10 More Times Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's Pick for NIH Director, was Dead Wrong About COVID-19
Childish, Willfully Ignorant, Unqualified, and Disgraceful
Congress has elected to drive America off the edge of a cliff and advance the nomination of anti-vax grifter and sadistic quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is little more than societal cyanide that will result in widespread disease outbreaks, and many more sick and hospitalized children for creeps like RFK Jr. and his rich buddies to profit from needless suffering.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was endorsed for President by Stanford economist Jay Bhattacharya, who is Trump's pick to lead the National Institute of Health, which is presently under siege. We talked about Bhattacharya's obsession with the childish "Covidian" insult, and if that didn't already disqualify Jay from the role of NIH Director, then here is a deeper review.
Y'know, it's quite astounding how easy it is to log onto social media and start shooting your mouth off about topics you know absolutely nothing about. People think they are espousing great wisdom into the world, when in reality, they are merely broadcasting their own ignorance - sometimes over a period of many years. Desperate to make the COVID-19 pandemic all about him, Jay Bhattacharya produced an extensive record of many things he knows very little about.
What you will learn about Jay Bhattacharya below is that:
He Imagines a Fantasy of “Focused Protection”
He Repurposes Tired Old Anti-Vaccine Arguments
He Attacks Long COVID Studies That Refute His Ideals
He Insists COVID-19 Is Not Disabling Millions of Americans
He Has No Idea What the NIH Actually Does
He Misrepresents Critics of Ivermectin Abuse
He Misleads the Public About Hospital Crisis Protocols
He Commits Basic Logical Flaws
He is Ignorant About the Latest COVID-19 Science
He Shamelessly Exploits Horrific Tragedies
Let’s break this all down in extensive detail.
August 23rd, 2021: Jay Bhattacharya Imagines a Fantasy of “Focused Protection”
Enjoying his newfound fame as a pandemic contrarian, Jay Bhattacharya tweets out a completely dishonest statement:
"Mortality from COVID-19 differs more than a thousand-fold between the old and young. Focused protection is the compassionate approach that balances COVID risks and collateral damage to public health."
As part of a 900-word online petition from 2020 titled the "Great Barrington Declaration," Jay Bhattacharya and his cohorts imagined the countless millions of "vulnerable" Americans, who would all know with certainty that they were uniquely at risk of death from COVID-19, could be hermetically sealed off from the rest of society in a radically ahistorical approach titled "focused protection."
"Focused protection" has no history, trials, or serious outlines of how this might function in reality beyond a few bullet points as part of Jay's online petition. Let Dr. Jonathan Howard for Science Based Medicine explain it:
“A section of the GBD titled Protecting the Old and Other High-Risk Groups laid out their “plan”, which they called “focused protection”. You should take 5 minutes and read it. It’s just 880-words long. Their answer to the question “How do we protect older people living at home?” was only four sentences long. It turns out, the GBD wasn’t a serious plan for public health officials, it was just a laundry list of demands of them”
The truth is that Jay never actually cared about the "the vulnerable," nor the reality that millions of young Americans are now disabled by COVID-19, with no treatment or cure in sight. Jay dishonestly presents the crisis of SARS-CoV-2 and its potentials for grave harms beyond death in order to pretend he didn't get the pandemic wrong.
As the head of Trump's NIH, Jay Bhattacharya’s primary objective will be to defund and bury the long COVID research that these millions of suffering Americans so desperately need if their condition is to ever improve. Jay Bhattacharya's dishonesty and cruelty has no place in public health and should be openly condemned by Congress with extreme prejudice.
February 6th, 2022 - Jay Bhattacharya Repurposes Tired Old Anti-Vaccine Arguments
As part of an argument against the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, Jay Bhattacharya tweeted:
"The risk to healthy children of severe disease from covid infection is small. It is unethical for public health to obscure this fact, to scare parents, with an aim of manipulating their decisions. Informed consent requires telling the truth."
This same argument could also be used to argue against pediatric vaccination against polio, measles, and numerous other diseases. It has been in the past, many times. Repeating centuries old anti-vaccine myths that have been long-debunked should immediately disqualify any candidate for NIH Director.
July 12th, 2022 - Jay Bhattacharya Attacks Long COVID Studies
After years of lobbying for the mass infection of tens of millions of unvaccinated American children with SARS-CoV-2, Jay Bhattacharya attacked studies showing that the virus was disabling numerous children, by declaring:
"Studies of long covid with no control group of uninfected people should be ignored."
Jay Bhattacharya worked overtime to ensure that this control group would not exist. His incompetence in attacking medical research that he could never produce on his own disqualifies Jay from serving as director of the NIH.
