Celebrate that you lived long enough to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
Just one ?
In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-authored the controversial Great Barrington Declaration. That declaration was widely covered and debunked in 2020 because of it’s anti-scientific conclusions.
It maintained that the answer to the COVID pandemic was to isolate the vulnerable, let everyone else get infected, and allow herd immunity to take hold. The plan ignored the risks of long COVID, the burden on healthcare systems, and the reality that isolating only “the vulnerable” was nearly impossible in practice.
Bhattacharya also lent credence to the long debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. It was a typical remark from a Stanford economist with a medical degree who has never treated a patient. The claim that vaccines cause autism was not just wrong, but fraudulent. It began with the claim that vaccines cause autism by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, whose now-retracted 1998 study in The Lancet sparked a global anti-vaccine movement. I asked Temple Grandin (yes, I met her) a leading expert on autism if Wakefield’s claims had merit. She was not happy about Wakefield’s theories and she soundly debunked them. I found out later that Wakefield used his theory to sell his own vaccine protecting people from the affects of the measles vaccine. Wakefield’s medical license was later revoked. Still, the myth lives on, nurtured by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services Secretary.
In July, 2021, Bhattacharya participated in a roundtable discussion with Governor Ron DeSantis and gave reassurances to the people of Florida:
“We have protected the vulnerable—by vaccinating the older population, we have provided them with enormous protection against severe disease and death.” He disagreed with people who fretted over case numbers: he claimed that cases and deaths had been “decoupled.” The Delta variant, he said, did not change his perspective “in any fundamental way.”
It was a disastrous miscalculation. The Delta wave would go on to kill tens of thousands in Florida—more than had died in the state before Bhattacharya’s reassurances—and many of those victims were younger and had fewer pre-existing conditions than in earlier waves.
Bhattacharya was involved in another controversy—this time over flawed research on the virus’s spread. Yet again, it wasn’t just a scientific mistake, it was ethically questionable!
In early 2020, as scientists scrambled to understand the virus, Bhattacharya and his team at Stanford launched a seroprevalence study to estimate how many people in Santa Clara County had already been infected. Their findings, released as a preprint (without peer review), suggested infection rates were 50 to 85 times higher than reported cases. That, in turn, would mean COVID-19’s fatality rate was much lower than feared—perhaps comparable to seasonal flu.
The study made headlines. Fox News ran with it. Conservative politicians used it to argue against lockdowns and face masks.
But the study was deeply flawed. Bhattacharya was struggling to find participants on short notice. So his wife invited parents from a wealthy area of California to sign up for the study, falsely claiming that an “FDA-approved” test would tell them if they have immunity. The email, leaked by BuzzfeedNews, also falsely claimed that these participants could return to work “without fear.”
Obviously, this was not the case. It also made for a bad study as wealthy communities were disproportionately recruited and the study didn’t account for the false-positive rate of the test. When these issues were pointed out, Bhattacharya and his co-authors adjusted their numbers—but even then, outside experts were unconvinced.
One of his co-authors later admitted they had massively underestimated COVID’s fatality rate.
“His biggest COVID publication underestimated IFR [infection fatality rate] by 35x,” wrote Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical doctor, in a post criticizing Bhattacharya. Scientists and medical doctors have strongly criticized Bhattacharya’s misconduct.
His critics fear he will prioritize ideology over evidence.
In the hearing, Bhattacharya was also quizzed about some of his previous COVID claims, which he glossed over, instead referring to a problem of “public trust.”
However, his own track record—downplaying the virus, dismissing mitigation efforts, and promoting flawed herd immunity strategies—contributed to the very erosion of trust he now claims to want to fix. Trust, indeed, has to be restored. Given Bhattacharya’s record, many in the scientific community doubt that will happen.
Important article but written like clickbait. Grok rewrote it in pyramid style. Here’s the rewrite.
Headline: Top U.S. Public Health Expert Admits COVID Policies, Including Masks and Mandates, Were Ineffective
Lead: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director, has publicly acknowledged that masks and other COVID-era policies, such as vaccine mandates and lockdowns, lacked scientific backing and failed to curb the virus, marking a significant shift in public health discourse.
Key Points:
Masks Ineffective: Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor, stated on the Huberman Lab podcast that cloth masks do not prevent the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID, citing a lack of randomized studies, particularly for children.
Vaccine Mandates Unscientific: He opposed mandates, including testifying in a Supreme Court case that overturned OSHAâÂÂs vaccine mandate, arguing they were not based on evidence showing vaccines stop transmission.
Lockdowns Harmful: Bhattacharya criticized lockdowns as unprecedented and damaging, disproportionately affecting the poor, children, and working-class communities, with no basis in prior pandemic plans.
Restoring Trust: He highlighted the erosion of public trust in science due to misleading public health messaging, such as mask-wearing rules in restaurants, which he called âÂÂobviously ridiculous.âÂÂ
Details:
Bhattacharya, a key figure behind the Great Barrington Declaration, advocated for limited disruptions and open schools, warning of long-term economic and social harms from lockdowns, which he links to current inflation and economic issues.
He faced professional backlash for his views, including a petition by Stanford colleagues to silence him for questioning child masking and threats to his academic freedom.
He cited SwedenâÂÂs low excess mortality rate as evidence against extreme measures like lockdowns, calling out âÂÂgroupthinkâ in the scientific community.
Misleading policies, like promoting cloth masks as protective, potentially endangered vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, and harmed children, especially those with disabilities like hearing impairments.
Context:
BhattacharyaâÂÂs appointment to the NIH under a new administration signals a departure from the policies of predecessors like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, whom he criticized for misinformation and politicized communication.
He emphasized the need for the scientific community to admit mistakes to rebuild public trust, noting widespread frustration across political divides.
Source: Ian Miller, OutKick, June 13, 2025.
That’s been clear and admitted for years now.
When they admit that their CARES Act established murderous protocols and incentives by which hospitals killed all they needed to spread the bogus pandemic claims, that the PCR tests now being used far beyond the Covid con are bogus, and the transfections also being used far beyond “Covid” are deadly, THEN we will be getting somewhere.
COVID caused about a million people (with other medical issues) to die.
The truth has been out there from the get-go - they just lied about it and called the truth “conspiracy theories”
most of this is not news, masked never worked, but the government (CDC) and media kept up the drum beat to mask up.. I was dont with the no social contact etc after several months and said screw it. and no i have never gotten vaxed either.