An Amazing Turn of Events to a Life “Completely Overturned”

By Grispb @Adobe Stock

Help the Poor, the Vulnerable, the Working Class
You don’t have to be from the India subcontinent (South Asia) to appreciate that Karmic justice is alive and well, perhaps even flourishing. Meet Dr. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, who has gone from a pariah in the medical and scientific establishment to President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health. Daniel Henninger of the WSHJ calls it one of Donald Trump’s best picks.

Dr. Bhattacharya, an economist as well as a physician, opposed Covid lockdowns and was one of three principal co-authors of the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration. The others, notes Tunku Varadarajan in the WSJ, were Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff, a statistician who has since been fired from Harvard for refusing a Covid vaccine.

The declaration dissented from the Anglo-American scientific establishment and argued for focused, age-based protection from Covid instead of universal and indiscriminate lockdowns.

Also read, Focused Protection Remains Heresy on the Left

The Moral Courage of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

In the WSJ interview with Mr. Varadarajan, Dr. B. admits, “That’s when the attacks started the prevalence of Covid antibodies in Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located, was 50 times the recorded infection rate.

That he argues in the interview, “implied a lower infection mortality rate than public-health authorities were pushing at a time when they and the media thought it was a virtue to panic the population.”

In April 2020 he and several colleagues published a study that confirmed his hypothesis. The prevalence of Covid antibodies in Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located, was 50 times the recorded infection rate.

His university (Stanford) opened a “fact finding” investigation into him after BuzzFeed made baseless charges of conflict of interest. “This was the most anxiety-inducing event of my professional life,” he says.

Dr. Bhattacharya was shaken, but steadfast in his opposition to lockdown. His life was “completely overturned” in the months leading up to, and just after, Great Barrington, notes Mr. Varadarajan.

“I couldn’t eat or sleep for months,” Dr. B. says. Not a big man, he lost 30 pounds. He received death threats. “There were some very, very nasty attacks.” Once-friendly colleagues stopped talking to him: “They crossed the street to avoid me.”

Fringe Epidemiologists

Several of Dr. Bhattacharya’s submitted proposals did not get funded, but Dr. B. stops short of attributing the rejection to his views on the pandemic.

“It’s hard to tell,” he says chivalrously. “I mean, it’s hard to get NIH funding.” But it’s also true that Francis Collins, then NIH director, called Dr. Bhattacharya and his colleagues “fringe epidemiologists” in an October 2020 email to Anthony Fauci, in which Dr. Collins called for “a quick and devastating published take down” of the declaration. (Dr. Collins has since acknowledged that his own view of Covid was “very narrow.”)

The Universe Is Laughing 

Readers may feel there is Karmic justice in Trump’s nomination of Dr. B., but Dr. B. is unsure. He demurs, saying he is “actually amazed” at the turn of events.

There’s certainly some sense of the universe laughing,” he says. “If I had written my story five years ago, you would’ve thought of me as ridiculous and said, ‘Things like this don’t happen in real life!’ I had the head of the NIH . . . try to destroy me, and now I have the opportunity to lead this organization.”

(Dr. Bhattacharya’s appointment requires Senate confirmation.) “I think the main thing is that I know what abuse of power in this position looks like, having been exposed to it, and I will never do that.”

Once a household word, NIH is now sullied from the pandemic. For Americans to understand how important NIH is, Dr. B. wishes them to understand what NIH does:

“It is the single most important funder of biomedical research in the world,” he says, dispensing grants of nearly $50 billion a year. “It has a track record of funding some of the most important biomedical projects in history,” including the human genome project, and it is “the gold standard for institutional support for biomedical scientific research.”

Has the NIH become somewhat sclerotic in recent decades? Dr. B. thinks yes, but change is coming:

“I wrote a piece before the pandemic, on how the NIH had grown very conservative over the years, more conservative in its support of the newest ideas. Measurably so. We’re spending all this money, but we’re not getting the kind of innovation one would expect from this kind of investment.”

Essentially Launching Careers 

Funding allows researchers to “make their own labs.,” which worries Dr. B. When funding is given to older researchers, it nudges it into becoming an “old man’s club.” Pausing, Dr. B. recasts his point:

“That’s not the right phrase. The NIH has not given support for the ideas of younger people that it once did.”

Not supporting younger people means fewer revolutionary ideas in science, at the expense of scientific advancements.

Dr. Bhattacharya says the typical NIH-supported researchers in the 2010s were “publishing ideas that were about eight years old. Whereas typically, 20 or 30 years ago, they were two years old. So it’s just gotten much more conservative in the ideas that it supported.”