July 27th, 2022 - Jay Bhattacharya Insists COVID-19 Is Not Disabling Millions of Americans
It was well understood in *2010* that SARS-CoV causes serious disability in a significant number of the infected. Disregarding this research in 2020, Jay Bhattacharya advocated for the mass infection of hundreds of millions of Americans with SARS-CoV-2. He would inevitably get his wish under the Biden Administration and a failed attempt at restoring "normalcy" by any means necessary. The inevitable result of millions of Americans being disabled by COVID-19 followed, and this quickly became news.
Sharing a tweet from art dealer Eli Klein, a misogynistic bully who publicly harasses women disabled by COVID-19 and accuses them of lying, Jay Bhattacharya tweeted:
"The [LA Times] is fear mongering again, as it has throughout the pandemic. Calling covid a 'mass disabling event' is truly irresponsible. If I were not against censorship, I would wonder why Twitter does not tag this LA Times piece as misinformation."
Of course, tens of millions of disabled Americans and mountains of scientific research later, the LA Times was right, and Bhattacharya was wrong, yet again. If you cannot admit when your ideas and statements are wrong, then you are simply not mature enough to handle the responsibilities of serving as NIH Director.
September 22, 2022 - Jay Bhattacharya has No Idea what the NIH Actually Does
For someone who seeks to lead the National Institute of Health, Jay Bhattacharya seems to struggle with what the NIH actually does - or more importantly, has done. Jay tweets:
"Imagine there hadn't been an NIH-led 'devastating takedown' of the [Great Barrington Declaration] in Oct 2020. Imagine no media/social media suppression. We would have won the policy argument. Schools would have opened. We would have prioritized protection of the vulnerable. Instead, lockdowns."
This is just rank dishonesty. The GBD was soundly rejected with overwhelming consensus by scientific experts, without the guidance of the NIH, and because Jay refused to admit error, immediately painted himself as a victim. Winter 2020-21 resulted in hospitals overwhelmed amidst a horrific wave of death, and Bhattacharya's proposal to infect the unvaccinated families of tens of millions of American children, and countless unvaccinated American teachers, just months before a vaccine would be widely available, would have collapsed America's healthcare system.
The massive mountain of dead would have made any "policy argument" Bhattacharya thought he would have "won" utterly perverse. Jay's willingness to write elaborate alt-history fantasies in which he emerges the hero, detached from reality, shows a level of immaturity that disqualifies Jay Bhattacharya from the role of NIH Director.
March 4th, 2023 - Jay Bhattacharya Misrepresents Critics of Using Ivermectin to Treat COVID-19
Throughout the entire history of pandemics, snake oil salesmen have sold sham cures to exploit the public. This is such a well-documented fact, to the degree that even the popular videogame franchise Red Dead Redemption features these sorts of villains. Early in the pandemic an anti-parasitical drug, Ivermectin, was falsely promised to treat COVID-19, a viral infection, which is a completely separate phenomenon for which Ivermectin is ineffective. You don't need a medical degree to figure this out.
Now, Bhattacharya is on the record defending Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. In March, he tweeted in defense of the anti-parasite drug as a treatment for a viral disease:
"Ivermectin is used productively for many diseases that afflict humans. Anyone who calls it a solely horse medicine hurts public health."
Comically enough, nobody who warned against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 ever said this. They warned against going to farm supply stores to buy the animal formula of Ivermectin, which did sadly kill some Americans who were misled. Later in August, Bhattacharya would invent an even sillier defense, arguing:
"One effect of public health suppression of ivermectin is that many took veterinary formulations and inappropriate doses. Over 18 months in Oregon, 37 patients reported toxicity from the drug. Wouldn't it have been safer to not drive the med underground?"
Equating exploitative scam artists on social media with credentialed doctors and pharmacists protecting their patients' health and arguing that hospitals should be run like restaurants with a menu, is a completely depraved and indefensible statement. Jay Bhattacharya wants to serve as NIH Director and he can't even form the courage to stand up for basic facts around ineffective treatments for COVID-19? This is absolutely indefensible and disqualifying.
June 19th, 2023 - Jay Bhattacharya Misleads the Public on Hospital Crisis Protocols
Let’s re-iterate: Jay Bhattacharya never completed a residency or attained a medical license. He is not a medical doctor and has never treated patients, much less on a COVID-19 ICU ward. Jay spent much of his 2020 comfortably shooting his mouth off from his Stanford office:
Years later, forgetting his relative safety away from the immediate crisis of the beginning of the pandemic, Jay Bhattacharya shamelessly tweeted out:
"In April 2021, nurses filled gloves with hot water to hold the hands of dying patients, isolated from family members because of hospital protocols. Every government should adopt human rights legislation to guarantee patients the right to family visits."
