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pandemic
Health Professionals Warn of 'Extremist' Trump Pick for NIH
"He will set American health, innovation, and science back for a generation," said one virologist of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Nov 27, 2024
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and Stanford University professor who shot to prominence during the pandemic due to his heterodox views around Covid lockdowns, is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health.
In announcing his selection, Trump wrote that Bhattacharya and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will work together to "Make America Healthy Again."
However, Bhattacharya's nomination was met by alarm from some health professionals who warned that the views he expressed during the pandemic make him a poor choice to run the globe's premier medical research agency.
"Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers and promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, and science back for a generation. He's not here to reform NIH. He's here to destroy it," wrote the virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen on X.
Biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran wrote: "Please google Great Barrington Declaration. If it had been implemented, millions more people would have died at the start of the pandemic. Now, one of its architects will lead the NIH (if confirmed), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world," wrote biomedical scientist and public health communicator Dr. Lucky Tran.
Another doctor, Alastair McAlpine, echoed these sentiments, writing that Bhattacharya is a "terrible" choice for head of NIH.
Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a treatise published in October 2020 that advocated for a "focused protection" approach to the pandemic.
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk," Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote.
The document was named after the Massachusetts town where the three authored and signed the proposal. That work took place on the campus of a libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research.
The proposal caught the attention of Trump's White House in 2020. Trump, for his part, minimized the threat of the virus, chafed against lockdowns during the pandemic.
Public health groups criticized Bhattacharya and his co-authors, arguing that the proposal would threaten vulnerable individuals, according to reporting a the time. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, also denounced the approach in an October 2020 interview with The Washington Post: "This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."
"What I worry about with this is it's being presented as if it’s a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true," he said.
Now, four years later, Bhattacharya has been tapped to fill Collins' former seat.
Bhattacharya has also expressed an interest in shaking up NIH itself. "I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn't have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time," Bhattacharya said in a January 2024 interview with the Post.
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Why Didn't the Covid-19 Pandemic Result in Medicare for All?
Nobody should die in the richest country on Earth because they can’t afford health care. But this what happens day after day after day, whether we're experiencing a pandemic or not.
Nov 25, 2024
In 2002, the American economist Victor R. Fuchs wrote that “national health insurance will probably come to the United States in the wake of a major change in the political climate, the kind of change that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest.”
You couldn’t have designed a crisis much better suited to deliver us this outcome than Covid-19. In 2020, the U.S. faced the largest public health emergency in its history, at a time when 28 million Americans did not have health insurance and millions more were underinsured.
The faulty, patchwork nature of our health care system greatly compounded the effects of the pandemic. In fact, a study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that the U.S. could have seen around 338,000 fewer deaths from Covid-19 if we’d had universal coverage and we could have saved billions in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease.
Nobody should die in the richest country on Earth because they can’t afford health care. The Covid-19 pandemic should have made clear once and for all how irrational and cruel our system is. We are the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee health care to all citizens. As a result, tens of millions of Americans every year suffer without access to basic medical care, while insurance companies are allowed to make record profits. There are people in America who have to ration prescription drugs, while a few miles over the border in Canada, they could get these same pills at a fraction of the cost. There are people who have to forgo life-saving surgeries, because they can’t afford the procedures. Roughly a third of all GoFundMe campaigns in the U.S. go to people raising money for medical treatments.
In April, 2020, a nurse in the intensive care unit of a New York City hospital named Derrick Smith, wrote on Facebook that one of his patients asked “who’s going to pay for this?” before being intubated and placed on a ventilator, seemingly more concerned about the cost of the procedure than what the outcome would be. These would end up being his last words.
Meanwhile, the CEOs of 300 health care companies collectively made more than $4.5 billion in 2021, according to Stat News. The obvious conclusion is scathing.
Lockdown orders during the pandemic led to a massive spike in unemployment, yet despite significant job losses, the number of insured Americans actually increased, primarily due to emergency Medicaid eligibility policies. This amounted to the government (at least, partially) performing the function of a national health care system – i.e. filling gaps in coverage left by the private insurance industry. Unfortunately, as pandemic-era emergency measures ended, millions of Americans lost this coverage and private insurance returned to business as usual.
A number of factors contributed to America’s poor pandemic performance relative to other countries; a slow government response in terms of travel and testing, PPE shortages and delays in testing rollout. But it’s almost certain that addressing Covid-19 would have been easier if everyone had health insurance. According to the consumer health advocacy organization Families USA, roughly 40% of Covid-19 infections were associated with lack of health insurance.
