President-elect Donald Trump stunned federal health agencies last week by naming a brilliant but unorthodox scientist, long maligned by the establishment for his ‘heretical’ views during Covid, to lead one of the nation’s most powerful public health departments under the new administration.
Trump selected Stanford University School of Medicine Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya —an outspoken critic of the government’s lockdown policies and vaccine mandates—to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Bhattacharya would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, including NIAID, FDA and the National Cancer Institute.
Trump’s announcement was a moment of vindication for Bhattacharya, a highly credentialed scientist, once trashed for his dissenting views by former public health gurus Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In a grand twist of irony, the Stanford physician is now poised, pending Senate confirmation, to take over the leadership of the sprawling health empires these men once commanded.
President-elect Trump also nominated Dr. Marty Makary, another staunch critic of lockdowns, to head the Food and Drug Administration. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, a Hall of Fame for doctors.
After a respected Johns Hopkins study came out forcefully attacking lockdowns as ungrounded in science and offering evidence that no lives had been saved, Makary slammed corporate media for its wall of silence with regard to these groundbreaking findings.
In a Fox News appearance, he suggested that editors “may already have written their own narrative” on the effectiveness of Covid lockdowns, and are unwilling to deviate from it.
A deep thinker and articulate spokesman, Dr. Makary sharply criticized public health leaders who affected ignorance of the fact that prior Covid infection and subsequent natural immunity makes Covid vaccination unnecessary.
In a Wall St Journal op-ed, Dr. Makary slammed “the public-health officials who ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated.”
“After two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear,” Dr. Makary said. “It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology.”
Celebrated and Cursed
News of Bhattacharya’s and Makary’s appointments was hailed by health experts who see the need to clean house at the federal health agencies and bring in bold independent scientists who challenge group-think and insist on scientific evidence.
“Jay Bhattacharya can bring science back to NIH, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, blasting the agency for its distorted hiring priorities that has prioritized racial quotas over scientific and educational merit, placing incompetent DEI applicants into senior positions.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s appointment isn’t just vindication for him. It is a victory for all dissenting physicians who risked their licenses to stand against deep-state medicine. It helps ensure that when this country faces another public health crisis, science will be protected from politics, profits and power grabs,” wrote a Washington Times op-ed.
Liberal power elites, however, were simmering over Bhattacharya’s selection. They remember all too well when his was a voice that threatened their iron grip on pandemic policy and needed to be silenced. His opposition to masking and vaccine mandates infuriated them.
During the pandemic, federal and state officials were coercing all workers to get vaccinated before returning to work after the lockdowns were lifted. Because the vaccines did not prevent infection, Bhattacharya argued that mandating the Covid shots was unethical.
He went on to advise Florida to drop masking in schools earlier than other communities, and became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging social media companies for suppressing his and others’ online posts that questioned the government’s narrative.
Bhattacharya regularly slammed Collins and Fauci for mishandling the pandemic and abusing their power. Fauci and Collins “created an illusion of scientific consensus around their ideas; they marginalized anyone that disagreed with them even though there wasn’t a scientific consensus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox News last year.
In response to Trump’s nominating him to lead the NIH, liberal media outlets immediately pounced, belittling the Stanford University scientist as “self-serving,” “bound to erode public trust,” and “outside the medical mainstream.”
Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist and FDA insider, admitted that appointments of Drs. Bhattacharya and Makary to the NIH and FDA underscore that the current leaders of these agencies are no longer trusted.
“What they’re saying, when they make these kinds of appointments, is that we don’t trust the people who are in authority there now,” Offit lamented.
What could be truer?
Offit himself as well as many other experts have acknowledged the reasons for the loss of public trust. “Children suffered from decreased education, decreased socialization [during the lockdowns] … We probably didn’t need to close businesses as long as we closed them, either,” Offit admitted to Politico.
The Great Barrington Declaration
Following the sweeping shutdown of schools, “non-essential” businesses and houses of worship, the Stanford professor, with two renowned colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, authored the historic Great Barrington Declaration, slamming the lockdowns as uncalled for, dangerous and even deadly.
This document, named for the city in which it was written in Oct. 2020, battled for common sense amidst hysteria. It was presented as an open letter to the public, with particular concern over the devastating effect lockdowns were having on children.
It warned that the prolonged school closures and coast to coast lockdowns would cause irreparable harm to American society, and would heighten all-cause mortality for years to come.
The letter called on government officials to rethink the entire concept of shutting down society, urging them to end the brutally restrictive measures and instead embrace a “focused protection” approach.
“Focused protection” called for strong measures and early treatment to shield high risk populations such as the elderly and medically vulnerable, while allowing younger healthy individuals who could fight off the virus to return to normal life.
