Free Republic

Five years ago, in March 2020, Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis MD, PhD, MPH took to Twitter to marvel at China’s response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19. In a detailed thread, he described China’s “social nuclear weapon” (of the people-clearing ‘neutron bomb’ -variety?): unprecedented lockdowns, movement restrictions on 930 million people, and a collectivist culture harnessed by an authoritarian regime. He framed it as a Newtonian feat: the sheer force required to stop the virus revealed its power. Contrast this with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, MA (economics): equally credentialed, but clear-eyed (the French term is “clairvoyant”),...

Yesterday, the academic physician (full Professor at Stanford, no less) once vilified by former NIH Director Francis Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist”, Director of NIH nominee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, testified before the Senate in a confirmation hearing.Having listened to various clips and read commentary from both mainstream media and alternative media, I am convinced that not only will Dr. Bhattacharya sail through the committee hearing, but the Senate will also promptly confirm him.In his opening remarks, Dr. Bhattacharya stated that “a culture of coverup, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs” had characterized the official...

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who was blackballed during the COVID pandemic for bucking scientific consensus, is “one the most exciting picks of all the Trump picks,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told Breitbart News.In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Banks said Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH is the perfect man to turn the embattled agency around.“President Trump has picked a game changer to lead the NIH, to clean it up,” he told Breitbart News. “I mean, talk about draining the swamp and disrupting Washington. Dr Bhattacharya is the type of...

Donald Trump's announcement last month of Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as his nominee to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health further intensified the controversy—and alarm—about what the second Trump administration will mean for American science and medicine. Bhattacharya is an actual physician. He also has a Ph.D. in economics, and a track record of reputable scholarship focusing on policy questions related to public health. But there is no question that Bhattacharya owes his nomination to one thing: his emergence early in the COVID pandemic as a vocal critic of the public health consensus that favored...

Below is my column in The Hill on the recent Wall Street Journal report on the Biden Administration’s resistance to experts who voiced support for the lab theory on the origins of COVID-19. As with many academics in higher education, government experts were warned not to question the natural or zoonotic theory. In the meantime, figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci said little to support other experts who were being censored and targeted for opposing views. Call it the Silence of the Labs. The effort to marginalize such figures continues this week as pandemic hawks circle Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in anticipation...

For those who opposed the censorship and cancel campaigns during the pandemic, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya became an iconic figure of resistance. Unfortunately, the same can be said of the anti-free speech movement and pandemic hawks. Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and was a vocal critic of COVID-19 policies, has been nominated as the next head of the National Institutes of Health. As I wrote this weekend in my column, the nomination was heralded by many as a turning point for the NIH. It is also a rallying cry for those who supported the earlier measures, as shown by...

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security...

The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new administration’s selection for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which...

Bhattacharya is a champion of the people and real science, who vows to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.” ... Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published in October 2020 that challenged the response to the covid pandemic lockdowns. The declaration proposed an approach called “Focused Protection,” which advocated for allowing those at lower risk to resume normal life, implementing strong measures to protect high-risk populations, and reliance on widespread immunity through reliance on natural infection. If this guidance had been followed, our society’s massive and expensive damage could have been avoided. It was...

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award. The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats. That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in...

American Academy of Sciences and Letters honors Dr. Jay Bhattacharya with highest award WASHINGTON, D.C. – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya received the American Academy of Sciences and Letters’ top intellectual freedom award on Wednesday for resisting attempts to politically control his scientific work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The academy presents its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom to a scholar “who displays extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom,” according to its website. Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, received the honor during the academy’s annual investiture ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C....

Last week, a federal appeals court confirmed that science cannot function without free speech. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya reflects on a victory for himself—and every American.When I was four, my mother took her first flight and first trip out of her native India to the U.S. with me and my younger brother in tow. We were going to meet my father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, who had won the U.S. visa lottery in 1970. He had moved to New York a year earlier. By the time we arrived he was working at McDonald’s because engineering jobs had...

The development of an airborne method of delivery for mRNA vaccines was hailed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra as "a game changer in the way we can combat future pandemics. No longer will we be dependent on our ability to persuade or threaten people to get vaccinated. By placing aerosol dispensers of FDA approved experimental vaccines in key gathering places like food stores, medical facilities, indoor sports arenas, airports, and public transit people can be painlessly vaccinated without their knowledge and 100% compliance achieved." Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world's leading expert on health said "I wish...

Now, why oh why would officials text about deploying a new variant? Hrm. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya shared screenshots of texts between UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Damon Poole from December of 2020, and gosh, golly gee, they were about ‘deploying the new variant.’ Yikes. This implies that they were ‘deploying’ other variants, yes? We should note that since these are screenshots we can neither confirm nor deny their authenticity HOWEVER … holy crap, you guys. If these are real? Take a look: Dec. 2020. UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock: "When do we deploy the new variant?" https://t.co/geFtC8wrcp pic.twitter.com/u3lr0EEKOe —...

The United States made multiple mistakes in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including widespread lockdowns and the aggressive promotion of faulty vaccines, experts testified to a new congressional panel on Feb. 28. “During the last three years, we have seen the worst public health mistakes in history,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard University, told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in Washington. The mistakes included not crafting policies focused on protecting those highest at risk—the elderly and otherwise infirm—and the denial and downplaying of post-infection immunity, Kulldorff said. He and Dr. Jay...

(The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.)Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and self-described COVID lockdown skeptic, blasts the university in a powerful piece in Tablet that describes the administration’s attempts to censor and intimidate him for scientifically (and correctly) pointing out that mandatory lockdowns didn’t work. He was an early and influential voice in objecting to the harmful, draconian policies enforced on populations here and abroad, and he’s paid a heavy price for it.In his piece, titled “How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test,”...

Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment. One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted...

On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection. The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would...

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University in California, slammed U.S. coronavirus vaccination tactics during an appearance Thursday night on Fox News’ "The Ingraham Angle." DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: We have to be honest with people. These vaccines are still under experimental-use authority and these vaccines do have side effects. For older people I think it is still worth the risk but you don’t bully people. You tell people, ‘Go talk with your doctor, talk over the risks and then make your own decision.’ That’s the right way to do public health. What we’re doing now is just...

An epidemiologist and professor at the University of Stanford said Friday that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s credibility "is entirely shot" after revelations from his emails show a reversal on the subject of mask wearing to prevent COVID-19. "I think he's been all over the place on masks," Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford said on "The Ingraham Angle." "There are emails you can find in the treasure trove of emails that have been released where he acknowledged the virus has been aerosolized -- well the cloth masks people have been recommending, they're not particular[ly] effective against aerosolized viruses. "I...