Jay Bhattacharya To Head Up NIH? Think Again.

Capitalism and Mass Migration The Possible Beginning of The End

Jay Bhattacharya To Head Up NIH? Think Again.

President-elect Donald Trump is said to be considering Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up the National Institute for Health. Bhattacharya was one of the three sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated achieving herd immunity by letting the non-elderly continually re-infect each other at a time when there were still no Covid vaccines.

The Declaration was made public on October 4, 2020. It called for "focused protection" for "the vulnerable" and for everyone else (who the authors falsely claimed were not vulnerable) to "live their lives normally," until herd immunity was reached, which they anticipated would be in "three to six months." In other words, immunity would be built up by surviving infection (except for those who died) while the elderly population would be segregated and granted "focused protection."

In a rare reference to specifics, Bhattacharya claimed that hotel rooms were a possible site where the elderly could safely wait out the pandemic. At the time he made the suggestion, there were fifty-five million Americans over sixty-five and 5.3 million hotel rooms in the United States. #1 In other words, if focused protection had been implemented it would have required housing more than ten elderly people in each hotel room. But it was never a serious plan, and those under 65 did not rush to resume normal lives upon hearing the Declaration. #2

Although the Great Barrington Declaration was original - stopping a pandemic by allowing mass infection had never been tried before - it was profoundly counter-intuitive. #3 Nevertheless, Bhattacharya doubled down on its claim that COVID was only dangerous for the elderly throughout the remainder of the pandemic, while predicting that the virus would disappear. #4 Almost five years later, it still hasn't.

Bhattacharya said early on about Covid that "it's probably about as deadly as the flu," and estimated that fewer than 40,000 Americans would die of it. #5

But, apart from the 1918 flu pandemic, flu has never come close to killing the 1.2 million people in two years that Covid ended up killing in the U.S. in 2020-21. #6

Bhattacharya said that the elderly could use Insta-Cart to get food without risking infection, but this was hardly a serious proposal. Instantly delivering food to tens of millions of elderly people would have been a colossal undertaking, and Bhattacharya treated it as though it were a minor errand. The Great Barrington Declaration offered no plan on how the over 65 population could be segregated and fed for months on end. It was just a talking point, reflecting hope that someone else might be able to figure out how to accomplish it. No one did.

Bhattacharya pronounced it unethical to make children wear masks for the benefit of adults, but found deliberately infecting tens of millions of children with Covid for the benefit of those same adults fine and dandy. #6 While the pandemic raged, he repeatedly announced that Covid had been "defanged."#7

Two weeks after the Delta variant became the dominant Covid strain, Bhattacharya announced on Facebook (on July 26, 2021) that "we have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population." But in short order people were dropping like flies and Florida hospitals had to order mobile morgues to deal with Covid-19 death overflow. #8

At the time of Bhattacharya's announcement, fewer than half of Floridians were vaccinated and the state had the highest COVID death rate among the country's six most populated states. Three weeks later AARP reported that "Florida led the nation in nursing home resident and staff deaths in the four weeks ending August 22." And the non-elderly were hardly safe, either, as Bhattacharya repeatedly claimed. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis reported that during the Delta and Omicron waves (August 2021 - February 2022), COVID was the second leading cause of death in the age cohort 35-54. #9

On September 9, 2021 a POLITICO headline read, "Child COVID Deaths More Than Doubled in Florida as Kids Returned to the Classroom." #10 Countries that let the virus run rampant had higher all-cause mortality than New Zealand, an island country that had a zero COVID policy from the beginning. Even Bhattacharya had to concede this: "New Zealand's strategy delayed the inevitable spread of COVID throughout the population to a time after the development, testing and deployment of a vaccine capable of reducing the burden of severe COVID disease . . ..New Zealand has a tiny proportion of the U.S.'s COVID-attributable deaths per capita."

If the United States had followed New Zealand's COVID strategy, hundreds of thousands fewer Americans would have died of the disease. #11 Nevertheless, Bhattacharya felt that New Zealand had no right to protect its people with "lockdown" when so many other countries just let people die unnecessarily. In fact, he thought that New Zealand was "immoral" for not letting more people get infected before vaccines were available to protect them.

Bhattacharya and his fellow authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta) presented no scientific evidence and made no real effort to argue their case. They simply started from the premise that abandoning public health measures was good for everyone because it was good for business, and made a series of assertions consistent with that outcome. They made no mention of any public health measures to contain the disease. Again, this was because they assumed against evidence and common sense that mass infection was a benefit to be pursued, not a negative outcome to be avoided until vaccines arrived.

The Great Barrington Declaration policy was to deliberately sacrifice human life for the sake of "the economy." This herd immunity strategy drew scathing criticism from the world's premier public health organizations. On October 15, 2020 the British medical journal The Lancet condemned the policy as "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." #13 An earlier denunciation was issued by seventeen leading public health organizations, including the Big Cities Health Coalition and the American Public Health Association: "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." #14

Bhattacharya likes to complain about the "laptop class" shutting everything down during Covid. But he is a tenured professor at Stanford, a laptop class member if there ever was one, and he advocated a do-nothing approach that would have killed far more than the horrifying 1.2 million deaths the U.S. endured in 2020-21.

Just say "no" to a big role for Jay Bhattacharya in public health.

Notes:

#1 Howard, p. 124, 130

#2 Howard, 121

#3 Howard, 112

#4 Howard, p. 118

#5 Uncommon Knowledge, April 21, 2020, Howard, p. 127, 187

#6 Howard, p. 127, 187

#7 Howard, p. 131

#8 Howard, p. 198

#9 Howard, p. 446n.

#10 Howard, p. 113-14, 119

#11 800,000 fewer according to Dr. Johnathan Howard. (Howard, p. 165)

#12 Howard, p. 165

#13 Blake, ed. CCCW, 310

#14 Blake, ed. (CCCW, 311)

Sources:

“The Fight Against Covid-19: An Update FromDr. Jay Bhattacharya,” Uncommon Knowledge, April 21, 2020

Jonathan Howard MD, "We Want Them Infected, - How The Failed Quest For Herd Immunity Led Doctors To Embrace The Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID," (Redhawk, 2023)

Evan Blake, ed., "Covid, Capitalism and Class War - A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic," (Mehring Books, 2020)

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