Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been named the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, speculation has turned to who might be appointed director of the National Institutes of Health.
Before we get into that, here’s a related story.
I’ve several times featured Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, on the Tom Woods Show, and I’ve mentioned him a number of times in this newsletter. Jay and I became friends in the course of opposing the Covid madness.
You may recall that Jay was one of three authors — with Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta — of the Great Barrington Declaration, which decried lockdown hysteria as a catastrophically bad policy decision.
Jay’s view was that measures as extreme as society-wide lockdowns demanded an overwhelmingly strong consensus — and such a consensus did not exist. How could it? Nothing like that had ever even been recommended, much less tried.
A left-wing student group condemned him on posters splashed all over campus kiosks. “On a progressive-dominated campus,” Jay said, “these posters were clearly an incitement to violence. The group placed them on kiosks all over campus, including near a campus coffee shop that I frequent.”
Then in August 2021, Stanford’s chair of epidemiology, Melissa Bondy, had a hand in a secret petition circulated around the medical school urging Bhattacharya to be censured for saying, at a Ron DeSantis roundtable, that there were no randomized controlled trials demonstrating that masks on children did anything to stop the spread of Covid.
That statement happened to be true, but no matter — he wasn’t supposed to say it. Junior faculty worried about tenure knew they were expected to sign the petition.
And it wasn’t just Jay: Scott Atlas, whom I’ve also had the pleasure of featuring on the Tom Woods Show, was likewise attacked for speaking out against the novel and never-before-contemplated lockdown policy.
As Jay put it:
The university’s refusal to defend dissenting voices created an environment in which slander, threats, and abuse aimed at lockdown critics could flourish. In August 2020, when President Trump chose Dr. Atlas as a White House adviser on the pandemic, around 100 Stanford faculty members signed an open letter accusing Atlas of “falsehoods and misrepresentations,” without giving any specific examples. Instead, the faculty letter falsely implied that Atlas opposed handwashing.
When Martin Kulldorff challenged the signatories to a debate on the topic, none accepted. Instead, the Stanford Faculty Senate voted to censure Atlas formally, though no one voting had his expertise in public health policy.
In other words, it was the usual behavior we’ve come to expect from academia: refusal to debate dissidents, and the use of intimidation to make sure junior people know not to join the dissidents.
At no time did the university ever reprimand anyone trying to suppress Jay’s voice, or affirm his right to speak and to set forth opinions obviously based in scientific evidence.
Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health called Jay, a distinguished scholar, a “fringe epidemiologist” for opposing the inhuman Covid measures.
The White House mentioned him by name as someone Twitter needed to suppress.
Despite this atrocious treatment, Jay has become an internationally recognized voice of sanity.
And here’s where this story has been going, in case you didn’t already suspect it:
“Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH Critic, Emerges as a Top Candidate to Lead the Agency”
That’s the Washington Post headline from just two days ago.
It’s very rare to see justice of that kind, but here it is.
Jay has not only the scholarly accomplishments but also the professional temperament necessary for such a position.
I have told him numerous times: I cannot get over how consistently you keep your cool, when I would be wild and animated.
Jay was kind enough to write the foreword to my book Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania.
When I approached him about it, I told him that I understood completely if he preferred not to do it, that I had a rather more bellicose style than he himself preferred, and that I wouldn’t want to cause him more grief than he was already experiencing.
He was having none of it. He would be delighted to write the foreword, he said.
We shall find out soon whether he gets the nod. But imagine that: the man smeared by the current director of the National Institutes of Health could himself now be the director.