NIH Playing It Safe

Its key philosophy,” grumbles Dr. Bhattacharya, “is that new ideas are risky. There’s understandably some pressure to show results in terms of breakthroughs that improve health. And it’s much easier to say, ‘Look, we’ve taken these safer risks.’ But if you invest, the right approach is a portfolio, some safe bets and some riskier things, where you expect some failure but also some tremendous breakthroughs.”

How will Dr. B. go about rebalancing the NIH? By emphasizing newer ideas that have the potential for huge breakthroughs. Dr. B. also looks to concentrate on “the real health risks that Americans face, like heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer.”

Those diseases are not funded “nearly in the proportions they need, relative to infectious disease. We spend $8 billion to $10 billion a year on infectious disease when we should be spending proportionally more on chronic diseases that kill Americans at higher rates.”

Addressing Scientific Fraud

“We’ve had “scandal after scandal of biomedical scientists publishing papers where they Photoshopped key scientific data.” Major scientists had to retract papers.

Science depends on being able to trust results, so that fraud can produce “a whole tower of ideas built on a foundation of sand. And the ultimate consequence of that is that clinical advances that we think we have ended up not working to … help people.”

Replication, the Key Pillar of Science

To be certain that a result is sound, it needs to be demonstrated over and over. But that’s seen as drudge work. “We need to make replication of scientific data and scientific hypotheses a centerpiece of what the NIH does. Make that into an honorable track so that people can make their careers doing that. A lot of times this work isn’t seen as particularly original, but it’s … central to scientific progress.”

Mr. V. asks Dr. Bhattacharya if it is possible to restore the trust that the American people have lost in health experts and the scientific establishment, due primarily to their utter failure during Covid.

Scientists embraced ideas that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and of course the harm to children from school closures.”

Negligent Scientific Elites

“Denial of basic scientific facts like immunity. Denial of basic human rights—the rights to bodily autonomy, to informed consent, to free speech.”

All of these violations, (Dr. B. notes,) were “embraced by scientists as necessary to control the pandemic, and they weren’t. Neither were they sufficient—”these draconian measures failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. Americans came to see “the scientific establishment as essentially an authoritarian power sitting over them, rather than as a force for good.”

America’s Scientists Played God

Dr. Bhattacharya—himself a victim of their “divine wrath”—believes that it was the result of “a relatively small group of scientists during the pandemic deciding that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.” This led to a “groupthink that is anathema to science. It’s also anathema to civil society.”

Is Dr. Fauci in Dr. B.’s Ine of sight for criticism? As a victim of the scientific communities “divine wrath,” Dr. B. blames a relatively small group of scientists during the pandemic. This clique decided that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.”

Dr. Bhattacharya is particularly critical of the “hubris” of Dr. Fauci, who “decided that if you contradicted him, you weren’t just contradicting Fauci, you were contradicting science itself.” That sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Dr. Fauci said of his critics in November 2021 that “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.”

The scientific community, instead of giving ideas a hearing, the establishment scorned Dr. Bhattacharya as a crank.

“They questioned my integrity, my values.” His university hounded him. What kept him going, he says—in addition to the cast-iron conviction that he wasn’t wrong about the science—was his religious faith. “I’m a Christian,” he says. “That definitely played a role in giving me strength.” He was raised Hindu but became a Presbyterian as an 18-year-old senior at Claremont High School in Southern California.

Too Smart for Everyone’s Own Good

There’s folly in believing what makes someone important, “what gives them moral worth, is how smart they are.”

The Sin of Hubris 

When he converted, he came to understand “how evil that idea of measuring ones worth” by one’s smartness was.

Dr. B. understood that “hubris around your accomplishments, your intelligence, is immoral. Sinful even.”

That understanding helped him withstand the deprecation and the belittling he had to endure decades later during the pandemic. “I had all these people essentially saying I was not very smart. But they were attacking a version of me that had already died when I was 18.”

Dr, B.’s purpose in life is to use the gifts of his knowledge so he can make discoveries and suggest policies that would improve the health and well-being of the poor, the vulnerable, and the working-class.”

It wasn’t only the scientist in him but also the Christian that rose up in revolt during the pandemic when he “saw the widespread adoption of policies that were not grounded in science, that were harming the welfare of the vulnerable, particularly children.” He felt he “had an obligation to speak. Because what’s the purpose of my career otherwise?”

Scientific Institutions Work for the People 

Dr. B doesn’t like the haughty relationship where the scientists sit above the public and say, “Look, you can’t think that,” or “You’ll be censored if you say that.” The Scientist need to remember that they are servants of the American people.

The people are the ones paying the bills. They’re the ones giving the $50 billion a year. We scientists serve the people, not the other way around.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.