In general, gaps in insurance coverage tend to accelerate the spread of diseases. People are less likely to get tested if they don't have insurance for fear of large medical bills. The more people who have insurance and a relationship with a primary care physician, the more cases can be diagnosed and treated quicker, thus reducing the likelihood of serious infection. Slowing the spread also reduces the strain on hospitals, making it easier to treat all patients.
There were some countries with single-payer that fared poorly during the pandemic. Italy, for instance, was hit very hard, in part because they had a lot of people in the vulnerable age range. However, many of the best-performing countries, particularly outside of Europe (New Zealand, South Korea), were those with single-payer systems. Taiwan, which transitioned to a single-payer system in the 1990s, achieved Covid-19 zero without a lockdown.
There were other factors which should have made Covid-19 uniquely suited to deliver us major health care reform. Unlike a number of other public health crises (the opioid epidemic, homelessness), Covid-19 received near-constant media coverage. It was front-and-center in everybody’s mind for three years. It also came on the heels of two back-to-back election cycles in which Medicare For All was a key issue in both debates and public policy discussions.
Public support for Medicare For All was at an all-time high in 2020. And in 2021, when Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the legislation, it was co-sponsored by a majority of Democrats in the House. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Even according to right-wing outlets like the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), Covid-19 led to a significant spike in support for single-payer.
Why, then, did nothing happen? One major problem was that the pandemic kept people inactive. The public was too atomized and immobile for any effective, coordinated response to cohere. The pandemic created a lot of pent-up anger, much of which got unleashed in the summer of 2020 via the Black Lives Matter protests, coming at a time when many people had been stuck in lockdown for months, many without jobs. When the spark was lit, it quickly became a lightning rod for solidarity and popular discontent.
The biggest problem is that single-payer health care is opposed by some of the most powerful special-interest groups in the country; the private insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and the for-profit hospitals. Health care is a massive sector of our market economy, a multi-trillion-dollar a year industry, so despite widespread popular support for the program, there is currently no mechanism strong enough to bring this public pressure to bear on politicians.
If we are to rise to the level of the rest of the developed world and guarantee health care to all citizens, we need to constitute an organized popular opposition which can participate in shaping public policy. Ideally, this will mean grass-roots initiatives backed by a strong labor sector—unions in the nursing, trades, and service sectors working in conjunction with local advocacy groups. We must capitalize on the momentum built up in 2020 and continue to push single-payer forward. If we organize and act to exercise our power, this is hardly a utopian goal.
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What Might the US Owe the World for Covid-19?
A US-funded laboratory origin of Covid-19 would certainly constitute the most significant case of governmental gross negligence in history. The people of the world deserve transparency and factual answers on vital questions.
Mar 16, 2024
The US government (USG) funded and supported a program of dangerous laboratory research that may have resulted in the creation and accidental laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the outbreak, the USG lied in order to cover up its possible role. The US Government should correct the lies, find the facts, and make amends with the rest of the world.
A group of intrepid truth-seekers—journalists, scientists, whistleblowers—have uncovered a vast amount of information pointing to the likely laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. Most important has been the intrepid work of the The Intercept and US Right to Know (USRTK), especially investigative reporter Emily Kopp at USRTK.
Based on this investigative work, the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is now carrying out an important investigation in a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In the Senate, the leading voice for transparency, honesty, and reason in investigating the origin of SARS-Cov-2 has been Republican Senator Rand Paul.
The evidence of a possible laboratory creation revolves around a multi-year US-led research program that involved US and Chinese scientists. The research was designed by US scientists, funded mainly by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense, and administered by a US organization, the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), with much of the work taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The US owes the full truth, and perhaps ample financial compensation, to the rest of the world, depending on what the facts ultimately reveal.
Here are facts that we know as of today.
First, the NIH became the home for biodefense research starting in 2001. In other words, the NIH became a research arm of the military and intelligence communities. Biodefense funding from the Defense Department budget went to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s division, the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Second, NIAID and DARPA (in the Defense Department) supported extensive research on potential pathogens for biowarfare and biodefense, and for the design of vaccines to protect against biowarfare or accidental laboratory releases of natural or manipulated pathogens. Some of the work was carried out at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the NIH, which manipulated and tested viruses using its in-house bat colony.
Third, NIAID became a large-scale financial supporter of Gain of Function (GoF) research, meaning laboratory experiments designed to genetically alter pathogens to make them even more pathogenic, such as viruses that are easier to transmit and/or more likely to kill infected individuals. This kind of research is inherently dangerous, both because it aims to create more dangerous pathogens and because those new pathogens can escape from the laboratory, either accidentally or deliberately (e.g., as an act of biowarfare or terrorism).
