Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, came to his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee representing the triumph of science over dogma.
The Stanford economics professor was one of the leaders of the lockdown skeptics movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and suffered personally and professionally as a result of his contrarian views.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration that challenged the conventional wisdom on lockdowns and school closings.
The Declaration “criticized school closures and society-wide restrictions and instead argued for a strategy of ‘focused protection’ that would ‘allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally,” reports Christian Britschgi of Reason.com.
Former NIH Director Francis Collins demanded a “quick and devastating published take down” of Bhattacharya’s argument. The Sainted Anthony Fauci described the Great Barrington Declaration as “nonsense.”
Standing in Bhattacharya’s way was the entire public health establishment in the United States, Democratic politicians, the Teachers’ Unions, and celebrities who wouldn’t have known a microscope from a stethoscope. In the end, his argument won out.
It was a complete rout. At Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing, Democrats who once called him “dangerous” and “fringe” were as silent as church mice.
Not a single Democrat mentioned the Great Barrington Declaration. None bothered to press Bhattacharya on his opposition to once-consensus opinions on lockdowns, masking, and school closures.
Despite having every opportunity and incentive to attack Bhattacharya as a dangerous crank nominee, the minority on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chose not to even mention what were once his most controversial views.
Instead, Democrats almost exclusively focused their questions on the Trump administration’s recent pauses of NIH grant and advisory committees and caps on grantees’ indirect research spending. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) asked Bhattacharya if he’d lead a campaign against food companies’ advertisement of unhealthy snacks to children.
When Bhattacharya’s COVID views were mentioned, the comments came from Republican senators heaping praise on him.
What should we do about the skeptic critics who actively tried to suppress Bhattacharya’s and the others’ views and ended up being spectacularly — and tragically — wrong?
There is evidence, for instance, that Fauci knew his ideas of how to stop the spread of COVID were largely nonsense, that masks were ineffective, that lockdowns weren’t working, and that herd immunity was not a crackpot theory because it was working in Sweden.
Facui’s tissue of lies about “gain of function” research should already result in his being held in contempt of Congress. But what about American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten? Despite the recommendation of several physician groups to reopen the schools, Weingarten worked hand-in-glove with the CDC and the White House to keep them closed.
In May 2021, The Post reported on conversations between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AFT and the White House. Weingarten’s union actually suggested language for the CDC’s school-reopening guidance released in February that resulted in schools staying remote longer into the 2020-2021 school year.
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Collins, Fauci, Weingarten, and other COVID authoritarians have all gotten a free pass from the media and Congress. The greatest challenge to the American public health system since the killer flu epidemic of 1918 was met with an autocratic, anti-democratic stone wall that punished dissent or any independent thinking at all.
“The role of scientists is to say these are the risks by giving more data,” said Bhattacharya. “Science should be an engine for freedom, knowledge and freedom.”
That’s exactly the attitude we need from our new director of NIH.
