#jay bhattacharya

[gwydionmisha]

This will kill so many people if they dismantle the US Public health system and pandemic response infrastructure as planned.

[pandemic-info]

This is what we may have to deal with.

To say that this person is "unfit" for the role to head the NIH is not only an understatement, it is a crime. People will die, and people like him are happy to sacrifice them. To sacrifice you.

Some of us are working to organize with actual public health, medical, virology, epidemiology and other experts. We will do whatever we can to get through this.

Hold tight. Do not obey in advance.

[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.

[wat3rm370n]

Doctors who spread medical misinformation have been free to do so.

Covid contrarians repeating false information have not typically faced much in the ways of consequences. Anyone who makes claims of “cancel culture�� or any kind of “silencing” of “opinions” by fringe covid contrarian doctors or anti-vaxxers is NOT telling the truth. Legal research has shown that doctors who have peddled in false covid claims have almost never been disciplined. 

In Pennsylvania, and in Florida, zero physicians were ever penalized for misinforming patients or the public about covid. 

CIDRAP - Medical boards almost never discipline doctors who peddle false COVID claims, legal researcher says - Mary Van Beusekom, MS, Nov 13, 2024 No New York physicians were disciplined for any misinformation offenses, and no Florida or Pennsylvania physicians were penalized for misinforming the public. "Even within the small number of actions involving misinformation, the data shows that boards are far more comfortable disciplining physicians for misconduct involving direct patient care than addressing erroneous public statements," Saver said in a UNC news release. "Yet false public communications may cause wider harm."  "These findings suggest a serious disconnect between regulatory guidance and enforcement and call into question the suitability of licensure regulation for combatting physician-spread misinformation," he noted in the study. "In today's digital age, when a single physician spreading misinformation can influence thousands of people, our regulatory framework may need to evolve," he added in the release.

One should never assume that something really out there must be true just because a doctor feels free to say it. And it’s not wrong to seek a second opinion. 

And doctors really need to shut up about their little myth of cancel culture - especially ones with lots of money, huge platforms, and government influence.

Who What Why - The Loudest Voice: Who Is GOP COVID-19 Expert Jay Bhattacharya? Walker Bragman 03/29/23 For his unconventional views, Bhattacharya has been showered with media attention,  particularly from right-wing media — but not exclusively. He has been given column space in a number of publications to make his case. This brand building has allowed the professor to amass hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and establish himself as a prominent dissenting voice in the national discourse around public health measures. Bhattacharya has made at least 37 appearances on Fox News since the pandemic began, which other right-wing outfits like Breitbart and the New York Post have amplified. But he has appeared on CNN. He has also been quoted in many outlets from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker, The Washington Post to The Daily Caller. Beyond giving quotes to reporters, Bhattacharya has gotten to make his case himself, writing for a number of publications including the WSJ, The Hill, The Daily Mail, and Newsweek.

[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.

[trendynewsnow]

The Future of the National Institutes of Health Under New Leadership

The National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) stands as a beacon of excellence in biomedical research, renowned for its pivotal role in scientific advancements. As the leading public funder in this domain, the N.I.H. has been instrumental in facilitating groundbreaking research that has garnered over 100 Nobel Prizes. Furthermore, it has provided critical support for more than 99 percent of the…

[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

[oknews]

Trump nomina a Jay Bhattacharya, feroz opositor de la salud pública, para dirigir el NIH

[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

[bonnieb23-blog]

Should the Evil Ones Be In Jail?

Dr. Fauci Belongs in Jail Dr Fauci belongs in Jail. Because of him, we were threatened, shamed, sworn at, disparaged,canceled, and spit upon (literally). Because of him hundreds of thousands of people died. Dr Fauci said, “You will never shake hands again.” What an evil man. He knew all the time because he was funding the experiments done in the Wuhan lab. Is iteven remotely possible that he…

[todayworldnews2k21]

Trump Picks Indian-American Jay Bhattacharya To Lead National Institutes of Health

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked Indian-American scientist Jay Bhattacharya as the director of the National Institutes of Health, the country’s top health research and funding institutions. With this, Bhattacharya becomes the first Indian-American to be nominated by Trump for a top administrative position. Earlier, Trump picked Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly created…

[beardedmrbean]

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked  Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.” 

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

[darkmaga-returns]

In an interview with Newsmax last week, U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said that one of the reasons she supports President-elect Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HSS) is her concern about the safety of the COVID-19 shots. She confirmed that she suffered injuries following her second COVID mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) shot in the spring of 2021.1 2 3 4

Rep. Mace received the first dose of Moderna/NIAID’s Spikevax COVID mRNA shot on Apr. 13, 2021, followed by the second dose in May-June of that year.5 She said:

I now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pain that no doctor can explain, and I’ve had a battery of tests, Mace said. “I thought I was doing my civic duty to get vaccinated by this vaccine that had not been tested. My health has never been the same.1 2 4

Mace, who is a member of the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, that the public has not been told the truth about the safety of the COVID shots, and specifically that information about the shots was suppressed during the pandemic by social media platforms such Twitter (now known as X).1 2

