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.
The term “long covid” is part of the fraud.
That is to say, the long term effects in question are from the clot shot, not the virus.
The virus associated with the planned demic is a mere cold virus.
Deaths attributed to it were in fact from other causes.
When the enemy is invisible, people can’t see it which makes it a lot easier for the authorities to lie.
The question most likely to produce useable information is the following:
Was there anything we were told about “covid” that wasn’t a lie?
I advocated for Fibonacci distribution of the COVID vaccines starting in April 2020.
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.
What if they all died?
There would have been 162 dead after day 9.
Instead, we let about a million die in the USA alone.
“isolate the vulnerable, let everyone else get infected, and allow herd immunity to take hold”
I got COVID a number of times, I believe seven times, probably due to mutations.
I personally doubt effective herd immunity to COVID was possible.
So that leaves:
“isolate the vulnerable, let everyone else” live a normal life.