Jay Bhattacharya: once thwarted, now nominated for NIH director
Jay Bhattacharya has been up, then down, and now up again. His academic pedigree has always been stellar: it’s Stanford all the way, from undergrad to medical degree to PhD in economics. Then work at RAND, teaching at UCLA, then the Hoover Institution and back to a Stanford professorship.
A star.
That is, until he gave commonsense suggestions regarding COVID masking and lockdowns – suggestions that ran against the official line.:
He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through “focused protection” of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. This would let the virus spread in low-risk groups, with the aim of achieving “herd immunity”, which would result in enough of the population becoming resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic. The authors conceded that it was hard to protect older people in the community, but suggested individuals could shield themselves and that efforts to keep infections low “merely dragged matters out”.
It seems reasonable now – and it seemed reasonable then. But it was heavily criticized.
Then, in March of 2021, he wrote that the lockdowns were the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.” I wrote this post at the time about what he’d said. An excerpt:
In the US – the country I know best – I believe that initially it really was a public health decision, borne of fear, the unknown, and the desire to be as safe as possible and buy time to prepare. But not long after, the lockdown took on another life and was propelled by much more than the public health considerations, as people in charge saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to accomplish a host of things they might otherwise have difficulty achieving.
First and foremost was to harm Donald Trump’s presidency and chances of re-election. Mission accomplished. Next was the sheer exercise of power over the little people. That can be very intoxicating, particularly for the left, and they learned a lot from it. One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! Not only is power intoxicating and even contagious for those in charge, but fear is apparently contagious to much of the public, and the habit of fear is hard to break.
Another possible motive in this country was to harm the non-elite and reward the elite. …
Voices of warning were drowned out almost from the start. I recall writing a post one year ago, almost to the day, that mentioned that the amount of fear seemed way out of proportion to the actual risk involved with COVID. I wasn’t the only one saying this, but we were in the minority.
Well, Bhattacharya was really in the minority, and as a result his voice was stifled:
According to a December 2022 release of the Twitter Files, Bhattacharya was placed on a Twitter “Trends blacklist” in August 2021 that prevented his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches. It appeared to coincide with his first tweet on the service, which advocated for the Great Barrington Declaration’s herd immunity proposal.
And yesterday, Trump named him as the prospective head of NIH. Seems like a really good pick to me. He’s got the credentials – including a specialization in the economics of health care. In my opinion, he’s earned the post.
Amidst a field of mostly good choices, this is stellar. Blessings to the really Good Doctor.
I agree that Bhattacharya is an excellent choice. He certainly knows the problems in academia from the inside. He was shamefully treated by Stanford. See this interview of him by a conservative publication at Stanford.
https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview-with-dr-jay-bhattacharya/
Rooting out the academic rot is a big job, but at NIH he has the power of the purse. I hope he uses it.
A great choice. It made my day when I learned that Trump had nominated Jay Bhattacharya for NIH director. I agree with John+Guilfoyle- one of the best among a field of good choices. My hope for the future of our country increases every day.
I sincerely hope he can get to the bottom of that fraud and fire the people who were responsible. The Left is never held to account.
Dr. Jeff Gold was the top guy at the University of Nebraska Medical Center when the School of Medicine and School of Public Health recommended that all Nebraska school students continue to wear masks one year into covid.
Dr. Gold was nominated to be the President of the entire of University of Nebraska system. I drove down to Lincoln and took him to task for that. Of course he got approved, but at least one person (me!) complained about that giant error.
An outstanding choice.
Good points, neo. Am I a bad person for anticipating the howls from the Usual Suspects? Grins.
Yes, a very good choice. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and now maybe we’ll get some transparency, along with some credible analysis of what went well and what didn’t. Oh, and maybe a plan for how to better deal with future pandemics.
The protest/riots of the summer of 2020 occurred without a great wave of infections. I suspected then that the virus was not as transmissible as advertised. Fauci and Birx saw only what they wanted to see, and lockdowns were the answer.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the calm and clear approach Neo took during Covid when the MSM was spreading fear.
Her posts and links to good information were invaluable. Kept my wife and I from freaking out. 🙂
The right guy at the right time. Saw the 36 min video below at Ace’s place. I can’t wait until he’s read into the classified research he has deduced led to Covid and the unprecedented USG response.
“Dr. Bhattacharya was silenced after he questioned the narrative on Covid. He joined @mkibbe to discuss this in the first episode of our docuseries ‘The Coverup’ on @theblaze”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1861589658985009511
I don’t disagree with any of the commentary here, but I have a feeling that you all might be underestimating the significance of this pick. My impression is that the NIH, and secondarily the FDA, are a big part of the giant pharma and crony capitalism government collusion. If you believe that “following the money” is usually a good idea, then this is potentially one of the biggest areas of conflict. I hope Mr. B lives to see this through and also stays out of jail.
During Covid I loved Jay Bhattacharya. I was sure he was brave and right. So I wasn’t surprised when he was marginalized.
Now he will be in charge of the NIH.
Imagine!
I hope there’s space somewhere for Martin Kuldorff, one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. He was fired from Harvard Medical School, ostensibly for refusing to get the Covid shots (after already having had Covid), but presumably more for defying the herd.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I confessed to a morbid curiousity about the response by virologists and public health authorities. Tragically, they failed to meet the country’s needs.
All the frustrations of my experience in academia over the previous thirty years were repeated on a much larger stage. Bhattacharya’s appointment, like Trump’s election, is a beginning, not an end. Thousands of bureaucrats, in the NIH and in the universities, will be arrayed against him. They will do anything to undermine his every utterance. To clean out the swamp in Washington will be an easy task compared to cleaning out the one in science. Since our civilization depends on the latter, the work will require heroic efforts.
@ Neo: “One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! ”
But I certainly hope the Covid episode has firmed up our spine to resist a “fear play” the “next time”, without a greater basis of real evidence to justify our cautions and responses.
Which leads in turn to ….
J.J. on November 27, 2024 at 6:58 pm “… and maybe a plan for how to better deal with future pandemics.”
But unfortunately we have not taken this opportunity to truly lay out and debate the pros and cons of just what our responsible responses should be for when the next epidemic is more viral/lethal, or impacts a different or wider subset of the population (just the children? or the whole population?), etc.
We learned that we have to keep the economy going to retain and supply the protection and recovery resources needed (material and human), and that almost everyone is necessary or essential in this process (except the talking heads and related media?). We have not prepared action plans and governance measures, with legal and other limits, legislative or judicial reviews of (authorized or unauthorized) executive activities, and decision making procedures, with the maximum preservation of liberty coupled with the maximum preservation of life. In its own way, this is worse than the failures of FEMA to provide high quality support after the two recent hurricanes, where we already know/knew what was or would be or could be needed. In regards to a future epidemic, we have known unknowns that we can readily convert to known knowns.
Cornhead, in ref to Dr. Gold, it sounds like you ended up tilting at a different sort of windmill.
Cornflour, instead of mere peer reviews of published scientific work, we may end up requiring successful replication of results at two other independent labs to reasonably settle on what has truly been “discovered”. From a funding/ resource perspective, this might lead to a restriction on the breadth of what gets investigated vs. providing confirmatory depth.
R2L
I knew Dr. Gold had the votes and said so. But the Regents and Dr. Gold needed to know that at least one person was on to them.