Fourth, many leading US scientists opposed GoF research. One of the leading opponents inside the government was Dr. Robert Redfield, an Army virologist who would later be the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the start of the pandemic. Redfield suspected from the start that the pandemic resulted from NIH-supported research, but says that he was sidelined by Fauci.
Fifth, because of the very high risks associated with GoF research, the US Government added additional biosafety regulations in 2017. GoF research would have to be carried out in highly secure laboratories, meaning at Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) or Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4). Work in a BSL-3 or 4 facility is more expensive and time-consuming than work in a BSL-2 facility because of the added controls against an escape of the pathogen from the facility.
Sixth, one NIH-backed research group, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), proposed to move some of its GoF research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2017, EHA submitted a proposal to the US Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) for GoF work at WIV. The proposal, named DEFUSE, was a veritable “cookbook” for making viruses like SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory. The DEFUSE plan was to investigate more than 180 previously unreported strains of Betacoronavirus that had been collected by WIV, and to use GoF techniques to make these viruses more dangerous. Specifically, the project proposed to add protease sites like the furin cleavage site (FCS) to natural viruses in order to enhance the infectivity and transmissibility of the virus.
Seventh, in the draft proposal, the EHA director boasted that “the BSL2 nature of work on SARSr-CoVs makes our system highly cost effective relative to other bat-virus systems,” prompting the lead scientist on the EHA proposal to comment that US scientists would “freak out” if they learned of US government support for GoF research at WIV in a BSL2 facility.
Eighth, the Defense Department rejected the DEFUSE proposal in 2018, yet NIAID funding for EHA covered the key scientists of the DEFUSE project. EHA therefore had ongoing NIH funding to carry out the DEFUSE research program.
Ninth, when the outbreak was first noted in Wuhan in late 2019 and January 2020, key US virologists associated with NIH believed that the SARS-CoV-2 had most likely emerged from GoF research, and said so on a phone call with Fauci on February 1, 2020. The most striking clue for these scientists was the presence of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2, with the FCS appearing at exactly the location in the virus (the S1/S2 junction) that had been proposed in the DEFUSE program.
Tenth, the top NIH officials, including Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Fauci, tried to hide the NIH-supported GoF research, and promoted the publication of a scientific paper (“The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”) in March 2020 declaring a natural origin of the virus. The paper completely ignored the DEFUSE proposal.
Eleventh, some US officials began to point their fingers at WIV as the source of the laboratory leak while hiding the NIH-funding and EHA-led research program that may have led to the virus.
Twelfth, the above facts have come to light only as a result of intrepid investigative reporting, whistleblowers, and leaks from inside the US Government, including the leak of the DEFUSE proposal. The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services determined in 2023 that NIH did not adequately oversee the EHA grants.
Thirteenth, investigators have also realized in retrospect that researchers at Rocky Mountain Labs, together with key scientists associated with EHA, were infecting the RML Egyptian fruit bats with SARS-like viruses in experiments closely linked to those proposed in DEFUSE.
Fourteenth, the FBI and Department of Energy have reported their assessments that the laboratory escape of SARS-CoV-2 is the most likely explanation of the virus.
Fifteenth, a whistleblower from inside the CIA has recently charged that the CIA team investigating the outbreak concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged from the laboratory, but that senior CIA officials bribed the team to report a natural origin of the virus.
The sum of the evidence – and the absence of reliable evidence pointing to a natural origin (see here and here) – adds up to the possibility that the US funded and implemented a dangerous GoF research program that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and then to a worldwide pandemic. A powerful recent assessment by mathematical biologist Alex Washburne reaches the conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab…” He also notes that the collaborators “proceeded to mount what can legitimately be called a disinformation campaign” to hide the laboratory origin.
A US-funded laboratory origin of Covid-19 would certainly constitute the most significant case of governmental gross negligence in world history. Moreover, there is a high likelihood that the US Government continues to this day to fund dangerous GoF work as part of its biodefense program. The US owes the full truth, and perhaps ample financial compensation, to the rest of the world, depending on what the facts ultimately reveal.
We need three urgent actions. The first is an independent scientific investigation in which all laboratories involved in the EHA research program in the US and China fully open their books and records to the independent investigators. The second is a worldwide halt on GoF research until an independent global scientific body sets grounds rules for biosafety. The third is for the UN General Assembly to establish rigorous legal and financial accountability for governments that violate international safety norms through dangerous research activities that threaten the health and security of the rest of the world.
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