RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/11/the-quiet-radicalism-of-jay-bhattacharya/

Of all Donald Trump’s spicy picks for government, the wisest, in my view, is Jay Bhattacharya. The unassuming Stanford professor and famed lockdown sceptic might not come with an army of wellness bros, like RFK Jnr. He might not be as wisecracking as the state-dismantling DOGE double act of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And his presence in the corridors of power is unlikely to freak out the deep state as much as, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s. And yet he will bring something precious to the second Trump administration, a virtue that is as essential as it is rare: the art of doubt.

This week, Bhattacharya gave his last health economics lecture to his Stanford students before he heads to Bethesda in Maryland to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dickens himself would have struggled to conjure up such a reversal of fortunes. For four, long years Bhattacharya was shamed as a scientific heretic. His blasphemy was to question lockdown. To give impious voice to his honestly held belief that it was wrong to lock down the entire population in response to Covid-19. For this, he was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, a threat to life itself, just as past heretics were branded the polluters of men’s souls and warpers of men’s minds whose ideas might even kill.

Yet here he is, in 2024, off to run the US government’s public-health research agency. The very agency whose aloof boffins and smug bureaucrats joined in the witch-hunting of him in the Covid era. The Hill calls it ‘the right kind of revenge’. For in appointing Bhattacharya to the NIH, Trump isn’t just flipping a fake-tanned middle finger at ‘the libs’. No, he’s handing the NIH to someone who is ‘eminently qualified’ to run it – Bhattacharya has been an esteemed professor of medicine for years – while also ‘replacing the arrogant, believe-our-science elitists’ with ‘a person they regularly disparaged’. Bhattacharya is being rewarded for his heresy, and it is richly deserved.

We should remind ourselves of the censorious lunacy that ruled in the Covid years. Bhattacharya’s thoughtcrime was to pen the Great Barrington Declaration along with two other scientists worried about lockdown: Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration’s proposal was fresh and modest: that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be preferable to blanket shutdowns of society. Yet if you went by the elites’ frothing response to the declaration, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Bhattacharya and Co had proposed that every Covid-addled youth snog the nearest 80-year-old.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-historian-writes-in-the-lancet-that-slavery-is-at-the-bottom-of-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom“:

We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh?

Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny:

Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment to this, teaches us that freedom is negative, a matter of being at liberty to oppress other bodies.

In that way of regarding the world, fear replaces care: the fear we believe we must instill in others, and our own fear that we will lose our dominion. And, of course, most people are not free at all, even in this fearful sense. If we understand what is wrong with this philosophical tradition and this history, the right to health care becomes undeniable.

I don’t try to instill fear in others. And I see people caring for each other all around me. How about you?

Snyder reminds us, in his fashion, that we are not islands. True. But really — this?

No one can become an individual without help. And in order to remain free, we must know ourselves—the task, par excellence, that cannot be achieved in solitude. We all go through life with a piece of metaphysical spinach between our teeth. If we think we know everything we need to know about ourselves, we are wrong, and therefore vulnerable to those who see how we can be manipulated. And, of course, the most tempting error is precisely the belief that we did it all ourselves and will do it all ourselves.

And that leads us to . . . slavery!

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/jay_bhattacharya_will_transform_the_nih.html

Unlike the other cabinet nominees that Donald Trump has selected who will battle with their organizations and take no prisoners, I suspect that Jay Bhattacharya will define his actions and responsibilities differently. He’s not afraid to argue and protest injustices when he’s trying to protect citizens from the deluded powers-that-be; but he will make changes with determination and clarity, and hopefully remove those people in power that have demanded unreasonable responses to the health needs of the public.

Bhattacharya has many reasons to take retribution, especially against Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. When Bhattacharya produced the Great Barrier Declaration, he was lambasted by Collins, now retired from the NIH:

The declaration called for speeding herd immunity by allowing people at low risk to get infected while protecting those most vulnerable, like the elderly.

It was denounced by many public health experts as unscientific and irresponsible. ‘This is a fringe component of epidemiology,’ Collins told The Washington Post shortly after the document was released. ‘This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.’

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-taps-jay-bhattacharya-for-nih

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.” 

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.” 

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.  

https://nypost.com/2024/11/27/opinion/trump-picks-marty-makary-jay-bhattacharya-will-disrupt-health-agencies-to-save-lives/

The public health establishment and left-wing media are rushing to discredit President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to lead health agencies. The New York Times smears them as “outside the medical mainstream.”

Circling the wagons, Dr. Paul Offit, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, lamely observes, “What they’re saying when they make these appointments is that we don’t trust the people who are there.”

You bet.

Trump and the public have every reason to distrust the current agency heads, after the repeated blunders, deceptions and cover-ups during COVID-19. Trump is appointing disruptors with the courage to challenge the status quo.

Like Dr. Marty Makary, nominated to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Makary’s credentials will make it impossible for the Senate to reject him. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, a Hall of Fame for doctors.

More importantly, if you’re in the hospital, you want Makary on your side.

Two decades ago, he declared war against the epidemic of medical errors killing as many as 100,000 patients a year. Errors like patients being given the wrong dose of a medication, or a surgeon operating on the wrong body part, or a lethal germ invading the patient’s body to cause an infection.