Doctors Censored on Social Media for Criticizing Federal COVID Policies

In a House Oversight Committee hearing on Feb. 8, 2023, Mace questioned ex-Twitter official Vijaya Gadde about why renowned medical doctors and epidemiologists like Martin Kulldorff, MD of Harvard Medical School, Jay Bhattacharya, MD of Stanford University, and others were censored on Twitter for views that did not conform to the federal government’s narrative about COVID and the COVID shots.1

“You guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices. “Apparently, the views of a Stanford doctor are disinformation to you people,” Mace said. “I find it extremely alarming [that] Twitter’s unfettered censorship spread into medical fields and affected many Americans by suppressing expert opinions from doctors and censoring those who disagree with the CDC. ”1 4

“Millions of Americans were lied to and [are] living with the consequences of this decision. Thank God I didn’t vaccinate my children with this thing, but I’m living every day with the consequences of that decision, and I regret it,” Mace said.2

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved at our archive

This is the scientific version of letting nazis come hold conferences.

By Michael Hiltzik

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

He said he hoped that the conference would be a “model” for how to bring together people of divergent views.

If only it were. Within minutes of their opening remarks, their hopes were exploded.

That happened during the conference’s opening panel, which was labeled “Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic.”

Turning the conversation to the issue of COVID’s origins, panelist Andrew Noymer, who teaches about population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine, launched into a fact-free attack on Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has become a target of relentless smears by right-wingers and congressional Republicans.

“I believe,” Noymer said, “that the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are that it’s ... an experimental virus that escaped from a lab and Tony Fauci is intimately linked to the funding for experiments that created this virus.”

There’s no evidence that the virus escaped from a lab, much less that Fauci as NIAID director funded any experiments that created the virus. No one on the panel called Noymer to account.

A few other low points during the day reflected the organizers’ having invited conspiracy-mongers and purveyors of long-debunked claims to share the stage with public health and science professionals who have spent the last few years battling a tide of misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic.

Stanford posted videos of all the conference panels and speeches on its website and on YouTube on Friday, expanding the potential audience beyond the few hundred people who attended the event in person.

As I mentioned in an earlier column about the conference, the idea that universities such as Stanford should be arenas for airing all opinions in a search for truth is simplistic and historically incorrect. Universities have always had, and even embraced, the duty to draw the line between fact and fiction — to determine when an assertion or opinion falls below the line of intellectual acceptability.

“Science and quackery cannot be treated as having scientific and moral equivalence,” John P. Moore, a distinguished biologist and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who played a part in debunking misinformation about the role of HIV in AIDS during the 1990s, wrote recently. “Do NASA scientists attend conferences by people who believe the moon-landing was faked? Do geographers and geologists attend conferences held by idiots who believe the earth is flat? Of course not.”

Stanford did some things right. After the initial conference agenda was published in August, it was criticized on social media and in the science community (and by me) for mainstreaming an “anti-science agenda (and revisionist history),” in the words of vaccine expert and pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez.

Several more participants were added to the final roster in a possible effort to balance the lineup. (It may be that the organizers approached some of them before the original announcement came under attack.)

This effort bore fruit. In the first session, for example, health policy experts Douglas K. Owens and Josh Salomon of Stanford’s medical school educated their fellow panelists in the realities of crafting social policies in the first months of a deadly pandemic with little-understood medical characteristics or health implications.

Yet a persistent subtext of the conference was that the social interventions taken against the pandemic, such as business and school closings, mask and social distancing advisories and lockdowns, were generally worse than the disease. This echoed the position of Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in October 2020 that called for ending lockdowns and school closures and pursuing “herd immunity” through “natural infection” of almost everyone other than the aged and infirm.

During the opening panel, moderator Wilk Wilkinson, a blogger on the concept of “personal accountability,” offered the astonishing criticism that public health leaders “focused very narrowly on deaths from COVID, and often it came at the expense of other social values” such as “being able to visit people, ... or putting children in school as they normally would go to school, or attend funerals.”

It fell to Salomon to observe tactfully that “in the early part of the pandemic, in March 2020, “it made sense to focus on mortality. We all saw ... the stacks of body bags in New York City.” Over time, he said, social trade-offs from public health interventions can be weighed, as they are today. But if there’s a higher imperative for public health officials than reducing deaths from a deadly pandemic while it is in full cry, what is it?

As it happens, researchers have found that social interventions did succeed in reducing infections and mortality, a conclusion that was barely mentioned at the conference.

COVID death rates in U.S. states were reduced by restaurant, gym and pool shutdowns, vaccine mandates for school and government workers, and stay-at-home orders, according to a massive study published by the British medical journal The Lancet in April 2023. Infection rates were reduced by bar, restaurant and primary school closures; mask mandates; restrictions on large gatherings; stay-at-home orders; and vaccine mandates.

Social policies in place during the pandemic are easy to denigrate because their costs were evident but their positive effects were often invisible, Salomon observed. “It’s harder for us to recognize the lives that were saved, the hospital systems that were not overwhelmed, the ... illnesses that were avoided.”

