Dialog: You can seek to persuade the other party through civil dialog.

For reasons we have never understood, those supporting the government narrative have only tried method #1. Today, three years later, the results are now very clear: it hasn’t worked at all. In fact, it has done the opposite: it has made things much worse. Today, fewer people than ever are believing government authorities and the number of “misinformation spreaders” has grown dramatically. Every single day, there are many more people moving to our side of the narrative than to your side. Every time you release a new booster, few and fewer people are taking it. Today, just 1.3% of eligible children under 5 have been vaccinated with the COVID vaccine, a fact you readily concede. The low acceptance rate for your narrative isn’t because parents haven’t heard your arguments; it is because the credibility of the CDC is now at an all time low. As time goes on, fewer and fewer people are believing the CDC and more and more are siding with our side of the narrative. Even though you are outspending us by at least 10,000:1 on marketing, you are losing badly. Thus, method #1 is a losing strategy by any objective measure.

May I suggest that you give approach #2 a try and see if that might work better? This approach was suggested by UCSF Professor Vinay Prasad in an op-ed published nearly 3 years ago in STAT entitled “Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard, not demonized.”

If you are open to hosting a forum where a group of scientists from the CDC, FDA, and NIH can engage with us in a public forum to resolve our differences and determine the truth about the mitigation policies, please have Carol Crawford give me a call and we can work through all the details for hosting such an event.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

12/18/22: I left a voice message with Carol Crawford at the CDC notifying her of our offer. One of my colleagues (whose email is not yet blocked by the CDC) mailed Dr. Walensky’s official email which we have verified is read and works. I will update this article if we hear back.