Senate Republicans seem to be cruising toward confirming as the director of the National Institutes of Health an academic who made a huge mistake about the most serious health crisis to confront the United States in a century and who refuses to acknowledge he erred big-time.
President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford, was a fierce critic of Covid vaccine mandates and other anti-pandemic measures, such as lockdowns and mask mandates. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank. It recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection and focus on sequestering particularly vulnerable populations, such as older Americans.
A large number of public health experts and organizations assailed this approach. A collection of these groups responded: “If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace… The suggestions put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration are NOT based in science.”
Bhattacharya, who advanced the paranoid idea that the pandemic was being used to create a “biosecurity state,” was hailed by libertarians, conservatives, and MAGA-ites for his defiance—even as public health experts noted he had not presented a workable plan to achieve herd immunity while protecting at-risk Americans. He went on to champion himself as a victim of censorship.
Perhaps more worrisome is that he totally misread the potential danger of Covid and now won’t admit that.
At the start of the Covid pandemic, in late March 2020, he co-wrote with Eran Bendavid, another Stanford professor, an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which they dramatically downplayed the possible consequences of this public health crisis. The pair noted there was “little evidence to confirm” the “premise” that Covid would kill millions in the absence of such measures as quarantines and shelter-in-place orders.
Bhattacharya and Bendavid pointed to estimates that predicted 100 million Americans would contract the disease and 2 to 4 million would perish. “We believe that estimate is deeply flawed,” they wrote. They noted that statistical misinterpretations “could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million.” And they insisted the lower number was “not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.”
Covid has killed 1.2 Americans, and that number would probably be much higher—perhaps in the 2 to 4 million range—had a vaccine not been developed.
The two Stanford professors presented a bunch of statistics to contend that the pandemic would likely be of a “limited scale.” And they made an obvious point: “A 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.”
This was not merely an academic exercise. Their numbers had significant policy implications. They asserted that in the face of a “limited” epidemic, there would be no need for the most severe measures, such as lockdowns. They were providing ammo to those who were opposing the restrictions being advocated by public health officials.
Bhattacharya got it wrong. But what’s worse is that he now won’t concede he was off the mark by a factor of at least 25.
Last fall, I got in a tussle with him over this. Hedge fund manager and Trump fanboy Bill Ackman tweeted that Bhattacharya was a “brilliant scientist” who’s “unafraid to stand by his carefully researched opinion.” Citing the 2020 Wall Street Journal article, I responded that Bhattacharya at the start of the pandemic said that only 20,000 to 40,000 people would die from Covid, adding, “He was only off by 1.16 million.”
Bhattacharya replied, “This is a lie. The article pointed out that, given the evidence available in early 2020, the pandemic could end up killing anywhere between 20k and 4 million. And it called for a study to reduce the uncertainty.” Elon Musk also chimed in to promote a community note attached to my tweet that read, “Bhattacharya never claimed only 20-40K would die from Covid.”
These responses to my tweet were misleading. Bhattacharya hadn’t merely called for better studies. The intent of his article was to suggest that those experts who feared a pandemic and who were proposing tough measures to prevent such a wave of death were likely wrong and overreacting. His op-ed had indeed noted that the estimates of Covid deaths varied from his figure of 20,000 to other predictions of 4 million. But he and Bendavid had clearly stated that they believed the number would end up being at the lower end and that the United States would face an epidemic of “limited scale.”
Bhattacharya and his supporters, including Musk, cannot acknowledge his big error, and they have been trying to erase it. And he is probably prepared to stick to this misleading CYA spin during his Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for Wednesday. There’s nothing wrong about an academic expressing skepticism about the conventional wisdom. More troubling is when a supposed expert in health stats blunders significantly and cannot ‘fess up to it. Such disingenuous defensiveness is not a good trait for the top appointment at the federal agency in charge of biomedical and public health research.
