NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is a vengeful liar and a menace to society

Steve Bannon and Jay Bhattacharya — image from Important Context

I would like to draw your attention to the exceptional writing and devoted pro-science activism of Dr. Angie Rasmussen and Dr. Jeremy Berg.


1. Dr. Rasmussen is a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has countered the dangerous COVID misinformation of Jay Bhattacharya since 2020. It’s a travesty of American science that Bhattacharya was installed as the Trumpist bureaucrat tasked with the destruction of NIH, the world’s premiere funder of biomedical research.

Her latest masterwork of demolition compares Bhattacharya to Soviet fraudster (and Stalin favorite) Trofim Lysenko, who denied the genetic transmission of traits, persecuted his enemies, and killed seven million people in a famine of his own doing.

I urge you to read Dr. Rasmussen’s entire piece. Some highlights are below.

Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko

Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge

 

DR. ANGELA RASMUSSEN

…

Both [Lysenko and Bhattacharya] have capitalized on population-level disasters to climb out of academic obscurity into powerful positions. Both did so by advancing authoritarian political interests and telling a dictator what he wanted to hear. Both proposed and doubled down on policies that would kill millions of people, even resorting to manipulating or manufacturing data to justify them. Both were so emotionally fragile and unable to tolerate expert criticism that they pursued mortal vendettas against entire scientific fields of study. The only difference is that Lysenko hated genetics, while Bhattacharya hates public health, virology, and vaccines.

 

 

How much does Bhattacharya hate public health?

 

Bhattacharya first came to prominence with the Santa Clara serology study in April 2020, a widely pilloried preprint that claimed the mortality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than most other estimates. It was later revealed that this study was partly funded by the CEO of JetBlue Airlines, who was looking for data to support lifting pandemic-related restrictions on air travel. A few months later, Bhattacharya dropped the Great Barrington Declaration, a pandemic policy proposal calling for “vulnerable” people to isolate forever, while encouraging a COVID free-for-all everywhere else. That would have resulted in mass infection and another million deaths in the US if it had been implemented.

How much does Bhattacharya hate vaccines?

Bhattacharya started lying about vaccines in 2021. That was when he appeared on a panel hosted by “vaccine safety” fanatic Steve Kirsch and his Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff, the anti-vax barrow-wight who is currently chairing ACIP, purging it of expertise, and trying to cancel the MMRV vaccine. At this panel, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff sat silent, nodding in tacit approval as Kirsch claimed falsely that COVID vaccines killed more than half a million people.

Her inevitable conclusion:
“Bhattacharya is the American Lysenko and must be removed as NIH Director.”

We know that Bhattacharya currently has control of American biomedical research, is eagerly gutting research that does not comport with his own mass death-inducing crank beliefs for Trump, and really wants revenge against anyone who ever pointed out that the Great Barrington Declaration would kill millions, the evidence does not show that the pandemic began with a lab leak, or that mRNA vaccine technology is safe, effective, and essential for pandemic preparedness. We know how this story will end. We must have the courage as a scientific community to stand united against it.

What can we do as scientists? Be as loud as possible and amplify messages such as these!

Support the American Public & HHS Employees — read and sign the letter.



2. Dr. Berg is a former Editor-in-Chief of Science and the former Director of NIGMS. He has embarked on a high-profile email campaign to call out Bhattacharya’s hypocrisy and incompetence as NIH Director, as well as the disastrous, politically-motivated decline in grant awards. Dr. Berg has documented these communiques on Bluesky. 

Among my favorites are:

 

Dr. Berg has recently collected some of his missives into a document called Fifty Shades of “Jay”, which starts out with helpful suggestions (which are ignored) but quickly reaches the conclusion that “Jay” is willfully ignorant and deceptive.

I have been closely monitoring NIH progress and policies throughout the year. When Director Bhattacharya began making public statements of various sorts that revealed his lack of knowledge about NIH, I started to send emails in good faith to share my knowledge about NIH programs with him to help him perform his important job more effectively. At first, he did not respond at all and when he did, he responded using the term “ideological boondoggles” without definition. This ill-advised behavior substantially decreased my hopes for his interest in receiving input about NIH programs and policies as it seemed that he had entrenched political perspectives.

 

I'm a fan of the Governor Newsom Press Office account on X, which mocks Trump's incoherent ALL CAPS ramblings. In the same vein, I endorse the ridicule of inept and unqualified Trumpist bureaucrats on social media and elsewhere.