The Vindication of Dr. Bhattacharya

Banished by the medical establishment for resisting Covid policies, he now runs the agency that made them

Before he was confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was a well-respected professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, from which he took an M.D. in medicine and a Ph.D. in economics, econometrics, and health economics.

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Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and, unlike the majority of academics across the United States, Dr. Bhattacharya did not quickly fall in line with the normative narrative. Just days after the government ordered Americans to shelter-in-place, he co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that questioned the rationale for lockdowns. Later, he was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which codified resistance to government mandates.

The story of Dr. Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration exposes a systematic effort by the Biden administration to suppress scientific truths at the expense of life and liberty. With his confirmation, America and the world are witnessing a momentous victory for “real science” and free speech.

Named for its drafting and signing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, The Great Barrington Declaration was published on October 5, 2020, months before any Covid - 19 vaccines were widely available. Its premise: lockdowns and restrictive measures will inflict harm, and people at high risk of the disease should be protected while healthy people should live normally as herd immunity develops.

The story of the ‘declaration’ is a tale of sensible scientific minds sticking to their truths even as the government and government-supported scientists made every effort to ridicule and silence them.

The declaration’s three authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, were highly respected academic leaders. Their combined expertise did not focus on the sole metric of stopping disease spread, but on the ancillary consequences to society if lockdowns were implemented.

This contradicted the misinformation narrative of Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins. In an email to Fauci four days following the release of the Declaration, Collins wrote: “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. Is it underway?"

Collins and Fauci conspired to rally a government disinformation network to discredit Bhattacharya and the declaration, including via social media platforms later implicated in the “Twitter files” as co-opted by the Biden administration to do the government’s bidding. The World Health Organization decried the declaration a dangerous strategy lacking a sound scientific basis. Dozens of supposed health authorities, including the American Public Health Association, rallied to condemn the declaration in an open letter stating:

“If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives…. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way.’”

The exact opposite is now known to be the truth: these organizations participated in a coordinated smear campaign that itself cost innumerable lives. The political strategy of the NIH under Collins ignored the sound public health expertise of the declaration’s authors in favor of fearmongering, lockdowns, and government domination at the expense of free speech liberties and scientific inquiry.

As the National Review later explained in “Francis Collins & Anthony Fauci's Great Barrington Declaration Attack Was Wrong”:

“Real scientists would investigate the premises first, then decide if the declaration should be subject to a “takedown,” but no such thing ever happened. The authors were disparaged, their motives impugned, their conclusions ridiculed, but one looks in vain for anything like a scientific counter-argument.

“It’s enough to make you suspect that the real objective of Fauci and friends was expansion of government authority rather than protection against disease.”

Jay Bhattachrya and crew stuck to their truth-telling guns, criticizing the efficacy of masks, social distancing, school closures, and even (gasp!) vaccine effectiveness. This determination has paid off in revelations of common sense and led to the eventual dethroning of the disgraced Collins. On his way out the NIH door, Dr. Collins leveled still more slanderous guff at the Great Barrington Declaration and its supporters. Collins labeled the (now widely accepted) lab-leak theory a “huge distraction,” and maligned as killers those telling Americans the truth:

“Outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins took aim at the makers of the "The Great Barrington Declaration," refusing to step down from calling them ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while arguing ‘hundreds of thousands’ would have died of COVID-19 if the country followed their advice.

“Collins told Fox News host Bret Baier Sunday that he was ‘not going to apologize’ for comments Friday in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in which he called advocates of herd immunity ‘fringe epidemiologists,’ arguing that ‘hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.’”

This shameless dishonesty has been thoroughly debunked. Defending themselves in a subsequent article published by The Brownstone Institute, Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff wrote:

“It is impossible to shut down society completely. Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in necessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from COVID.

“Collins, Fauci, and [Dr. Jeremy] Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.”

Over time, truth conquers propaganda. In 2024, Collins admitted the utter folly of his disparagement of the Declaration:

“Collins, whose July 2023 comments recently attracted online attention, confessed that ‘public health people’ made a ‘really unfortunate’ mistake by ignoring the devastating side effects of the interventions they believed were necessary to curtail COVID-19 transmission.

“During the pandemic, the wisdom of weighing costs against benefits was not just forgotten but explicitly repudiated.

“Collins … regrets that he and his colleagues paid insufficient attention to the ‘collateral damage’ caused by restrictions on social, economic, and educational activity. ‘We probably needed to have that conversation more effectively,’ he said.”

In remarks to The Kennedy Beacon, Great Barrington signatory Dr. Meryl Nass responded to Francis Collins' admission:

"A day late and a dollar short,” she said. “Collins was central to the conspiracy that kept the [false] notion of ‘zoonotic spillover’ alive to protect himself and his agency--or worse, to prolong the pandemic and roll out a vaccine he must have known was deadly by mid 2021. Is this evil man now trying to polish his legacy?"

Dr. Bhattacharya’s most tremendous vindication: he is now America’s first Indian American to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya and all those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration are true freedom fighters. It is a new day in America.

(Originally published at the Kennedy Beacon.)