#jay bhattacharya

[pandemic-info]

(via HHS picks, the House subcommittee report, and pandemic revisionism)

Bottom line

We are moving into an era that represents a rejection of the public health establishment. Change is coming, but not all change is good change. We need to have honest discussions about what went right and wrong with a focus on learning how to do better next time, not rewriting what happened.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marina Dunbar at The Guardian:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is collecting the private medical records of many Americans from several different federal and commercial databases to give to researchers for US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new autism study. With this information being included in the database, the NIH is also reportedly crafting a new registry to track those with autism, per CBS News. The health agency claims it was doing so to fulfill a controversial promise the secretary of health made to root out the cause of autism by September, despite some experts saying that Kennedy’s goal is not even feasible. “If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don’t see any possible way,” Dr Peter Marks said on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month. On the collection of data, the director of NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, told advisers during a presentation on Monday that the aim was to help researchers study autism by giving them access to “comprehensive” patient data and health records. He added that these records would cover a “broad range” of people across the US. “The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” he said in the presentation. “Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.” Bhattacharya added that the NIH was also discussing a potential expansion of the agency’s access to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ZERO respect for people with autism, and his asinine idea of Americans’ private medical records to conduct a study on autism is an abomination.

See Also:

Daily Kos: RFK Jr. ramps up his ignorant—and dangerous—war on autism

Public Notice: RFK Jr. is wrong about autism

[alyfoxxxen]

Trump picks NIH critic Jay Bhattacharya to lead the agency - POLITICO

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

President-elect Donald J. Trump late Tuesday nominated Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., if the Senate will confirm him!

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/health/trump-taps-dr-jay-bhattacharya-co-author-of-great-barrington-declaration-to-lead-nih

#TheFreeThoughtProject

[wat3rm370n]

Right-wing voices intent on spreading bird flu & misinformation.

All the usual suspects and their business interest backers are gearing up for a big push to oppose any public health deployment against the threats of avian influenza. These covid deniers and anti-vaxxers have never actually been satisfied with having successfully manufactured mild and The Great Barrington Declaration becoming public health policy all over the place (minus protecting the vulnerable part of course). Various right-wing covid minimizers are pushing all sorts of misleading things about the very real threats of H5N1.

Important Context Right-Wing Operatives, Anti-Vax Groups Already Working to Politicize Bird Flu Many of the same people who successfully politicized COVID-19 are gearing up for round two. Walker Bragman Dec 26, 2024 In May, REPPARE published a paper, which was subsequently shared by Bhattacharya, arguing that the WHO and the World Bank were overstating the threat of future pandemics. It specifically noted that “mortality from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) types H5 and H7 has greatly declined over the past century.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has been politicizing bird flu on his War Room broadcast on the right-wing Real America’s Voice television network. Early on in the pandemic, Bannon and his business partner, Chinese billionaire fraudster Guo Wengui, were critical in spreading the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Early on in the pandemic, the claim was used by right-wing media to provide cover for the flailing Trump White House. With the bird flu outbreaks, War Room has engaged in similar activity, pushing conspiracy theories about the virus—its origins and the expert concern over its outbreaks.

On the podcast Knowledge Fight which reviews what Alex Jones, the hosts often remarks that Alex Jones works for Big Covid, in that he promotes the spread. On the show they’ve played several clips in the month of December 2024 where Alex Jones wrongly claims that Peter Hotez is responsible for bird flu or other things, and that the avian flu news is some kind of plot against Trump. Many clips they’ve played you can hear him demonize doctors and healthcare workers in a way that’s very disturbing because historically these types of accusations have led to people being induced into violence against those with such accusations against them, indeed it’s a known social engineering tactic, one that appears to have been used in the covid pandemic by covid contrarians and monied interests. Back in July 2024 he played a disturbingly lengthy wildlife-killing-prey video for his audience and likened it to supposedly the hospitals doing this to patients, clearly he meant on purpose. In the December 24, 2024 episode of Knowledge Fight they play a clip where Alex Jones describes animal experiments not unusual in medical training. He doesn’t seem to be that concerned with animal rights, he merely uses the emotional disgust to stoke people to believe that doctors are being made to do this as part of their training as a type of hazing ritual, to weed out anyone who will be unwilling to commit atrocities on behalf of… "they". The “they” is described as a mafia-like organization of some type using doctors to hurt people who won't pay protection money. His description was a ham handed mobster movie narrative that reminded me of the comedy movie Nuns on the Run with Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle. I don’t mean to make light of this because though it does seem comical, I think this type of rhetoric is actually quite serious, and that at least some in the right-wing audience do take it seriously.

[emotional-in-stem]

Haven't seen this floating around on here but NIH scientists recently published the Bethesda Declaration, a document criticizing Jay Bhattacharya and current policies at the NIH.

They disagree with the politicization of research, interruption of global collaboration, undermining peer review, caps on indirect costs, and the firing of NIH staff.

They put their jobs on the line, and we can support them by also signing! Your name does not have to be listed publicly, nor do you have to be a scientist. Please support NIH-funded science and its employees!

[star-pound-star]

NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration’ in dissent of Trump administration policies | CNN

In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus.

They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations “unethical.” Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies.

Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH.