This is an incredibly cruel and exploitative statement to make, implying that hospitals somehow enjoyed keeping dying patients from their families. In reality, hospitals were so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, that if a visitor of a dying patient were infected with COVID-19 in the hospital and needed a bed, there simply were none available. The last thing anyone dying a painful, horrible death from COVID-19 wants to do is put a loved one on the hospital bed next to them, at risk of suffering the same humiliating fate. Jay thinks we didn’t get enough Americans sick with COVID-19.
Jay Bhattacharya's failure to complete residency and attain a medical license is on full display here, and his refusal to understand emergency hospital protocols immediately disqualifies him from serving as NIH Director.
August 20th, 2023 - Jay Bhattacharya Commits Basic Logical Flaws
As a stunning example of sentences that sound smart, but simply broadcast one's own ignorance and failure to construct logical sentences, Jay Bhattacharya tweeted out:
"There is no randomized evidence showing masks prevent long covid."
The long running and expansive field of PPE engineering does not use randomized control trials, which are primary limited to clinical drugs, for numerous reasons including ethical. Instead of asking any expert in PPE engineering why this is, Bhattacharya instead decided to imply that they are all incompetent and/or guilty of fraud - a massive conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.
In reality, it's well documented that quality respirators prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and that Long COVID is caused by, you guessed it, COVID-19. Thus, preventing COVID-19 infection with a quality respirator... would prevent Long COVID, a condition afflicting countless millions of Americans.
Jay Bhattacharya's well demonstrated struggles with basic logic should immediately disqualify him for the role of NIH Director, where he will be expected to make many complicated and technical decisions.
January 11th, 2024 - Jay Bhattacharya is Ignorant About COVID-19 Viral Persistence
In another boldly uninformed claim, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
"The viral load of nearly every long-covid patient is zero."
This is an astounding statement that does little more than show Jay Bhattacharya's willful ignorance about the growing mountain of evidence that viral persistence, meaning the immune system is not clearing the virus, is a likely culprit behind LongCOVID disability, which affects millions of Americans. Of course, Bhattacharya does not have a license to treat patients, and does not perform scientific research in a lab. Jay is an economist who posts on social media more than anything else.
Viral persistence in COVID-19 completely invalidates Jay's proposal (the GBD) that America could have reached "herd immunity" in 3-6 months with the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans. Thus, he is forced to deny its existence. This unprofessional irresponsibility & willful ignorance about one of America’s most important health challenges disqualify Jay Bhattacharya from being able to serve as the head of one of the world's leading medical research institutions.
October 4th, 2024 - Jay Bhattacharya Shamelessly Exploits a Horrific Tragedy in the United States military
In an absolutely shameless and repulsive display of dishonesty, Jay Bhattacharya exploits a 2020 tragedy at the Air Force Academy and tweets out:
"We are approaching the 4th anniversary of the Air Force Academy lockdown tragedy, in which two cadets killed themselves after weeks in lockdown-induced solitary confinement."
This is a complete lie. Bhattacharya has zero evidence to support this claim, and no cause was identified in the deaths of these cadets. Jay is merely assigning guilt to emergency early pandemic measures in order to forward his shameless agenda. Suicides of military cadets have been on the rise since before the COVID-19 pandemic and are often linked to sexual assault or substance abuse issues.
The fact that Jay Bhattacharya would exploit the tragic deaths of two Air Force Academy cadets in order to forward his own agenda is utterly repulsive & completely un-American. For this alone, Jay Bhattacharya should be loudly condemned by the United States Congress and disqualified from the role of NIH Director for disrespecting our servicemen and women.
Final Verdict
The role of Director of National Institute of Health, one of the world's leading centers for medical and scientific research, is a serious responsibility. Jay Bhattacharya is an economist who has done little more over the past five years than make outlandish attacks on others, whilst relishing in childish antics and throwing his support behind the modern anti-vaccine movement. As the Trump Administration works to cripple the NIH as revenge for Trump’s own failures in 2020, it's clear that Jay Bhattacharya was chosen because of their shared illegitimate grievances against actual doctors and scientists with real-world accomplishments and responsibility.
Congress has a sacred obligation to safeguard our federal institutions from unqualified charlatans operating in bad faith. Jay Bhattacharya's years of childish antics and misleading the publics are well documented, and he should be forced to answer for his many failures as an economist masquerading as an expert on pandemics and infectious diseases. Rewarding him with one of the most important offices in the federal government would only be weakening America and handing the century to China and BRICS.
Contact your local Senator and demand that they refuse to confirm Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the NIH.
