The Man Who Fought Fauci and Won - Karma & the NIH

WSJ 12/06/2024
Karmic justice strikes as Jay Bhattacharya, a dissenting physician who was made a pariah during Covid, is nominated as director of the National Institutes of Health.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-man-who-fought-fauci-and-won-trump-nih-nominee-jay-bhattacharya-covid-cancel-culture-4a0650bd?st=1six6x

..... Dr. Bhattacharya’s tale begins on these pages with a March 25, 2020, op-ed titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” Co-authored by Eran Bendavid, a fellow professor of medicine at Stanford, the article argued that many asymptomatic cases of Covid were likely going undetected, making the disease far less dangerous than authorities were claiming.

“That is when the attacks started,” Dr. Bhattacharya, 56, says in a Zoom interview from his office in Palo Alto, Calif. In April 2020 he and several colleagues published a study that confirmed his hypothesis. The prevalence of Covid antibodies in Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located, was 50 times the recorded infection rate. That, he says, “implied a lower infection mortality rate than public-health authorities were pushing at a time when they and the media thought it was a virtue to panic the population.” His university opened a “fact finding” investigation into him after BuzzFeed made baseless charges of conflict of interest. “This was the most anxiety-inducing event of my professional life,” he says.

Shaken but steadfast, Dr. Bhattacharya, who is an economist as well as a physician, continued to oppose lockdowns, on Oct. 4, 2020, with the Great Barrington Declaration, of which he was one of three principal co-authors. (The others were Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff, a statistician who has since been fired from Harvard for refusing a Covid vaccine.) The declaration dissented from the Anglo-American scientific establishment and argued for focused, age-based protection from Covid instead of universal and indiscriminate lockdowns.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s life was “completely overturned” in the months leading up to, and just after, Great Barrington. “I couldn’t eat or sleep for months,” he says. Not a big man, he lost 30 pounds. He received death threats. “There were some very, very nasty attacks.” Once-friendly colleagues stopped talking to him: “They crossed the street to avoid me.”

He also put in “a couple of NIH proposals that didn’t get funded during the pandemic”—though he stops short of attributing the rejection to his views on the pandemic. “It’s hard to tell,” he says chivalrously. “I mean, it’s hard to get NIH funding.” But it’s also true that Francis Collins, then NIH director, called Dr. Bhattacharya and his colleagues “fringe epidemiologists” in an October 2020 email to Anthony Fauci, in which Dr. Collins called for “a quick and devastating published take down” of the declaration. (Dr. Collins has since acknowledged that his own view of Covid was “very narrow.”) .....