John Tierney Jay Bhattacharya’s Confirmation Hearing Was an Embarrassment for Democrats Senators who once denounced the NIH nominee’s ideas had nothing to say about pandemic lockdowns, mandates, or lessons learned.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/jay-bhattacharya-nih-senate-confirmation-hearing-covid-pandemic
Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing in the Senate last week was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid-19 pandemic policies. While some public-health officials, academics, and journalists continue to defend the Covid restrictions and oppose Bhattacharya’s nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health, Democrats at the hearing unanimously abandoned the fight against his supposedly “fringe” ideas.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?
Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”
“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about Covid-19 when much of the rest of the world stayed silent about it,” Indiana senator Jim Banks told Bhattacharya. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you.” Banks then asked him to define the role of the NIH director during a pandemic.
“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya replied. “Our role isn’t to make decisions—to say you shouldn’t be saying goodbye to your grandfather as he’s dying in a hospital.” Instead of decreeing that schools close and people be vaccinated, he said, scientists should accurately describe the risks and benefits of these actions, so that citizens and their leaders can weigh the trade-offs. “Science should be an engine for freedom, for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this, this, and this, or else.”
That’s a stark contrast from “The Science” extolled by Fauci, Collins, and their acolytes in academia and the media. They proclaimed the necessity of unprecedented authoritarian measures and ostracized scientists who pointed to abundant evidence—from pre-2020 studies as well as data during the pandemic—that these measures were ineffective. They vastly exaggerated the risk of Covid to younger people while ignoring the enormous social, economic, and medical costs of the lockdowns. They justified vaccine mandates for workers, even ones with existing Covid immunity because of prior infection, by falsely claiming that the vaccinated would not spread the virus. Fauci summed up their attitude toward dissenters: “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”
It would have been refreshing at the hearing if Democrats on the committee had apologized for the attacks on Bhattacharya—or at least acknowledged that they should have heeded him instead of Fauci. They ignored not only their mistakes but also the lessons of the pandemic. The Democrats repeatedly denounced the Trump administration’s initial budget cuts at NIH and demanded that Bhattacharya (who hadn’t been involved with the cuts) vow to restore every one of them. But if we learned anything from the pandemic, it was that the NIH and other federal public-health agencies have squandered vast sums of money.
Yes, the investment in Covid vaccine research was a notable success, but in other areas the agencies failed miserably. While researchers in other countries reported promising results treating Covid with inexpensive existing drugs (like dexamethasone), U.S. officials mostly ignored or actively discouraged these approaches while spending more than $160 million to develop remdesivir, a $3,000-per-dose antiviral drug with disappointing results. (A 2022 literature review concluded that it had “little or no effect” on mortality.)
European public-health agencies made plenty of mistakes during the pandemic, too, but at least they encouraged schools to reopen, while many in America remained closed. They also avoided some of the worst U.S. policies, like forcing toddlers to wear masks, mandating vaccines for adults with natural immunity, and recommending vaccines for healthy children facing essentially no risk from the virus. The panicked groupthink that ruled Washington was largely absent in Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, which recorded one of Europe’s lowest rates of excess mortality during the pandemic while avoiding lockdowns and advising citizens not to wear masks.
Bhattacharya assured the Democratic senators that he would review the budget cuts and make sure that NIH provided researchers with necessary resources. But he also made clear that the agency needed to be reformed. “Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differ from theirs,” he said. “Dissent is the very essence of science. I’ll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.”
The challenge facing Bhattacharya in Washington became especially clear two days after the hearing, when thousands of researchers and other protesters gathered near the Lincoln Memorial for a rally called “Stand Up for Science.” The disagreement was anything but respectful, as speakers took turns vilifying the new administration. One of them was Collins, who had just retired after directing NIH for 12 years. Like the Democratic senators at the confirmation hearing, he had nothing to say about the Covid mistakes: his and Fauci’s support for engineering dangerous viruses in laboratories, NIH funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suppression of the lab-leak theory, the harms caused by the lockdowns and school closures, the attacks Collins promoted against Bhattacharya and other dissidents. Oblivious to the dramatic decline of public trust in science, Collins hailed the NIH as “an institution with a stunningly positive track record.”
Worst of all, Collins pulled out a guitar and played an old folk melody featuring lyrics he’d written to celebrate the scientific researchers and bureaucrats funded by the federal government. The crowd sang along with him in the chorus: “This is a song for all the good people. We’re joined together by this noble dream.” It was painful to hear, but it did vividly capture what remains the attitude of the Washington public-health establishment: “good people” defending “The Science” against evil critics.
Bhattacharya’s confirmation can’t come soon enough.
Comments are closed.
