President-Elect Trump made another off-the-wall nomination, which is sure to demoralize the scientists and doctors who work in public health for the federal government.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.
Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.
The decision to choose Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on the politics on public health.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.
The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These people are idiots.
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Has there been a sensible selection? Trump is acting as a Russian asset. Who knew?
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Anyone paying attention.
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I am!
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It’s going to be a long hard slog, but I think we will survive it somehow, someway. We did survive the first Trump term and then he lost to Biden so there is hope.
Trump selects another crackpot to lead a very essential department, the NIH. Appalling and sad for the nation.
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From the story in The New York Times:
Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Mr. Trump during his first term, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.
Dr. Bhattacharya also became a go-to witness in court cases challenging federal and state Covid policies. He joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration over what he called “Covid censorship,” arguing that the administration violated the First Amendment in working with social media companies to tamp down on Covid misinformation.
He also argued against mask mandates for schoolchildren in Florida and Tennessee. Judges in both states dismissed him as unqualified to make medical pronouncements on the matter.
“His demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda,” Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee wrote in 2021, adding that he was “simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya.”
More recently, amid widespread recognition of the economic and mental health harms caused by lockdowns and school closures, Dr. Bhattacharya’s views have been getting a second look, to the consternation of his critics, who have accused those entertaining his ideas of “sane-washing” him.
Perhaps the most notable reflection has come from Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. In 2020, Dr. Collins called Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists.” Last year, Dr. Collins suggested that he and other policymakers might have been too narrowly focused on public health goals — saving lives at any cost — and not attuned enough to balancing health needs with economic ones.
“I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mind-set — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made,” Dr. Collins said in December 2023, at a conversation hosted by Braver Angels, a group that addresses political polarization. He did not address Dr. Bhattacharya or the Great Barrington Declaration specifically.
But Dr. Bhattacharya still provokes extremely strong feelings. Dr. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, who treated patients at Bellevue Hospital at the height of the pandemic, has assailed Dr. Bhattacharya in a book, “We Want Them Infected.”
Dr. Howard said Dr. Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as it was being made out to be, and that the death toll might top out at 40,000 Americans; in the end, 1.2 million died.
Dr. Bhattacharya responded on social media by calling Dr. Howard “unhinged” and his book “inane,” advising him to “take an epidemiology class if you don’t want to keep embarrassing yourself.”
The Great Barrington Declaration grew out of a meeting in Great Barrington, Mass., convened by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles. Its authors, who included doctors, scientists and epidemiologists, wrote that they had “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies.” They called their approach “Focused Protection.”
Alarmed and angry, 80 experts published a manifesto of their own, the John Snow Memorandum (named after the 19th-century English epidemiologist), saying that the declaration’s approach would endanger Americans who had underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe Covid-19 — at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates — and result in perhaps a half-million deaths.
“I think it’s wrong, I think it’s unsafe, I think it invites people to act in ways that have the potential to do an enormous amount of harm,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, a Harvard infectious disease specialist, said at the time. Dr. Walensky later became director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when President Biden took office.
Last month, Dr. Bhattacharya hosted a forum on pandemic policy at Stanford, saying he had hoped to bring together people of different views who would “talk to each other in a civil way.” But the forum itself became the target of attacks — a development that Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, called “dispiriting.”
One of Dr. Bhattacharya’s Stanford colleagues, Dr. Pantea Javidan of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was quoted in The San Jose Mercury News as saying the symposium gave “a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangerous, scientifically unsupported or thoroughly debunked approaches to Covid.”
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“Stupid is as stupid does”.
Insanity at it’s finest!
Mammon worship. . . by xtian theocrats.
What interesting times for the next four years.
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So, when the next epidemic hits. . . .
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THIS is our country, sad to say. The vote has been cast.
And, the word that came to my mind the other cold morning is….. SHABBY.
Of course, people become what they hate.
Oddly, tragically, Trump and his ilk are destined to make the United States into exactly the imaginary demon that they conjured up out of thin air: threadbare, seedy, mean, ungenerous, contemptible.
The straw man they concocted has become real, and oh-so-powerful. My God, he’ll soon be holding the nuclear codes again!
It’s absolutely Orwellian.
Make America Shabby Again.
There is nothing great about his plan.
Historians talk about “golden ages” in famous world civilizations.
What new music or art or literature or scientific achievements, what lifting of the human spirit, what good has flourished during this trump debacle?
It’s like the crappiest TV shows that come on late, late at night…infomercials for goofy, sham products. But now that’s us and the life being foisted upon us in real time.
He’s poisoned the well of America….even divided friends and split families.
Trump 2.0 is a epic scourge, rooted in the pandemic of 2020.
We never really left it.
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Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.”
When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:
“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”
Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.
He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger.
Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.
Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors.
Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.
Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.
The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid
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The Great Barrington Declaration was not the product of liberal anything. It was the product of right wing market worshipers who refuse to believe that anything is more important than profit, profit, profit.
It was sponsored by a libertarian think tank. Libertarians are not liberals. They are the opposite of liberal.
And “liberal media” is an oxymoron.
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The Great Barrington Declaration was not the product of liberal anything. It was the product of right wing market worshipers who refuse to believe that anything is more important than profit, profit, profit.
It was sponsored by a libertarian think tank. Libertarians are not liberals. They are the opposite of liberal.
And “liberal media” is an oxymoron.
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