On Tuesday President-elect Donald Trump announced that he will nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency with an annual budget of $47 billion and more than 18,000 employees. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in government or large organizations, but like other Trump candidates, he speaks out loud about the tyranny of public health restrictions and social censorship. Media platform. Although Bhattacharya has stood out as a strong critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, he has publicly stated that he supports some routine childhood immunizations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).
Bhattacharya did not respond to an emailed list of questions. mother jonesheld several positions at Stanford, including at the university’s liberal-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya is one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document developed at a conference at the American Institute for Economic Research, a liberal think tank, calling for the United States to adopt a grand strategy to It was recommended to achieve herd immunity against coronavirus. Epidemic. Bhattacharya and his co-authors, biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, suggested quarantining vulnerable groups such as the elderly and people with weakened immune systems while allowing other citizens to continue as usual. It was proposed that they be allowed to do their work.
At a conference hosted by anti-lockdown group Brownstone Institute in November 2021, almost a year after the COVID-19 vaccine was launched, Bhattacharya said public health had become a tool for “authoritarian power” and “implementing a biosecurity state.” “He lamented. ” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he now heads, and has proposed punishing scientists who go against the consensus by denying them funding.
Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool for “authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”
Bhattacharya’s criticism of pandemic protocols has made him popular in right-wing circles, and he has become a regular at conservative gatherings. He criticized the suppression of academic freedom at an event at far-right Hillsdale College and a rally where then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.
But elsewhere, Bhattacharya’s criticism of the management of the pandemic is far from over. The Great Barrington Declaration was condemned by the American Public Health Association. In an open letter lanceA group of 80 scientists called this “a dangerous error unsupported by scientific evidence.” As journalist Walker Bragman reported, in 2021, Bhattacharya testified in a Tennessee court in favor of Gov. Bill Lee’s order allowing parents to send their children to school without masks. U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw blocked the order and wrote that Bhattacharya’s “demeanor and tone during his testimony suggest he is furthering a personal agenda.”
Bhattacharya frequently cited a 2023 review from the Cochrane Library, a medical database, questioning the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19. “It’s disheartening to see reputable experts ignoring the negative verdict of the Cochrane review on community masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” he posted to his 548,000 followers on X. Posted to followers. ” But Cochrane itself disagrees with Bhattacharya’s conclusions. “Many commentators have claimed that the latest update: Cochrane Review This is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” wrote Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library.
Meanwhile, Bhattacharya’s ties to powerful conservative groups and Silicon Valley heavyweights have increased his status and visibility. PayPal founder and top conservative donor Peter Thiel praised Bhattacharya and referred to him as a friend at the 2021 National Conservative Conference. Who what why why‘s Allison Neitzel reported. The following year, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Musk invited Bhattacharya to Twitter headquarters. There, the two discussed claims that the platform had “blacklisted” them for tweets criticizing public health guidelines for the pandemic.
It will be a while before we find out more about why Twitter 1.0 behaved so arrogantly. @ElonMuskSomeone who promised to help you find out. We will report the results to Twitter 2.0, where transparency and freedom of expression reign.
4/4— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022
In 2023, a promotional video by the Teneo Group, a political strategy organization led by conservative judicial kingpin Leonard Leo, included a montage briefly showing Bhattacharya.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has been outspoken about censorship, which he claims is silencing scientists who, like him, question the government’s approach to pandemic restrictions. He has been particularly critical of the censorship he has seen at his university, particularly the work done by the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to track pandemic disinformation. Bhattacharya alleged that the group serves as a “conduit for laundering the Biden administration’s social media censorship activities” and “embedded within social media companies to forward the government’s demands for censorship.” Renée DiResta, a disinformation scholar who was the group’s technical research manager, said she was told by her superiors not to publicly refute Bhattacharya’s claims, and that the damage he did to the group’s reputation led to its disbanding earlier this year. He said he may have contributed. Year. She said Bhattacharya’s criticism “created continued public pressure and led the university to decide that some of the work was not worth continuing to support.” Stanford University did not respond to a request for comment. mother jones.
In 2022, Bhattacharya joined a group of plaintiffs suing the Biden administration, alleging that the U.S. government pressured social media companies to suppress posts criticizing its pandemic policies. He was represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group that aims to “tame the illegitimate power of state and federal agencies,” and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. It was dismissed earlier this year on the grounds that the plaintiff lacked standing.
As the pandemic increasingly faded from view, Bhattacharya became involved in causes other than public health. He currently serves as an advisor to Third Rail, a consulting group that he says helps “neutralize” “self-censorship environments” and “counterproductive DEI initiatives.” The group’s founder is former New York City Community Education Board president Maud Maron, who has campaigned against transgender inclusion plans. Last year, Bhattacharya joined independent journalist Rav Arora to create a podcast called: illusion of agreementThe two hosts “dissect misconceptions about the scientific consensus, from COVID-19 policy to gender-affirming treatment.” Earlier this year, Neitzel reported that Bhattacharya had joined a group of scientists trying to convince the public that COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak.
If confirmed as NIH director, Bhattacharya will take charge of the agency responsible for allocating government funding for biomedical and public health research in the United States. He will help shape the research goals of the agency’s 27 research institutes, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a group that Dr. Anthony Fauci led until his retirement in 2022.
In a post on “After the fiasco of the Covid era, America’s scientific and public health institutions work for the benefit of the American people.”
