By stockpro @Adobe Stock
Federal Medical Research Gets an Upgrade
A few brave media souls were Covid lockdown skeptics right from the get-go. Their first complaint was that press corps darling Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn’t even pretending to understand the consequences of his destructive societal prescriptions,” reports James Freeman in the WSJ.
But Dr. Fauci and then-director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins really were pretending when they treated dissenting scientists as peddlers of fringe theories. This week, seeing one of those brave and accurate dissenters moving closer to a Senate confirmation vote to run the NIH, it’s a little easier to hope that the lockdown disaster will never be repeated.
From John Tierney City Journal:
Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing in the Senate last week was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid-19 pandemic policies. While some public-health officials, academics, and journalists continue to defend the Covid restrictions and oppose Bhattacharya’s nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health, Democrats at the hearing unanimously abandoned the fight against his supposedly “fringe” ideas.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?
Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for… opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”
The Moral Courage of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
That’s a stark contrast from “The Science” extolled by Fauci, Collins, and their acolytes in academia and the media. They proclaimed the necessity of unprecedented authoritarian measures and ostracized scientists who pointed to abundant evidence—from pre-2020 studies as well as data during the pandemic—that these measures were ineffective. They vastly exaggerated the risk of Covid to younger people while ignoring the enormous social, economic, and medical costs of the lockdowns.
Who would not agree with James Freeman claiming President Trump is “prone to exaggeration.”
But if he calls the Bhattacharya hire the greatest leadership upgrade in the history of federal medical research, could anyone argue with him?
Read more about Dr. Jay Bhattacharya here.
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