Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is feeling very great these days. In 2020, nearly the entire scientific community lined up against his criticism of the answer to the COVID-19 crisis.
Advertisement
The Stanford health scholar turned COVID contrary was savaged by the medical establishment for daring to issue Dr. Antony Fauci and the experts at the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) whose policy prescriptions led to huge deaths in nursing homes, a “lost generation” of children whose education was excessively short-circuited, and an economical blow from unnecessary “lockdowns” that we’re still trying to recover from five years later.
Bhattacharya was one of the primary endorsers of the” Great Barrington Declaration”. Signed by nearly a million academics and health professionals, it called out Fauci and the rest of the public health establishment for gravely miscalculating the effects of lockdowns. It warned that closing schools and shuttering factories would produce “devastating effects on short and long-term public health”, including “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health” . ,
Then-NIH Director Francis Collins called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist” whose views deserved a “quick and devastating published takedown”. Now, Bhattacharya will succeed Collins as NIH director in what has to be one of the most satisfying cases of schadenfreude in recent memory.
Exclusively for our VIPs:$ 20 Billion in’ Green Pork’ Fattens the Wallets of Radical Left NGOs and Non-Profits
Advertisement
Dr. Jay will travel to Capitol Hill today to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. His confirmation hearing, unlike that of his future boss, Robert Kennedy, is expected to be mild by comparison.
That’s what happens when a” contrarian” turns out to be right.
He’ll join a team of Covid contrarians led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eager to shake up the scientific establishment. Trump has gotten it started with a series of orders slashing funding and restricting diversity initiatives, while Elon Musk has moved to purge thousands of government employees.
Bhattacharya’s prepared remarks endorse Kennedy’s desire to shift focus toward the causes of chronic diseases and treatments for them, skepticism of existing science, and disgust with NIH leadership during the pandemic. Bhattacharya accuses his predecessors of fostering” a culture of coverup, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs”.
” Dissent is the very essence of science”, Bhattacharya is expected to say.
The debate over cuts to NIH is heating up. ” Will paring back the NIH’s funding force the agency to make better choices about the research it sponsors? Or will patients lose out on potential lifesaving treatments that NIH support has long made possible”? asks The Free Press.  ,
Advertisement
Hopefully, it will be the former. The problem, as I see it, is that one person’s  , “waste” could be another’s life-saving treatment. There’s also the unintended consequences of basic research. This is widespread in the medical research community. Research into one disease often leads to a solution to cure another disease.
In 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming was investigating the properties of Staphylococcus bacteria. He grew some in a petri dish before leaving for vacation.  ,
When he got back, a strange mold had attacked the bacteria, destroying it. He noticed the mold seemed to be preventing the bacteria around it from growing. He correctly deduced that the mold must have been secreting a substance that acted as a self-defense chemical.  ,
He named it penicillin.  ,
It’s not rare for research in one area to bleed into another. It’s the way it’s always been. Bhattacharya’s mission to restore trust in American science is a lofty goal that must take that into account.