The hope of the Declaration, which was signed by tens of thousands of doctors and public health scientists, was that journalists would pay attention to an alternate perspective, prompting constructive debate on the unprecedented experiment of lockdowns.
Smear Campaign
Four days after the Declaration was published, Bhattacharya and his colleagues found themselves targeted by federal officials in a smear campaign.
Shocking emails from then NIH director Francis Collins to NIAID head Anthony Fauci that subsequently came to light through a FOIA release, revealed the two senior officials conspiring to coordinate “a devastating takedown” of the Barrington Declaration.
So threatened were Collins and Fauci that they denounced the authors of the Declaration—world-renowned scientists—as “fringe epidemiologists,” as they plotted to discredit them in medical journals.
Fauci allegedly orchestrated hit pieces in respected publications, undermining the Declaration’s authors as isolated eccentrics advocating “dangerous” ideas “outside of mainstream science.”
Shocked by the attacks, Bhattacharya nevertheless stood his ground. He went on to advise Florida to drop masking in schools earlier than other communities, joined a lawsuit challenging social media companies for suppressing his posts, and testified before Congress.
As Covid ripped through the country, Bhattacharya continued calling out Collins and Fauci for mishandling the pandemic. He criticized the government’s refusal to lift the nationwide lockdowns, after promising they would last for only a couple of weeks.
It is now undisputed that nationwide lockdowns were not backed by science and caused catastrophic damage, with no measurable benefit to society. They were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America, critics say.
People lost their jobs or their livelihoods. Lives were destroyed by financial hardship, loneliness, depression, despair and addiction. A generation of children suffer from stunted social skills due to years out of the school system with limited social interaction.
House Select Committee Releases ‘Lessons Learned and a Path Forward’
This week, the House Oversight Committee released a remarkable 500-page “Final Report” on the findings of a 2-year investigation into the coronavirus pandemic.
The report offers a sweeping validation of many non-mainstream opinions that have been suppressed or demonized, and castigates the Biden Administration for violating Americans’ rights in multiple ways.
Among the document’s conclusions, citing a preponderance of the evidence, is that Covid-19 likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China, and did not have a “natural origin” as Dr. Fauci continues to insist.
The report also notes that “China’s foremost SARS research lab is in Wuhan, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.” Researchers at the lab “fell sick with a Covid-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before the virus was discovered at the wet market.”
(Initial rumors swirled at the beginning of the pandemic that China’s wet markets, which are known for selling fish and exotic animals in unsanitary conditions, were the origin of the virus.)
The report stated that wearing masks were found to be ineffective at protecting people from Covid-19. Likewise, the report found that the social distancing rule, which shut down schools and small business across the country, was arbitrary and not supported by science.
School Closures
The report dwelled on the massive harm from school closures, confirming that the “science” never justified these draconian measures.
“Children were unlikely to contribute to the spread of Covid-19 or suffer severe illness or mortality,” the authors state. Instead, as a result of school closures, “children experienced historic learning loss, higher rates of psychological distress, and decreased physical well-being.”
“Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life,” the report stated.
The report castigated CDC Director Rochelle Walensky for granting the teachers’ union, American Federation of Teachers (ATF), undue input and influence over CDC advice to the nation regarding school closings.
“Schools remained closed longer than necessary because of AFT’s political interference in the school reopening guidance,” the report’s authors charged. AFT is a political union, not a scientific organization. Its interests were geared to its members, not to the needs of America’s schoolchildren, and the union should not have been given a voice in CDC decisions.
Furthermore, according to the report, the AFT advocated for various Covid mitigation efforts that prolonged school closures, which the CDC acceded to. Testimony to the Select Committee revealed that AFT President Weingarten even had a direct telephone line to contact former CDC Director Walensky.
Reinforcing the findings that children suffered significant academic and emotional setbacks, the report notes that standardized test scores show that children lost decades worth of academic progress as a result of prolonged Covid-19 school closures.
Most disturbingly, mental and physical health concerns also skyrocketed.
The Government Ran Misinformation Campaigns
Although public health officials have routinely accused critics of “spreading misinformation,” the report found that running misinformation campaigns was actually the government’s preferred tool in suppressing dissent.
In a striking statement, the document singled out the government’s demonization of off-label drug use [such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine] to treat Covid infection as “the most egregious examples of misinformation campaigns”.
These drugs, which have a solid, safety profile going back decades, and have been prescribed to millions of people across the world, were suddenly cast as unsafe. Pharmaceutical boards were told not to fill prescriptions for these drugs and doctors were threatened with the loss of their licenses for prescribing them.
The report also singled out the government’s suppression of the lab leak theory by casting it as a conspiracy theory, as another example of the abuse of government power.
