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.