On the nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health

And why it means so much to so many

There’s been much excitement on Twitter/X of late about the nomination of Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I share in that excitement. I’m indescribably moved by it, in fact, and emotional, for reasons I will attempt to explain here.

First of all, it’s hard to describe how lonely it was to question/challenge lockdowns in the spring of 2020. I’ve often said, and believe it to be quite literally true, that my husband and I were the only ones in San Francisco who said “hell no” from day 1. March 13, 2020. When it was announced that schools would close. And the city locked down. Despite the claims it would only be for 2 weeks, or 15 days, or until the curve was flattened, the city did not return to normal until long after I left (which was in February 2021) — 3 years after lockdowns began. From my perspective that city will never be “normal” again. I cannot forgive the tyranny, the cruelty, the snitching encouraged by the city’s leaders.

At any rate, if you were an early covid dissident and you read this article on March 24, 2020 by Dr. Bhattacharya entitled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” — you would have felt seen and less alone, hopeful and less insane. (The hope was perhaps misguided but not the sense of camaraderie and less alone-ness. But who knew the extent of the cancelling that would come?)

Then in April, Dr. Jay (this is how he is affectionately referred to in the X-sphere) published a study with John Ioannidis, also from Stanford, entitled: COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California.

The article stated that many more people had already been infected with Covid than was presumed which meant it was far less deadly than the media’s fear mongering stated. That provoked an onslaught of smearing of these two scientists based on their recruiting methods for the study. The media was hell bent on sticking with the 3+% fatality rate that justified lockdowns — or so they thought. (For the record I don’t think lockdowns are ever justified.) They really wanted Covid to be as deadly as they imagined. And anyone who suggested otherwise needed to be cut off at the knees.

Around the same time, Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) published a piece on LinkedIn (no publication would accept it so he self-published it on the platform) entitled COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific. Here’s the opener and general premise:

Among COVID-19 exposed individuals, people in their 70s have roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, 300 times that of those in their 20s, and a mortality that is more than 3000 times higher than for children. Since COVID-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.

Jay and Martin persisted and in October of 2020 they, along with Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), gathered and published the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) which simply stated that we ought to protect the vulnerable and let everyone get back to business. (My view is we needed to do nothing, let people decide their risk tolerance for themselves, but at the time, this was a revelation. The reason I say do nothing is that isolating the elderly at a time when they likely have little life left, keeping them separated from loved ones, seems also cruel and unnecessary. Let them choose if they’d like to see their grandchildren. State mandated family separation is downright evil. Beyond that, if there is a trigger point at which is it considered “acceptable” to lock down the vulnerable, there is one that will be deemed “acceptable” to lock down everyone. And it gives every excuse to the tyrants to manufacture that trigger point. As they did during Covid. Same with speech and censorship. Never acceptable.)

Back to Jay and Martin — as we now know, the GBD prompted a “quick and devastating published takedown,” positioning its three esteemed authors as “fringe epidemiologists.”

For the record, here are the brief bios of these three:

Jayanta Bhattacharya is an American physician-scientist and economist who is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.

Martin Kulldorff is a Swedish biostatistician. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2003 until his dismissal in 2024 (I’ll let you guess why he was dismissed). He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sunetra Gupta is a British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. Her thesis written in 1992 was called “Heterogeneity and the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases.” In her own words: “I use maths and experiments to work out how viruses and bacteria evolve.”

Real hacks, these three, am I right?

One year after the takedown was initiated, it was exposed via emails between Francis Collins (then head of the NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (then head of NIAID) that it was orchestrated out of a desire to defame the authors thus propping up Collins’ and Fauci’s misguided and harmful lockdowns. Challenging their edicts was challenging science itself and you were in for it if you dared.

Fauci and Collins both did the rounds on media to smear the GBD scientists.

How is herd immunity “nonsense”? Vaccines are created based on the idea of achieving herd immunity. The whole thing is such an utter distortion of “the science” that Fauci claims to own.

As a side note, I really do hope his legacy is left in tatters and that Jay’s nomination and ultimate appointment is only just the beginning. Fauci is such a mean-spirited, egomaniacal, narcissistic, camera-loving, political hack that it really will be just desserts for Fauci’s entire legacy to be obliterated. He does not deserve to be lauded in the history books. He deserves to be viewed as the striving, media-obsessed political animal that he is.

At any rate . . .

Just when we needed open debate on the matter, Fauci and Collins shut it down — not on the merits of the GBD authors’ argument, but by dismissing them as “fringe” and maligning their expertise and integrity. And they both continued to tear down the three authors a year later when their takedown scheme was exposed.

From Fall 2020 onward, Dr. Jay was relentless. He never gave up. He did endless media appearances, accepting every invitation to state his case.

But here’s the other thing he did: he offered endless support to those fighting along with him. My first direct communication with Jay was not until September of 2021. As I scroll through our exchanges I get choked up. I’m not going to share them here because they are private. But suffice it to say, his support of me in difficult times was unwavering. Some of it very public with tweets that make me teary to this day. To have that, when my own family and friends were attacking me, was an indescribable blessing.

And here’s the thing: he did that for so many. He answered every DM, every question, every text. He is a kind and decent man and that is, in the end, why we covid dissidents love him so.

Since we first started communicating, Jay offered endless advice when asked (but never unsolicited), he blurbed my book (when asked), and he essentially serves as the narrator of the documentary film that Andrew James (my directing partner) and I are almost done making.

What I will offer up that he said to me in a conversation is this (from memory): “What you’re doing takes real courage. You’re not a professor at a university. You don’t have tenure. And you do it anyway. You’re very strong and brave.” And then I felt stronger and braver than I knew I was.

He also is a huge fan of my husband Daniel Kotzin. The meeting pictured below was at a Rational Ground conference in San Diego in October 2022. Daniel is wearing a tank top because he spent the day tending to the children of the speakers — which included me — and entertaining them at the pool. Both of these men are true mensches.

And I couldn’t be luckier to be married to one and have the other in my life as a dear friend.

Thank you Jay for all you have done and all you will do, but mostly for being a truly kind and decent human being.

Dr. Jay’s nomination is vindication for every one of us who stood up, pushed back, challenged, was censored, demonized and ostracized. For every one of us called a murderer, eugenicist, racist for advocating for children, the poor, the vulnerable. For everyone who stood in the gap against ineffective and illiberal covid policies, Jay’s nomination to Collins’ former job is such joyful redemption.

And I truly hope it is the death knell of cancel culture. For me it signals the beginning of the restoration of free speech, and open debate and dissent in this country. And poetic justice for all those who speak truth to power and get torn down for it. As I always say, truth outs in the end. And I think that kindness does as well.

Cheers Dr. Jay. We’re all rooting for you.