Ashish Jha's Reactionary Crashout
From COVID Czar to... CEO of a GenAI Scam?!
Little attention has been paid to Ashish Jha after leaving the Biden Administration as White House COVID Response Coordinator (COVID Czar, but the former Brown University Dean of Public Health has taken a rather reactionary shift in his tone. It’s worth remembering that just before the pandemic, Jha was attacking Medicare-4-All and in 2020, endorsed Emily Oster’s fraudulent propaganda before smearing public schoolteachers as “irrational” for not wanting to be disabled or killed by COVID-19. As COVID Czar, Jha did little more than justify the Biden Administration’s decisions on cable news while thousands of children died, millions of Americans became disabled by Long COVID, and schools across the country shut down regularly as a result of unmitigated in COVID outbreaks.
Jha instead spouted off numerous reactionary unscientific myths, leading to quotes such as “There’s no study in the world that masks work that well,” insisting that “most of us can finally ignore COVID,” sharing fake statistics that Long COVID is magically going away thanks to waves of mass infection & reinfection, denying the well documented impacts of COVID-19 on the immune system, or even going so far to declare that the “radical fringe left who still mask indoors” are just as dangerous and unscientific as MAHA anti-vaccine cranks:
After this completely failed to save the Harris campaign in 2024, Ashish Jha publicly endorsed Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, and Mehmet Oz to lead the FDA, NIH, and CMS respectively. He also tweeted out that children don’t need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, after it’s already killed and disabled so many. Jha would later publicly declare that Oz was doing a “very good job” running CMS, which has actually been an absolute disaster. While this earned him zero respect amongst anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, Ashish Jha continues prostate himself before the MAHA altar.
Garbage I Read on Twitter is Evidence Now!
In a recent CNN appearance, Ashish Jha declared himself to be a believer in the “Lab Leak” theory of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that he had “compelling evidence.” There is a history of lab leaks, and a separate history of pandemics, but a lab leak leading to a global pandemic would be a historically unprecedented event, and such claims would have to be supported by strong evidence, instead of circumstantial sensationalism. So just what does the former Brown University Dean of Public Health & White House COVID Czar consider to be “compelling evidence?”
On Twitter, Ashish Jha shares a tweet from former Clinton staffer and Joe Rogan podcast guest Jamie Metzl, a self-described “futurist” think-tank dork that regularly whines about the Democratic Socialists of America and has shared bizarre conspiracy theory videos produced by anonymous trolls under the banner “Project EPSTEIN.” Jamie also made a big deal out of asking an AI chatbot to “distill thousands of years of human wisdom into ten commandments” as “A New Moral Code for Humanity,” spinning an entire joke of a book out of it that he has pitched to churches and clergy.
So no, not a reliable source for medical and scientific information. Doubling down, Jha insists “no one in America knows for sure,” that “Anyone telling you they do is selling you something.” This is the rabbit hole that “Enlightened COVID Centrism” leads you down: Legitimizing absurd conspiracy theories based off of unscientific garbage you read on Twitter. So, it should come as no surprise that Ashish Jha is the one trying to sell you something: he has gone on to become the CEO of a generative AI scam start-up.
Public Health by Chatbot
Generative “Artificial Intelligence,” a broken, janky software that does not work to a reliable professional standard, has already become a public health crisis in multiple ways. This includes, but is certainly not limited to:
Children receiving detailed guidance on how to take their own lives
A flood of dangerous medical disinformation across social media
As more and more of the general public turns against this exploitative matryoshka doll of scams, both leading Democrats and Republicans have insisted that this is the future, and that the public’s opinion simply does not matter. Seeing dollar signs in his eyes, Ashish Jha has decided to get in on this self-destructive reactionary spiral with a new AI-powered startup called “BioRadar,” playing directly to the lab leak crowd:
BioRadar promises to be “America’s AI Powered Biological Intelligence Service,” that will “detect emerging threats before they spread, characterize risk in real time, and deliver decision-ready intelligence,” alongside a Call to Action to “request a briefing” to receive “Mission-Grade Biological Intelligence,” as if this is like one of those crummy spy procedurals your boomer parents doze off to on CBS.
Jha’s BioRadar claims that “The world is saturated with high-risk labs: BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities have doubled worldwide since 2020, across dozens of countries with widely varying biosafety oversight.” Major cities around the world have had virology research labs long before 2020, with zero lab leaks leading to global pandemics. Straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, they insist that “Engineering pathogens is now fast, cheap and accessible: What once required a nation-state now requires a lab bench. AI, synthetic biology, and gene editing have permanently lowered the barrier.” Needless to say, BioRadar provides no evidence to support this claim.
BioRadar Wants Your Tax Dollars
What is the unintentionally hilarious, and quite frankly most damning, is that the frontpage of BioRadar features a bizarre animated graph that claims to be tracking metrics such as “Wastewater,” “Behavioral,” “Syndromic,” and “Environmental,” with a “STATUS: NOMINAL” and “THREAT LVL: LOW” readout at the bottom. It more closely resembles the work of user interface designers for Hollywood blockbusters like Iron Man, The Dark Knight, or Prometheus than anything science based.
With Ashish Jha’s chatbot powered “mission grade biological intelligence,” it claims that they will convert “complex biological data into prioritized threat assessments, early warning alerts, and operational guidance for leaders” that will “establish normal biological profiles for each community,” as well as “visual intelligence dashboards and action-oriented operational guidance.” Just what might that operational guidance be?
Jha has some answers! Pitching to Pete Hesgeth’s Department of War Crimes, he insists that BioRadar’s genAI chatbot will “protect the warfighter.” Pitching to “Public Health Agencies,” BioRadar insists it will help them “Deploy targeted interventions instead of broad, damaging shutdowns,” and “build public confidence” in state & local governments. Let me explain to you how this will work, prospective government official looking to light taxpayer money on fire: Ashish Jha (or some other schmuck in BioRadar’s employ) is going to open Claude, ChatGPT, or some other sycophantic chatbot, and “prompt” it to generate a report with fancy looking graphs. This chatbot is then going to suck up other people’s research & data from across the Internet, butcher it, and then remix it to meet the demands of the prompt it’s given.
In a nutshell, Ashish Jha wants to take your tax money and give it directly to himself and the world’s most vile, reactionary tech companies in exchange for bastardized versions of other people’s work.
In the real world, we know what this will result in: fraudulent data, hallucinated citations, and horrific policymaking decisions that get people killed. It would be reasonable to assume that BioRadar is never going to put out a report recommending mask mandates or other non-pharmaceutical interventions in case something like H5N1 (bird flu) or other pandemic-level threats emerge again in our lifetimes. BioRadar will instead produce unscientific propaganda justifying a hands-off approach that gets countless people killed. If BioRadar’s “briefings” inform terrible policy decisions that get countless people killed, it’s likely that Ashish is going to shrug his shoulders & absolve himself of responsibility for selling a fraudulent service.
The only value of “BioRadar” is to point and laugh at it simply as yet another case study in how genAI is anything but intelligent.