The medical establishment was hush-hush about them. But not Makary. 

https://newswithviews.com/the-experts-science-medicine-all-amazing-all-fallible/

For thousands of years, going back to the Bible, women have wept and grieved and pleaded to God over their miscarriages. Indeed, it took all these millennia for modern-day pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to this ongoing nightmare.

In the 1940s, they were happy to offer doctors the ability to prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent miscarriage. “You can tell them you would give it to your wife,” the marketing mavens from Big Pharma suggested to physicians.

And with good reason. This “miracle drug” worked! Women who had experienced no trouble conceiving but were plagued by constant miscarriages were now able to carry their babies to term and deliver quite “perfect” bundles of joy!

But then disaster hit with unspeakable horror. After one or two years of watching their beautiful babies smile and roll over and teethe and then walk and speak and thrive, the little girls began developing hideous vaginal cancers, and those who survived to adulthood experienced higher-than-normal premature births, miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies.

The little boys, too, had horrible anomalies in their urogenital tracts and are still being watched for higher-than-average cases of testicular and prostate cancers.

In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took DES off the market.

So much for the science!

SECOND TIME’S A CHARM

In 1957, another miracle medication, originally marketed as a sleeping pill but also found to prevent miscarriages,was developed in West Germany, and soon found its way to America, where women eagerly took the drug––approved by the FDA––and, again, were thrilled to carry their babies to term.

But unlike DES, where the monstrous effects took months to years to develop, the grotesque and tragic effects of the new drug––Thalidomide––were obvious from the moment of birth: children born with missing arms and legs, eye and urinary tract anomalies, heart problems, et al. The list of horrors went on and on.

So much for the science!

https://www.city-journal.org/article/shake-up-hhs

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services has the press corps in the D.C.–New York corridor flummoxed. The Washington Post reports that “Public health experts” call the pick “alarming and unprecedented.” The Wall Street Journal labels it a “strange choice.” And New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci opines that “among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks,” his selection of Kennedy “stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause.”

No federal department needs a major institutional shakeup more desperately than the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency’s “expert” authority was the basis on which President Biden and the vast majority of governors issued a variety of mask, vaccine, and lockdown mandates that undermined Americans’ basic freedoms, while achieving next to nothing in return.

Kennedy took the poster boy of the mask-and-lockdown regime to task in his bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci. But that book, a compelling and generally well-researched indictment of the public-health establishment, also makes clear that the agency’s problems extend well beyond one unscrupulous, attention-hogging bureaucrat. As former Trump advisor Scott Atlas reports in his own book, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health—all HHS agencies—appear to be infested with groupthink. During the pandemic, Atlas notes, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, then-CDC director Robert Redfield, and Fauci “shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level,” and “virtually always agreed” with each other.

https://www.thefp.com/p/rfk-jr-health-human-services-flouride-vaccines-covid-trump-europe
The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe? More than you’d think.

The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe

A number of American commenters have been hand-wringing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the secretary of Health and Human Services, which would put him in charge of such critical agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

“He supports people being able to purchase raw milk, don’t you know!” 

“He wants to discourage municipal water plants from adding fluoride!” 

“He says MMR vaccines cause autism!”

After Donald Trump nominated RFK Jr. for the post, Time magazine called him “a vaccine skeptic who spreads medical disinformation and conspiracy theories,” and quoted Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law as saying of his nomination, “I can’t think of a darker day for public health and science.”

But I think we need to draw distinctions. 

After looking at the whole range of RFK Jr.’s positions, I’ve come to the view that while some are extreme, others are genuinely worthy of debate—and still others are correct. And there is a way to sift the good from the bad and the debatable. When you hear one of RFK Jr.’s ideas, ask yourself a simple question: Do other nations do what he thinks the U.S. should do? If the answer is yes, then the HHS nominee’s idea is not necessarily apocalyptic, and we should be able to discuss it openly. 

Let’s take a look at some of his most controversial opinions:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rfk-jr-wants-disrupt-our-powerful-health-care-complex-terrified

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right– the U.S. is flunking health care. 

Our country spends nearly twice as much on medical care per person than other wealthy countries but our outcomes – measured by life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes and heart attack mortality — are far worse. This is an industry that begs to be disrupted. 

Whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President-elect Trump has nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is the man for the job remains to be seen. Give him this: he has been fearless in calling out the obvious failures of the status quo. 

The health care “establishment” is outraged by RFK Jr. ‘s nomination, but they only have themselves to blame. Gallup reports that merely 31% of the country thinks of our health care industry positively, while 51% have a negative view. Imagine: our medical establishment has lower approval ratings than Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Why would that be? First, disenchantment with our medical officials soared during COVID. Anthony Fauci and others in charge had no idea what they were doing but nonetheless made up rules on the fly that required toddlers to wear masks, closed schools, shut down businesses and — later on — mandated vaccines and lied about their efficacy. And yet, for all the Draconian measures, the U.S. lost more people per capita to the pandemic than most other prosperous nations.   

Second, people are not stupid; they know they spend too much for health care, that it’s too complicated and that the government’s ever-expanding intrusion into the field has made it inefficient. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the U.S. spends about $1,000 per person solely on administrative costs related to medical services, “almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than [the country] spends on long-term health care.” That, folks, is the tail wagging the dog.