Before March of 2020, Jay Bhattacharya was a widely respected professor of medicine at Stanford University who had published more than 135 peer-reviewed papers. Then came the coronavirus. And everything changed.
That’s because Dr. Bhattacharya, along with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta, held the following view about how to fight the pandemic: Protect the most vulnerable (the elderly and those with comorbidities) by, among other practices, conducting frequent testing of nursing home staff and visitors that would keep Covid cases to a minimum. For everyone else, especially the young, they advised eliminating restrictions that were silly (shutting down sporting events), deeply harmful (closing schools), or economically disastrous (lockdowns). They called it “focused protection.”
In October 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya and his colleagues published those views in a statement known as the Great Barrington Declaration, named after the Massachusetts town where they had written it.
What followed can only be described as a full-on assault on Bhattacharya’s character.
Four days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, then the head of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an email to Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), that the declaration seemed “to be getting a lot of attention” and that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.” He described Bhattacharya and his two colleagues as “fringe epidemiologists.”
“Some of my colleagues at Stanford wrote me letters basically disowning me,” Bhattacharya would later recall. “It really got nasty.”
The legacy media piled on. The New York Times spoke to scientists who described Bhattacharya as, essentially, a crank. Anthony Fauci told the paper that the Great Barrington Declaration was “total nonsense,” while Rochelle Walensky, then an infectious disease expert at Harvard—and later the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the Biden administration—said, “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.” The Guardian labeled it a product of “bad science. . . co-opted by shady ideological interests.” And so on.
It wasn’t just the press that smeared and shamed Bhattacharya. It was Big Tech as well.
As Free Press journalists discovered in our reporting two years ago for the Twitter Files, the company now known as X had put Bhattacharya’s account on a Trends Blacklist, which dramatically suppressed the visibility of his posts. YouTube, meanwhile, censored a video of a public policy roundtable with Bhattacharya and Florida governor Ron DeSantis because the Stanford scientist suggested—correctly—that the scientific evidence for masking children was weak. Google, Reddit, and Facebook also censored mere mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration.
We now know that the censoring was done in no small part at the urging of the Biden administration.
When several attorneys general filed a lawsuit over this suppression of speech, Bhattacharya joined as one of the plaintiffs. In September 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the administration, the FBI, the CDC, and the surgeon general’s office had worked in tandem to prevent dissident Covid voices like Bhattacharya’s from being heard. They “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints,” the court wrote in its ruling. The government, the court added, threatened “regulatory changes and increased enforcement actions” if the tech companies didn’t censor speech that contradicted the government’s pandemic party line.
As Bhattacharya wrote in our pages: “I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love.”
All of which is why we—and so many who witnessed what happened to him and his colleagues—could not help but cheer the news that Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to serve as the next director of the National Institutes of Health.
We know now that the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration had it exactly right—a reality we can plainly see given that many European countries, such as Sweden, followed exactly their guidance and had far fewer excess deaths than the United States. Lockdowns, school closings, mandatory masks for first graders—these were disastrous policies. So it’s only natural to view Bhattacharya’s nomination as karma.
We don’t disagree. But it’s more than that. With its $48 billion budget, the NIH is the government’s primary funder of medical research. It is also an agency badly in need of reform. Its 27 different agencies need to be less siloed and more collaborative. And it needs to become less dependent on strong-willed figures like Fauci, who, though he never ran the NIH, played an outsize role in determining the government’s response to the pandemic as the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Perhaps because he’s an outsider, Bhattacharya has a keen understanding of these problems—keener, certainly, than an establishment scientist would. In 2018, he co-authored a paper arguing that the NIH needed to do more to “promote innovative science.” Under Bhattacharya, there will undoubtedly be an openness to different views that has been missing for years.
Amazingly, to this day, Bhattacharya’s critics still refuse to acknowledge that their authoritarian approach to ending the pandemic was wrong—and that Bhattacharya was right. “Trump’s NIH Pick Guaranteed to Destroy Country’s Health,” read the headline in The New Republic. According to The New York Times, his critics are now accusing those who, having considered the data and decided to give his ideas a second look, of “sane-washing.”
Rubbish.
It is Dr. Bhattacharya who is the sane one—and who kept his head and his humility while his critics lost theirs.
Under his leadership, we expect there will be no more gaslighting of patients, no more suppression of dissenting views, no more blacklisting of scientists who don’t toe the majoritarian line. For these reasons, his nomination is something all Americans should applaud.
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