Jim Hartman
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University physician and economist, to lead the National Institutes of Health.
A skeptic of the COVID lockdowns, Bhattacharya was a pariah in the medical and scientific establishment four years ago.
During the initial onset of the pandemic, he wasn’t opposed to lockdowns because much was still unknown. But, as more data became available, Bhattacharya wrote about the dangers of widespread lockdowns, particularly the effects school shutdowns would have on children.
He urged that younger Americans return to work, allowing them to slowly build immunity against the virus.
On Oct. 4, 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration with Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta challenging universal lockdowns and mask mandates. They recommended a policy of “focused protection” for high-risk groups like the elderly or those with existing medical conditions.
Over 940,000 doctors and scientists around the world ultimately signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus of public health officials led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease for 38 years, and Dr. Frances Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health.
Collins sent Fauci an e-mail on Oct. 8, 2020.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises,” Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
Fauci assured Collins that the take-down was underway. Fauci told the press that there was no scientific divide and both doctors worked together with journalists to trash the Great Barrington Declaration.
The media cited Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Fauci got his talking points from the same media. Facebook censored references to the Great Barrington Declaration and Twitter blacklisted Bhattacharya.
The Biden administration pressured social media companies to suppress Bhattacharya’s posts.
The three research doctors weren’t “fringe” and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. However, in the panic over COVID, Fauci and Collins used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate.
In a Washington Post interview, Collins, the NIH chief between 2009-21, decried the Great Barrington statement “as a fringe component of epidemiology.”
“This is not mainstream science,” Collins added. “It’s dangerous” and “fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.”
Fauci told CBS that Republicans who criticized him were “really criticizing science, because I represent science.”
But Fauci isn’t science and for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent was dangerous. Bhattacharya was attacked and treated like a crank.
Many Americans now believe that school shutdowns and other pandemic policies lasted far too long and blame the public health establishment for an overly strict response.
If confirmed by the Senate as NIH director, Bhattacharya would head the single most important funder of biomedical research in the world, dispensing grants of nearly $50 billion a year.
He has called for reform at NIH urging more investment in research on chronic diseases and less on infectious disease. He’s willing to battle the bureaucracy, pledging to “rebalance the portfolio of the NIH to emphasize newer ideas that have the potential for huge breakthroughs.”
He says a major task for him is to restore trust that Americans have lost in health experts and the scientific establishment, “primarily because they utterly failed during COVID.”
Scientists embraced authoritarian policies that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and the harm to children from school closures.”
Bhattacharya showed courage in challenging the entrenched public heath establishment, including Fauci and Collins. He now stands vindicated.
E-mail Jim Hartman at lawdocman1@aol.com.