The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.
Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.
Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.
Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.
She wrote:
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 