Trump Taps Bhattacharya to Run NIH.     Who?

Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, Patel — The media loops through these controversial choices day after day. Certain of the less-noticed Trump picks are no less controversial but are overlooked. Here’s one of particular importance at a time when viruses pose an increasing threat to the human race.

The right has arrived at a widespread view that lockdown mandates and remote teaching in 2020 and 2021 were the wrong remedies for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hindsight that gives no quarter to the epidemiological “experts” – now spoken of with scorn — who had to come up with methods to combat a plague not experienced in a hundred years.

So it was deemed "karmic justice", said a full-page Wall Street Journal interview, when President-elect Trump tapped Jay (Jayanta) Bhattacharya to be
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The professor at Stanford University was much vilified for his contrarian views in the early months of the outbreak. The article is titled "The Man Who Fought Fauci—and Won" and tells us that his Bengali first name means “one who is victorious in the end.” The newspaper says, “Bhattacharya is as qualified as you can get to be head of the National Institutes of Health”, not least for his nomination being “a triumph of free speech”.

Dr. Bhattacharya is both a physician and economist, a combination that led to statistical conclusions first voiced in March and April of 2020 that made him a pariah in epidemiological circles. He co-authored an op-ed titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” that argued, followed by a study a month later, that the number of asymptotic and undetected cases vastly outnumbered those confirmed by testing, meaning that the death rate relative to all infections was much lower than the alarm sounded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH. Consequently, there was little justification for…

"the extraordinary measures …[of] shelter-in-place orders and quarantines… being carried out in cities and states around the country."

This was not helpful. Dr. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, had persuaded President Trump that a few weeks of stay-at-home shutdown of the economy was the right medicine to halt the spread of the virus. The nation was watching on television the refrigerator trucks in New York City hauling away the dead and Governor Cuomo pleading with the federal government for respirators. The death count was of greater alarm than the death rate.

To combat the spread of the disease, the CDC and NIH were following the standard public health practices of the past – avoidance of contact (“social distancing” of six-feet), masks, and
In the U.S., close to 1,500 healthcare workers
aiding the rest of us have died from Covid.

vaccines when they miraculously became available in early 2021. They were dealing with unknowns. Use of hand sanitizers were urged because it was not yet known that Covid was transmitted as an aerosol. Schools closed, because it was not yet known that children proved less susceptible. “Remote learning” was substituted, the fear being kids in classrooms would become Covid carriers and take the virus home to mom, dad, and highly vulnerable grandparents.

Bhattacharya, however, called the lockdown measures “the single biggest public health mistake”, that the “scientific establishment utterly failed during Covid”, that scientists embraced ideas that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and of course the harm to children from school closures.”

Months later, in October of 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya and two colleagues, Oxford University Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta and Swedish bio-statistician and former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, published an open letter which they called the “Great Barrington Declaration” (named after the town where it was presented). Dr. Bhattacharya is no stranger to this publication. Here’s what we reported at the time about the declaration:

”It makes no mention of wearing masks, distancing, crowd avoidance, nor any other of the preventives urged for months by scientists and medical professionals. It offers neither footnotes nor data traditional to scientific documents.”

It was something of a petition — its website, in 29 languages, asking for endorsement and claiming that 500,000 “concerned citizens” had signed on, among them over 10,000 medical and public health scientists, and over 28,000 medical practitioners, was its claim. Our report continues:

”The declaration claims that herd immunity can be achieved when as little as 10% to 20% of a population has been infected and carries antibodies, a proposition which the mainstream community finds preposterous. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health, calls the theory ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’. Fauci called it ‘ridiculous’… It ‘is just nonsense’, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produces the widely-cited epidemic model that the White House itself has used in its briefings. A recipe for ‘carnage’ tweeted Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. ‘Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,’ was the reaction of the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak’.

Think of vaccines. The standard threshold for herd immunity is at least 60% and more usually 70% of the population having had a disease…The point is that there must be a high enough proportion of persons in any cluster, gathering, or crowd to cause a virus to have difficulty finding someone with no antibody defenses…But with only 10% to 20% having been infected, a virus can easily find targets….The Washington Post did an analysis that showed that for the United States, with a population of 328 million, to reach a 65% herd immunity threshold could lead to 2.13 million deaths.”

The White House was considering adoption of the Barrington method. Trump’s new science adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist having no experience with respiratory diseases, was taken with the theory of "herd immunity" and brought the declaration’s authors to the White House. Our report objected:

”How would older people be protected, as the Great Barrington document blithely assumes?…How could the
nation's hospitals possibly deal with the onslaught of cases if the disease were allowed to run wild? Does this administration care at all for the safety — both physical and mental — of the nation's doctors, nurses, and hospital staff?”

All of this is forgotten. Conservative media remembers only the economic setback and the learning loss of school children without regard for the consequences of letting the virus run free. They forget what the Great Barrington Declaration actually said, and celebrates it as virtuous contrarian free speech.

Now riding the wave of revisionist approval, Dr. Bhattacharya presses his case as if proven valid. He bears particular animosity toward Dr. Fauci given his opposite view of how the pandemic should have been handled, referring to him and others as a "small number of scientific bureaucrats" who dominated "for a very long time." The scientific elite denies…

“scientific facts like immunity…the rights to bodily autonomy, to informed consent, to free speech… deciding that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.”

These violations “embraced by scientists as necessary to control the pandemic” were unnecessary and failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, in Bhattacharya's view.
It fails to mention that hundreds of thousands of the 1.2 million Americans who died from Covid effectively practiced Dr. Bhattacharya’s herd immunity by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated.

The National Institutes of Health is ritually spoken of as the crown jewel of the America health system. It is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With a budget of $48 billion, the NIH employs roughly 20,000 people at its 27 institutions devoted to different diseases and research. It awards grants of another $31 billion annually for work done by outside organizations and universities.

HHS is soon to be run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., if the president-elect has his way. “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research".

Dr. Bhattacharya has no experience running a large organization but has big plans. He finds the NIH “sclerotic” and offers data that the median age of its researches is a decade older then forty years ago.

“The NIH has not given support for the ideas of younger people that it once did…We’re spending all this money, but we’re not getting the kind of innovation one would expect from this kind of investment.”

He wants to redirect the NIH to chronic diseases such as heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer. The $8 to $10 billion spent on infectious disease is disproportionate, he maintains. His advocacy of herd immunity by allowing “natural infection” squares with Kennedy, who believes vaccines cause autism and says "there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective", and he Covid-19 vaccine is "the deadliest vaccine ever made." Last November, according to NBC News, Kennedy told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’” Deliberate inattention – what sounds like a shutdown of research — at a time when a number of viruses threaten us is more than troubling, especially as we see H5N1 (bird flu) cross over from dairy herds to humans and watch for human-to-human transmissions with what could be a 50% death rate.

Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist currently at the University of Saskatchewan, has worked with the NIH, and has been “on the frontlines of communication” in the media about Covid-19. She is surprisingly outspoken about Dr. Bhattacharya, writing at X:

”Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers & promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, & science back for a generation. He’s not here to reform NIH. He’s here to destroy it.”