This Is Your Life: The Legacy of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya
Faceplanting Into the Dustbin of History
One of the follies of chronic contrarianism is that you may suddenly find yourself becoming a part of the dreaded establishment that you became so famous for rallying against. Of course, for cranks like Jay Bhattacharya, his "dissident scientist" gimmick (economists aren't scientists, for starters) was always a work - a Stanford academic, well-funded by wealthy interests including the Koch oil dynasty, was never truly a brave champion against "the medical establishment." He was always a tool of established powers, who was wielded against science, medicine, and public health to get many Americans killed and disabled. Weird choice of friends, too:
For his unyielding loyalty to power and pestilence, Jay Bhattacharya is being rewarded with a nomination to serve as Director of the National Institute of Health, under the command of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - an anti-vaccine scam artist that Bhattacharya previously endorsed for President, who has proposed concentration camps for the chronically ill and Black children. The Trump Administration has already gone out of their way to cripple the NIH and its role making America a leader in scientific and medical research, paving the runway for Bhattacharya to swoop in and serve as a purely political appointee, sabotaging the work of actual scientists and doctors. This is fitting, considering Bhattacharya's inability to wrap his head around basic science - something that many American economists seem to struggle with:
As we've written before, Bhattacharya's agenda is to launder your hard-earned taxdollars over to his pro-pestilence friends so they can produce propaganda against lifesaving public health measures, which will be utterly worthless should America face another pandemic crisis. It's quite clear that Jay Bhattacharya clearly hasn't thought this master plan of his all the way through.
Jay struggles to think through a lot of things.
As of right now, disease outbreaks are ripping through America in early 2025, including one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent history ripping through Texas. Kids are dying in a horrific flu season, after repeated COVID-19 infections have negatively impacted their immune systems. Kansas is suffering from a serious tuberculosis outbreak. Oh, and a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic is simmering under the surface. Now, none of this is totally unmanageable - a competent team of federal public health officials could coordinate efforts to clamp down on these outbreaks, maximize vaccinations, and prevent future harms.
Folly of the Gambler
Unfortunately for us, Trump is purging those very people and assembling a team that is anything but competent. Jay is a childish social media troll, for starters:
Instead, these worthless cranks rely upon arrogant dishonesty to mask their years of indefensible failures, always blaming others for their own shortcomings. To understand the larger agenda, let's look at what one of the fellow travelers from the pro-pestilence movement is saying, a worthless anti-vaccine ivermectin grifter by the name of Syed Haider, who previously claimed that cancer isn't malevolent:
Gee whiz, it sure is a good thing that liberals didn't waste four years "normalizing" pediatric COVID-19 & constant illness under the guise of "immunity debt" or some other such nonse... awh, wait…
Damn. What was once unthinkable has become mainstream. Disease prevention has become uncouth, and simple fictions have overwhelmed hard science.
Jay Bhattacharya looks to lead a crippled National Institute of Health, dedicated to propaganda over research, through a dark period of pestilence saturation as the lapdog of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump. As Vivek Ramaswamy found out the hard way, Jay will always be seen as an inferior subhuman in the eyes of his white supremacist masters, never truly respected no matter how loyal he is to sadistic slobs and deadly viruses. The fool who once enjoyed the benefits of being a contrarian critic against the "medical establishment" has now played himself into a truly lose-lose hand by becoming a part of the very establishment he profited from demonizing.
Say, how about we put on a record?
On one hand, if Bhattacharya prioritizes loyalty to Trump and RFK over the science, then he will be known as the man who sank the world's leading hub for medical and scientific research into complete irrelevancy. On the other hand, if Bhattacharya finally gets his head out of his ass and attempts to stand up for actual science and medicine - attempting to mitigate the worst excesses of RFK - then decent odds are that he will be expelled from the NIH and condemned by his only remaining allies: the modern anti-vaccine movement and the wealthy interests that astroturfed Jay.
Jay's bluff is being called. As a loudmouthed contrarian on the outside, it was easy for Bhattacharya to condemn, smear, and demonize The Establishment. Now that Bhattacharya is joining The Establishment, it's very clear that he never had a real plan beyond playing childish games with other people's lives, even as disease outbreaks ravage America. The graveyards of history are riddled with blowhards whose foolish delusions of grandeur did nothing but harm, often soon forgotten. Bhattacharya hasn't realized that when he is forced to cash his chips, he'll be joining them.
Historical Footnotes
Let's jump ahead, say…150 years, to the far future of 2175. A Chinese colony ship, the Type 217 voidcrawler Lu Bu 949, is making the long journey across the stars from a doomed Earth ravaged by climate collapse to settle Proxima Centauri, in the desperate hope of rebuilding civilization. Generation after generation are born, live, and die aboard this vessel, passing down the lessons learned from the failures of humanity on Earth in the hopes that they are not repeated by mortal souls when they are once again weighed down by gravity. As part of their rigorous education, these cosmic voyagers are taught a class on American history. More specifically, the era of American decline and collapse that defined the first half of the 21st century.
Touching upon the 2020s and the American mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, students will learn how institutional rot, combined with liberal cowardice, freely handed the levers of power to reactionary forces. Left unchallenged, these sadistic fools accelerated American regression into a state of global irrelevancy.
Certainly, American readers must remember the shallowness of history lessons during your own education. Just how many sentences do you think will be spent detailing the collapse of America's role as a leader in medical and scientific research? Would Jay Bhattacharya even be mentioned in the footnotes of this chapter, or considered not even worth mentioning in the annals of this dark period of history?
Now, an entire semester could be dedicated to learning important lessons from Jay Bhattacharya's many failures. The importance of folding early and admitting fault, instead of doubling down for years in commitment to failed ideas. Acknowledging one's own limitations, instead of putting yourself in a situation which demands skills and perspective far beyond your own abilities. Most importantly, how the consequences of our failures can haunt the world long after we're gone, and our names are forgotten by humanity. This is what you can learn from Jay Bhattacharya.
Unfortunately, our modern institutions like Stanford Medicine are teaching their students that Jay Bhattacharya is a role model worth following in the footsteps of, instead of accurately painting him as an exploitative charlatan to be condemned.
Closing the River
With the Democrats still not making a commitment to rebuild the NIH if returned to power, one would not be unreasonable to fear that Bhattacharya's influence over the NIH will leave aftershocks that haunt American scientists for the years which follow. To undo this damage, it will inevitably require a bold new leadership with a strong commitment to undoing this sabotage, if America is to ever regain its competitive advantage in medical and scientific research. Anything else will merely lower the bar and surrender the 21st century to other nations such as China.
On the bright side, that bold new leader, whomever they might be if that day may come, will be remembered as a hero to young scientists and doctors for generations to come. Jay Bhattacharya's name will be completely forgotten, rendered totally irrelevant. That, my friends, is why you don't bet all your chips on an unthinking, uncaring virus like SARS-CoV-2.