The Biden Administration even employed “undemocratic and likely unconstitutional methods — including pressuring social media companies to censor certain Covid-19 content — to fight what it deemed misinformation,” the Pandemic report said.
Covid-19 Vaccines
The report harshly criticized the false messaging that was deployed around the Covid vaccines, falsely promising they would stop the spread or transmission of the virus when this was clearly untrue.
The lawmakers also faulted the FDA’s rushed approval of the Covid vaccines “in order to meet the Biden Administration’s arbitrary mandate timeline.” This was done despite the warnings of two leading FDA scientists about the dangers of rushing the vaccine approval process and the likelihood of adverse events.
“These scientists were ignored and days later, the Biden Administration went ahead and mandated the vaccine,” the Pandemic report stated.
In a scathing critique of vaccine mandates, the document asserts that “vaccine mandates were not supported by science and caused more harm than good.”
It accuses the Biden Administration of “coercing healthy Americans into compliance with Covid-19 vaccine mandates that trampled individual freedoms, harmed military readiness, and disregarded medical freedom.”
These wrongs were carried out “to force a novel vaccine on millions of Americans without sufficient evidence to support their policy decisions,” the report stressed, noting that many doctors opposed the vaccine mandates, particularly those targeting children, pointing out the risks of myocarditis, neurological and reproductive risks.
Many experts note there is no long-term safety data on the vaccines, they are still experimental.
“We need to demand answers from the federal agencies,” prominent Idaho pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole repeatedly stressed during the vaccine rollouts: “What’s the risk for cancer after the shots and boosters? The answer is we don’t know. What’s the risk for autoimmune disease? We don’t know. What’s the risk for impairing fertility for a lifetime? We don’t know.”
“So why in the world would we push forward at the pace that we’re going, without knowing these things? This is completely reckless and anti-science.”
For speaking out about the need for more safety data, and for questioning the government narrative, Dr. Cole and many of his colleagues suffered either the loss of their positions and titles, or threats by a compromised medical establishment to have their licenses revoked.
Natural Immunity
The Select Committee slammed public health officials for “engaging in a coordinated effort to ignore natural immunity — which is acquired through previous Covid-19 infection — when developing vaccine guidance and mandates.”
People who had recovered from Covid should have been exempt from vaccine mandates. Public health officials, however, sowed doubt about whether natural immunity was as effective as vaccines and imposed the mandates on everyone uniformly.
The report also addressed the deficiencies of the Vaccine Reporting System, confirming that vaccine injuries are not as rare as our public health leaders insist. It said the government’s reporting system “created confusion, failed to properly inform the American public about vaccine injuries, and eroded public trust in vaccine safety.”
HHS Obstruction
The report accused the Biden Administration’s HHS of engaging in a “multi-year campaign of delay, confusion, and non-responsiveness in an attempt to obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.”
The HHS allegedly sought to hide evidence that could incriminate or embarrass senior public health officials. This was responsible for greatly prolonging the investigation, as much as by 12 months or more, the report said.
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Standing Their Ground
Those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration demonstrated genuine courage in the face of a level of government coercion few Americans have ever experienced. But as a result of government pressure on social media platforms and corporate media to ignore it, the Declaration never gained the kind of traction that would fuel public demands to lift the lockdowns.
Today, most people have never heard of it. (Some Yated readers may recall the historic letter, as articles featuring the Declaration appeared in these pages in Oct. 2020, and in Nov. 2021.)
Similarly, government censorship succeeded in scrubbing reports of vaccine injuries from social media, while people were gaslit into believing their injuries were imagined, because of course vaccines were totally “safe and effective.”
People and publications gradually began to “self-censor,” unwilling to express ideas that would spark a backlash from indoctrinated co-workers, employers and even friends.
Despite the risk of being derided as “misinformation spreaders” and conspiracy theorists, a rare few publications and online sites —Yated among them—stood firm in giving a platform to the non-mainstream views of dedicated experts like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Marty Makary, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, and many others.
Articles published in these pages throughout 2020-2023 turned the spotlight on the hot-button issues of early treatment for Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin; and on gain-of-function research spearheaded by Anthony Fauci that allegedly created SarsCov2.
Despite the unpopularity of some of these topics, The Yated reported on the lab-leak theory; the lack of science behind masking mandates and the 6-foot social distancing rule that drove school and business closures.
Other articles on controversial topics covered Senate hearings on Covid vaccine injuries; the lie that Covid vaccines stopped virus transmission; the steady stream of misinformation from Anthony Fauci and the CDC; and the government’s censorship campaign in collusion with social media companies.
People have short memories, especially given today’s frenzied information landscape. Yet it’s important not to forget how the government, Big Tech and the media conspired to intimidate, coerce and slander not just Dr. Bhattacharya but any organization or American citizen that dared to challenge the establishment narrative.
