Jay Bhattacharya, an unofficial Covid adviser in Trump’s first administration, has been selected as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the lead biomedical research institutions in the world.
The selection of Bhattacharya, a Stanford economist whose proposal for widespread Covid-19 infection was backed by the White House, marks a return to controversial and scientifically questionable health policies in the second Trump administrationsay experts.
Bhattacharya, an economist who attended medical school, did called for an “absolute overhaul of the scientific community”.
He questioned the safety of vaccines, testified against the effectiveness of face masks, and argued that NIH officials should not be involved in scientific policy.
Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment.
Early 2020, Bhattacharya dismissed Covid’s deadline, and he soon joined two other scientists in recommending that Covid spread with “focused protection” – a proposal on the scientific fringe that soon became politically mainstream.
After the Trump administration the strategy of “herd immunity” from infection, millions of Americans were maimed and killed, with a death rate significantly higher than peer countries.
In April 2020, Santiago Sanchez, then a first-year student at Stanford Medical School, wanted to do something to help as the novel coronavirus swept the country and brought the world to a standstill.
That’s how he found himself volunteering in a makeshift lab in the ballroom of the Palo Alto Sheraton, carefully pressing drops of blood samples into rapid tests for 10 to 12 hours a day.
The research project was an attempt to see how many people have already become ill from Covid. If more people than previously known have already gotten sick and recovered, that would mean the virus wasn’t as bad as it seemed, and it could also mean there are enough people out there with immunity to help stop it. that the virus spreads, Sanchez hoped.
But as he saw negative result after negative result, Sanchez felt his optimism curl. After two days, the volunteers conducted more than 3,300 tests, but less than two dozen came back positive, as Sanchez recalled.
That’s why he was surprised when one of the study’s senior researchers, Jay Bhattacharya, walked into the ballroom, saw the handful of positive tests next to stacks of negative tests and said, “there’s definitely a signal here,” according to Sanchez’s recollection.
“That was my first sinking feeling because I was like, ‘This is not how I’m interpreting this experiment,'” Sanchez said.
The subsequent preprint study estimates that between 2.5% to 4% of people in the region are infected – a rate much higher than previously thought, and a figure significantly higher than the number of positive tests Sanchez says he has seen have.
Bhattacharya became a fixture on Fox News and other networks, preaching the opposite of what Sanchez now believed: that much more people had the virus than anyone thought, and that meant the US had to reopen.
“He was everywhere during the pandemic except hospitals,” said Jonathan Howard, associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and author of the book We want them infected. “He did not treat a single Covid patient himself and became famous despite the fact that he had no real responsibility in this way.”
Scientists quickly discovered significant flaws in the study: the people who gave blood was not a random sample; the positive tests were possible false positives; and the study was sponsored in part by an airline founder who has been an ardent advocate of reopening amid Covid’s strongest grip.
Despite criticism, the study results “got out of hand,” Sanchez said. “I and many others who worked on this study had this shared feeling that we were being taken advantage of, as if we were pawns in a clearly ideological project that did not meet scientific standards.”
A few months later, Bhattacharya and other skeptics of Covid precautions met with President Trump at the White House, at a time when Trump stopped talking with his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci.
Bhattacharya and two other scientists, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, soon unveiled a plan, known as the Great Barrington Declaration, to allow the virus to spread unchecked among the general population while trying to protect the vulnerable. The authors believed this approach could stop the pandemic within three to six months.
“This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous,” said Francis Collins, then director of the NIH.
But the day after the proposal was released, the authors met with Alex Azar, then the secretary of health and human services. confirm that the proposal reflects the Trump administration’s policy of reopening.
Within months, the worst wave of deaths of the entire pandemic crashed in the US. The strategy to protect the vulnerable never realized; even Trump, perhaps the most protected person in the country, has been hospitalized with Covid.
“He was a pro-infection doctor,” Howard said of Bhattacharya. “He said that parts of the country achieved herd immunity in the summer of 2020 … He said that one infection led to permanent, robust immunity, and he treats rare vaccine side effects as a fate worse than the death.”
In the past four years, Bhattacharya testified in state and Canadian courts, as well as US Congress hearings. Bhattacharya did said that public health has become an “instrument of authoritarian power … a political tool used to enforce the biosecurity state”, and that the field needs to be rebuilt.
When Sanchez sees patients who say they don’t need a Covid booster, he wonders if they were directly or indirectly influenced by Bhattacharya’s messages.
And he sees a direct line from the economist’s Covid advice to his possible appointment at the NIH.
“They handed Trump a big gift. They gave him a way to talk about the pandemic that obviously reached a lot of people, making them compartmentalize in their own minds what happened and feel that it’s okay to tolerate the amount of disability and death,” Sanchez said. . the researchers.
“It has totally clouded people’s ability to even assess risk, to the point that we have well-established, highly effective childhood vaccines now being denied — to the point that measles is making a comeback in some parts of the United States.”
With confidence in public health significantly reduced, the repercussions could be long-lasting and tragic in the coming years, especially as Trump’s health nominees erode confidence in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other public-health precautions, Howard said.
“Every measles outbreak, every whooping cough outbreak, will be on them.”
