Bhattacharya Discovers the Beetle's Dilemma
The NIH Is Not a Petty Fiefdom
Allow me to present you with a humble proposal: You can either be an equal in a forward-thinking organization rooted in advancing science and medicine, or you can be king. Except...you'll be king of nothing but a mountain of crap, openly mocked and ridiculed by the world as you roll around a useless ball of excrement. Jay Bhattacharya has foolishly chosen the latter, turning the world's leading hub for medical and scientific research into an irrelevant, politicized sham in a mere matter of weeks.
Dr. Jonathan Howard over at Science Based Medicine has properly read this destructive bureaucrat the Riot Act:
In reality, Dr. Bhattacharya was not silenced. As the video below shows, he was loud, prominent, and influential. He didn’t come out of nowhere when Trump plunked him from obscurity to head the NIH. He was a celebrity on Fox News and Twitter. Billionaires sung his praises. He made an enormous number of YouTube videos, many of them about how he had been censored. He was on countless podcasts and wrote many columns in international newspapers. He advised presidents and governors. He testified in courts and before Congress. He was everywhere, except a hospital.
All for misguided delusions of "revenge" on an almost random assortment of “Covidian” doctors and scientists for the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Bhattacharya gets to look in the mirror and fool himself into believing that he's some sort of hero for "evidence-based science," egged on by his scientifically illiterate social media fans. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's handpicked lapdog, many predicted that the Great Barrington Declaration's Jay Bhattacharya will go down in history as the face responsible for the destruction of America's medical and scientific research capacity: the National Institute of Health.
Top talent, including the next generation of scientists, will abandon this country to find work at other universities around the world, leaving America in the dust on the next great scientific breakthroughs. In a matter of mere weeks, Jay Bhattacharya has broken his promises to preserve ideological diversity and defend free speech, only to become one of the world's biggest censors in science. This doesn't bother the Stanford economist one bit.
An Anti-Intellectual Bloodbath
Surely, you've already heard of massive layoffs and slashing of clinical trials across the board that will only compromise the nation's health, but the meat and potatoes are much worse than you can imagine.
"NIH has been instructed to hold off from issuing all awards to Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern (including med schools). Agency staff have also been instructed to not speak about this funding freeze to grantees and applicants." -Max Kozlov via Bluesky
The illegal freezing of federal contracts to numerous universities, with written confirmation from Michelle Bull, NIH's Director of Extramural Policy, to refuse justifications for this grossly inappropriate course of action, may be only a small part of what Stanford University's Jay Bhattacharya will be remembered for.
On top of this, Dr. Kevin Hall, a leading nutrition scientist, was driven out of the NIH, directly citing censorship as the cause for leaving the NIH after 20+ years of service. This was not what Bhattacharya promised when he claimed to be a censored, dissident scientist across Fox News, Princeton University, and social media.
Why hasn't Bhattacharya tendered his resignation and ordered a formal apology for betraying his obligations to the American people? Is Stanford administration going to demand that Jay apologize for making the University look like their faculty are a gaggle of freedom-hating quacks?
Or was it that Jay Bhattacharya always a fan of censorship, when he spent years promoting himself in the media to spread absurd lies about COVID-19 in order to suppress the reliable information Americans need?
Sadly, this story is only getting much darker.
Continuing Wakefield’s Legacy
The anti-vaccine movement has existed in one form or another for centuries, but the modern iteration has its roots in the 1990s.
Long-time followers of the PAI (Thank you for your support, by the way!) will remember when we covered Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s favorite "medical expert," Andrew Wakefield, who personally violated young children in his unscientific witch-hunt to discredit the MMR vaccine, blaming it for autism.
This highly destructive myth has already been debunked by an overwhelming mountain of evidence. Sadly, facts don't overrule the feelings to Jay Bhattacharya's boss, who promised a "return to gold-standard, evidence based medicine" - the common refrain of anti-vaxxers for the past few years now. Worse yet, Jay Bhattacharya is too either cowardly to stand up to authority and censorship of science, or he finds perverse satisfaction in making a mockery of those who actually know what they're talking about.
Now, domesticated "dissident" Jay Bhattacharya is converting the NIH to revive RFK Jr. and Wakefield's old crusade to connect autism to pediatric vaccines, with horrifying potential for unforgivable cruelty. Coordinating with Medicare and Medicaid, Bhattacharya wants to create a national registry to "track" autistic Americans, shared with "10 or 20 outside groups" that are totally unaccountable. For supposed champions of "medical freedom," this is absolutely perverse and laying the foundations for a sequel to AktionT4, a central part of the Holocaust.
“Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities…publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child ‘euthanasia’ program.” -Herwig Czech, Molecular Autism
This is a highly unethical expansion of medical surveillance and a serious violation of privacy, including the harvesting of fitness tracker & smartwatch data, from the same cranks who whined that vaccine mandates are unethical - a centuries old argument that was thrown out of the Supreme Court in 1905.
RFK Jr. has not been shy about his desires to send the chronically ill and disabled to concentration camps, rebranded "wellness farms." This would naturally include the millions of Americans disabled by the SARS-CoV-2 virus RFK Jr. and Bhattacharya championed - erasing the people who have suffered as a result of Trump and Biden's failed pandemic responses. This is what Bhattacharya is proud to put his name alongside, not realizing he will be remembered under a much more infamous moniker:
“Little Eichmanns:” The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him. -Wikipedia
The "Great Barrington" Bhattacharya will be remembered as nothing more than a Little Eichmann, rolling around in shit.
As a minor aside: Congratulations to Ashish Jha, Leana Wen, Zeynep Tufekci, and other liberals who insisted that Jay Bhattacharya would be a good fit to lead the National Institute of Health. You absolutely freaking nailed it!
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The AFT teachers union Prez Weingarten had the utter audacity to invite Hoeg & Bhatyacharya to the union town halls until other scientists refused to appear in a town hall with either of them! 1000s of Ed workers, students, & their fam members died after Weingarten legitimized them before she pacted with Walensky to reopen unsafe schools in the Spring of 2021 when the majority of the AFT represented urban schools did not have adequate mitigation for reducing airborne transmission nor were the majority of its urban students and family members vaccinated. It is long past time for all of us to expose the criminal malfeasance of the NEA & AFT top national leaderships who led the reopening and continue to stand down while millions of kids, teachers, staff members and kids families are endlessly reinfected from SARSCov2 transmission in K-12 schools.