Senate Confirms Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as NIH Director
The last time we wrote about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, medical freedom advocate and champion of sensible COVID policies, Scientific American magazine published a critical piece arguing that his nomination as National Institutes of Health (NIH) director could harm science and public health.
Fortunately, science and reason prevailed in the US Senate today, and Bhattacharya is now the head of that agency.
I will simply point out that logic and rationale decision-making occurred strictly along party lines.
The Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, the Stanford University doctor and economist who rose to prominence as a vocal critic of the country’s handling of the covid-19 pandemic.The 53-47 party-line vote Tuesday means that Bhattacharya — one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the pandemic critique that urged health officials to end stay-at-home orders — will take charge of the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. His tenure atop an agency he has criticized comes at a time when the $48 billion arm of the Department of Health and Human Services has been hit by significant staff and research cuts.
Bhattacharya, a physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University, gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to widespread lockdowns and other restrictive measures. He was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for protecting vulnerable populations while circulating the virus among lower-risk groups.
This is a karma. According to the Twitter Files released in December 2022, Bhattacharya was placed on a Twitter “Trends blacklist” in August 2021, which prevented his tweets from appearing in trending topics searches. This action coincided with his first tweet on the platform, which advocated for the Great Barrington Declaration’s herd immunity proposal.
As a reminder, The Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020, advocated for ending covidlockdowns and implementing a strategy called “Focused Protection,” which aimed to shield vulnerable populations while allowing the virus to spread among lower-risk individuals. The declaration was authored Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University).
Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, strongly opposed the declaration. In private emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Collins referred to its authors as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a “quick and devastating takedown” of its premises. He expressed concerns about the declaration’s influence and alignment with certain political ideologies (namely the ones calling for and end to the useless lockdowns). Collins’s actions were criticized for suppressing scientific debate, with some commentators accusing him of fostering a narrow-minded approach during the pandemic.
Not only narrow-minded, but wrong.
This is a YUGE win for scientific debate and medical freedom, and another successful nod to the Make American Healthy Again contingent that helped elect President Donald Trump.
In his new position, Bhattacharya wants to amend how science funding is directed and would like more research on vaccines.
He has also argued for reforms to scientific funding practices, including applying greater scrutiny to research findings that are not borne out by subsequent studies and directing money toward the most far-reaching and innovative research rather than incremental studies.Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines…
This is great news, as Bhattacharya’s position will help ensure we never have senseless lockdowns again, even if there is a bird-flu-monkeypox-covid frankenvirus released from a gain-of-function laboratory.
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