Throughout the conference, anti-government paranoia and misinformation about pandemic policies were strong on the wing. Rutgers biologist Bryce Nickels — who has accused scientists of “fraud” for concluding in a 2020 paper that COVID most likely originated in the natural spillover of the virus from animals via the wildlife trade in China, not through a laboratory experiment gone awry — expressed the conviction during the panel on the origins of COVID that “the pandemic was caused by reckless research and a lab accident.”

Nickels insinuated that the scientists behind such research “have blood on their hands or culpability in some level.”

I asked Bhattacharya if comments such as Nickels’ and Noymer’s comported with his desire to eradicate from the debate over COVID “the goal ... to destroy people who disagree with you.” He hasn’t replied.

Levin told me by email that “revisiting pandemic policies, with the benefit of hindsight and data, is a valuable topic for study,” and that he thinks “we’ll learn more from that inquiry if we frame it around questions and evidence rather than ‘who was right.’”

Some presenters uttered evident misinformation. Consider Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a former COVID advisor to the Trump administration, who attacked pandemic lockdowns and their advocates because lockdowns “failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread — that’s the data.”

But this is a flagrant category error. No one argued that the lockdowns would stop the spread of COVID or “stop the dying.” They were consistently portrayed as policies to slow the spread and consequently mortality in order to relieve the crushing pressure on healthcare facilities and personnel long enough to enable them to get a handle on the pandemic — “flattening the curve” was the watchword. And over time, they succeeded in doing just that.

Then there’s Marty Makary, a prominent surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who made a name for himself during the pandemic by repeatedly predicting that the pandemic was on the verge of ending due to natural immunity, and was consistently confounded by the appearance of successive new waves of deadly COVID variants.

Makary related during the opening panel that he was frustrated because once data arrived about the social effects of lockdowns “there was no interest in evaluating” what was “the largest public health intervention in modern history.”

But that’s just wrong. Data-driven analyses of social interventions surfaced even in the earliest days of the pandemic — including a multidiscipinary symposium sponsored by Stanford in the fall of 2021, featuring 54 experts from academia, public health and government.

Up to this day, the medical, public health and social effects of the pandemic and pandemic policies have been the subject of unrelenting study — more than 700,000 papers by nearly 2 million researchers thus far, according to an estimate offered by Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ionannidis in his closing conference remarks.

The conference organizers wanted to congratulate themselves for producing what Bhattacharya described as “the first event where people of very different viewpoints about what happened during the pandemic are going to speak to each other in a way that’s constructive.”

But a conference in which conspiratorial delusions and outright falsehoods were treated as deserving the same respect as scientifically validated research, and in which the authors of serious virological and epidemiological studies, as well as respected public health authorities, were subjected to smears, was nothing like “constructive.”

Considering Bhattacharya’s expectation that this conference should be a model for others, then: Let’s hope not.

[3nding]

Ettore Meccia, fb

Una selezione minima, solo per avere qualche riferimento.

Il 4 ottobre 2020 scrive, assieme a Martn Kulldorf e Sunetra Gupta la Great Barrington Declaration, un documento in cui sostiene che per fronteggiare al meglio l'emergenza da Covid-19 la vita deve andare avanti come se niente fosse meno che per i vulnerabili che dovranno ricevere una focused protection (non riuscendo a definire né chi siano i vulnerabili né cosa sia la focused protection se no portare la spesa a casa agli anziani). In questo modo la popolazione infettandosi raggiungerà in fretta l'immunità di gregge e ci lasceremo la pandemia alle spalle. Quattro anni dopo contiamo milioni di decessi, un virus che continua a circolare e mutare originando ancora nuove varianti infettando e reinfettando la popolazione, è sempre più chiaro il rischio da infezioni cumulative e milioni di persone stanno ancora combattendo con gli esiti del Long Covid.

L'11 gennaio 2021 sostiene in un articolo su The Print che ormai la maggior parte degli Indiani ha raggiunto l'immunità naturale e non è il caso di vaccinarli per Covid-19, anzi potrebbe essere pericoloso. L'11 gennaio è dove c'è la freccia rossa nel grafico qui sotto con l'andamento cumulativo dei casi per milione (dati Our Wold In Data). Due settimane dopo in India emerge la variante Delta con 300.000 morti, più tutti quelli che farà in giro per il mondo.

A maggio 2023 viene presentato come un eroe in un'intervista pubblicata sul sito della Hoover Institution, il Think Tank conservatore e neoliberal che ha sede da sempre nella sua università (Stanford) per essersi opposto alle politiche di prevenzione del governo durante la pandemia. La Hoover Institution non ha nulla a che spartire con scienza e ricerca biomedica ma solo con politica e economia.

La comunità scientifica internazionale si prepara ad accogliere il prossimo direttore del NIH, Jay Bhattacharya. Sperando che H1N5 continui ad infettare solo oche selvatiche polli e mucche e non si faccia venire strane idee.