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NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration’ in dissent of Trump administration policies

By

1416700 CNN 2023- NY- CNN Correspondent Meg Tirrell

Meg Tirrell

Updated 21 hr ago

On Monday, NIH employees published a letter of dissent they called the "Bethesda Declaration."

On Monday, NIH employees published a letter of ...

In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus.

They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations “unethical.” Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies.

Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH.

“We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,” the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name.

It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It’s just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director.

“If we don’t speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,” said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH.

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

How To Make America a 3rd World Nation

Dear MAGAs, is this how you “Make America Great, Again”? (Article ran in the March 14th Florida Sun-Sentinel. NIH funding cuts are creating a lost generation of scientistsLisa Jarvis, Bloomberg Opinion The Trump administration’s attacks on science and funding at the National Institutes of Health will set research and training for future scientists back a generation. This might sound melodramatic…

[gwydionmisha]

Public Health/RFK Jr. Round Up: Published 6/14/25AM

He replaced robust debate by actual scientists who were experts in the field with incompetent science deniers.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy. Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.

Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (Bhattacharya has not been formally announced but is reportedly the top pick for the position.) These picks, to an extent, show Trump aligning his health policy hires with his own Fox-molded views. As president during the pandemic, he clashed with his official advisers when they contradicted what he was hearing from Fox personalities. The result was often chaos in decision-making, implementation, and public messaging.

Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and Nesheiwat received regular Fox airtime because on issues like the use of untested drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or nonpharmaceutical interventions like office and school closures, they tended to hew close to the Fox line — which also became the Trump line. If another pandemic hits, it is possible that they will be able to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses; they have real medical credentials, and Trump is likely to have greater confidence in them due to their shared past views. But while Trump’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed was an unalloyed triumph in his first term, Kennedy is a crank who was openly hostile to the drugs. And other members of the second-term team regularly went on Fox to warn about the purported health impacts of the vaccines and criticize mandates to ensure their use. That does not bode well for the prospect of a successful response should another pandemic hit during the next four years.

The people tasked to run health departments under a 2nd Trump Administration are a motley crew of TV doctors, anti-vaxx cranks, COVID minimizers, and quack cures promoters.

[soundgrammar]

The Green Gate (detail), Vidyadhar Bhattacharya [Jai Singh II], Pritam Niwas Chowk, City Palace, Jaipur, India, from 1727–43. From Wiki-uk via www.x-traonline.org.

[bb-strawbebe]

god. seeing that the cdc is actually prepping to do a "large-scale study into the potential connection between vaccines and autism" is so.....

[hayquetenerpatience]

"Jay Bhattacharya was deemed a 'fringe epidemiologist' by former NIH Director Francis Collins, who demonized him for asking obvious questions about the government's authoritarian response to COVID. Now, Jay will take the helm at NIH and clean house of all those who corrupted public health and did so much damage to Americans during the pandemic. Karma is a bitch." - Matt Kibbe

[wat3rm370n]

Vaccination is far safer than getting covid unvaccinated.

Myocarditis after a covid vaccine is rare, even in people the FDA says are most likely to have that happen, it's rare. The truth of the matter is that getting myocarditis after a covid vaccine resolves quickly, but getting myocarditis from covid is far more likely and far more serious. 

Trump's FDA full of covid deniers are fear mongering to dissuade people from vaccination possibly because of eugenics ideology aims. 

And anyone who thinks there's an outside chance of getting exposed to covid you should want to be vaccinated to reduce the risks – and that's everyone because it's everywhere all the time and you can't predict if lightning strikes your house or a tree falls on you and you're taken to the hospital unconscious where there are covid patients not quarantined because of faulty AI. 

I told the story about the faulty AI in healthcare as reported in a National Nurses United webinar before. 

Does CDC HICPAC want to make a mockery of infection control in healthcare? Chloe Humbert Aug 21, 2024 At a recent NNU webinar on the use of AI in healthcare, someone told the story about an automated shift change report that just makes a sheet with no human to human handoff between actual healthcare workers. In this case the automated sheet failed to show that the person coming into the hospital had “no immune system” and had the nurse not made the extra step of checking the patient’s chart, they would’ve put the immune compromised person in with the patient who had covid and flu.

Sidenote is that CDC's HICPAC committee was terminated by Trump. So there's no guidance on infection control in healthcare settings other than very specific conditions under CMS's HAC reimbursement rules which don't include a lot of stuff that circulates in hospitals like covid for example.

[healthyfitness23]

Trump picks Covid lockdown critic to lead top health agency

Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor known for his criticism of COVID-19 lockdowns and co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, is trending as he has emerged as the leading candidate for the role of Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President-elect Donald Trump. His nomination aligns with Trump’s vision of reforming federal health agencies, emphasizing innovation and reducing bureaucratic influence​

Read More in Google News

Bhattacharya has gained attention for advocating less restrictive public health measures during the pandemic, favoring “Focused protection” to shield vulnerable populations while allowing others to develop immunity. His proposed approach contrasts with more traditional pandemic responses and has sparked both support and controversy. His critics argue that his policies prioritize business interests over public health, while his supporters praise his push for science-based reforms​

This potential appointment marks a significant shift in U.S. health policy, promising to challenge long-standing norms within the NIH and broader public health sectors.

Read More in Google News Here