Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism
My YouTube channel is a reliable history of the pandemic. The NY Times is not.
The post Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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The NY Times recently published a lengthy interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya titled A Plan to Restore Trust in Science From a ‘Fringe Epidemiologist, which Dr. David Gorksi discussed in his article Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay Wants to Turn NIH Into the “Research arm” of MAHA. However, Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t become Podcast Jay the moment he was sworn into the NIH. He’s been podcasting constantly for 6 years now, and I’ve saved a lot of it. Here, I will share 5 thoughts on Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent interview, using his own words to show how the NY Times is complicit in not just pandemic revisionism, but also the MAHA attacks on science and medicine.
1. The Interview Was Revisionist History, Predictably
Today, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that his 2020 pandemic vision merely opposed lockdowns, a word that appeared 11 times in the NY Times interview, and school closures, a word that appeared 9 times. In reality, Dr. Bhattacharya believed that COVID would kill 20,000-40,000 Americans and therefore wondered if controlling it was “really worth it to suppress the economy.” Watch for yourself.
Notably, the word “immunity” was absent from the NY Times interview. However, a quick reading of the Great Barrington Declaration shows that it was all about herd immunity via natural immunity, and Dr. Bhattacharya spoke about this often in 2020. Watch for yourself.
Dr. Bhattacharya felt that the best way to reach herd immunity was to let countless millions of people “face the risk of the disease” in October 2020, just 2 months before vaccines arrived. Watch for yourself.
To numb people to the virus and further his pro-infection agenda, Dr. Bhattacharya spread copious disinformation in 2020, claiming that COVID’s risk kicked in at age 70 and that the flu killed more children than COVID, even though the opposite was true. Watch for yourself.
This is just a small sample of Dr. Bhattacharya’s disinformation in 2020, though the NY Times didn’t mention any of it.
2. Dr. Bhattacharya Knows How to Destroy Trust, Not Rebuild It
The main theme of the NY Times interview was about trust, who broke it and how to restore it. It opened with this statement by Mr. Douthat:
I want to start with a general diagnosis of the collapse of public trust in the medical establishment in America and how I think the Covid-19 pandemic played into it.
Dr. Bhattacharya himself said:
I just want to make sure people understand that I don’t want the public health authorities to be discredited permanently. I want reform of the public health authorities so that they become worthy of trust.
Of course, Dr. Bhattacharya was the “medical establishment”. He advised Presidents and Governors. He testified before Congress and was omnipresent in the right-wing disinformation media echo chamber. He was a pandemic celebrity who was everywhere, except hospitals, and he used his megaphone to spread distrust of scientists and doctors, claiming that they were liars and part of a “COVID cartel”. Watch for yourself.
Elsewhere, Dr. Bhattacharya endorsed the myth that hospitals and doctors were paid to put COVID on death certificates and therefore the death toll could not be trusted. Watch for yourself.
Dr. Bhattacharya made multiple emotionally manipulative propaganda videos where he warned that measures to stop people from dying of COVID were evidence of a “biosecurity state”. Watch for yourself.
To this day, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that “the engines of science were used for social control”, and this was “evil”. Watch for yourself.
Though the NY Times didn’t tell its readers, Dr. Bhattacharya spent 6 years relentlessly claiming that scientists and doctors were tyrants and liars. His disingenuous blathering about repairing trust today is pure hot dog meme guy.
3. Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism
While keeping an accurate history of the pandemic is worthwhile in its own right, this deliberate COVID revisionism serves a valuable purpose for MAHA. By constantly using the words lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates, as Dr. Bhattacharya made sure to do in the NY Times interview, Kennedy and his crew seek to justify their vandalism today. For example, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that lockdowns from spring 2020 are the reason the US is withdrawing from the WHO in 2026. Watch for yourself.
He also claimed that mandates are part of why he cancelled research into mRNA technology. Watch for yourself.
By enabling pandemic revisionism, the NY Times is also enabling MAHA destruction today.
4. “Bhattacharya should not be in charge of any scientific organization.”
Things are not going well for Dr. Bhattacharya at the NIH. While he is a grandmaster at destroying trust, he has no clue how to build it and has already failed in his mission. He has tied his fate to both Trump and Kennedy, his old allies have abandoned him, NIH leaders are quitting in protest, he is openly mocked as “Podcast Jay”, and states and medical organizations are wisely ignoring his anti-vaccine agenda.
The comments to the NY Times article revealed the depths of Dr. Bhattacharya’s failure. Readers knew to judge him on his real-world performance today, not his imagined glories in 2020, and they knew that potential mistakes 6 years ago don’t justify Lysenkoism 2.0 today. The top comment was this:
Let me understand. Mistakes were made during Covid so we should destroy science? Vaccines have decades of data to prove their effectiveness, we just ignore them? The US does NOT have a safety net healthcare system to treat patients quickly like Denmark, yet we take their vaccine protocol but ignore the lack of treatment we offer? There is a difference between an “outsider” and a person with a predetermined agenda whose actions will kill people. Bhattacharya should not be in charge of any scientific organization.
My favorite comment, for obvious reasons, was:
Jay Bhattacharya is not an epidemiologist. He has no degree or training as an epidemiologist, nor has he ever been a licensed practicing physician. In fact, he never did a residency. He is an economist with an MD, who if one examines his background and published research, has not only frequently criticized public health, but has engaged in blaming the victim, as with his published papers on the cost of insuring diabetic patients to employers, suggesting that employers pass on the additional cost to their obese diabetic patients.
In fact, Jay was one of the most egregious disseminators of Covid disinformation beginning in 2020 with the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that prior to the development of vaccinations, the SARS-Cov-2 virus was no more harmful than a common cold to the non-elderly population. Something we now know is completely false. He suggested that the US gov’t pay to protect all vulnerable individuals prior to vaccination from Covid and then did nothing to elaborate how this grand plan would take place. He repeatedly criticized the efforts of public health to mitigate the transmission prior to vaccination of COVID, including masking, school and work closures and public spacing, but never offered any concrete or realistic alternatives.
For a comprehensive review of the anti-science approach that Jay Bhattacharya communicated during the first several years of the Covid pandemic, please see Jonathan Howard’s excellent book “We Want Them Infected”.
Essentially all of the comments were like this, and not for the first time. Though many people fell for Dr. Bhattacharya’s COVID-superhero fantasy in 2020, everyone sees through him today. No one can make the affirmative case that the NIH is thriving under his competent leadership, and it’s no surprise he prefers to spend his time on X, celebrating the arrest of a journalist who called him “names” and trying to convince strangers he was right about everything 6 years ago.
5. My YouTube Channel is a Reliable History of the Pandemic. The NY Times is Not.
However, these wise readers knew to distrust Dr. Bhattacharya not because of the NY Times, but despite the NYTimes, which is itself a major contributor to the COVID amnesia project. It seems forbidden to acknowledge Dr. Bhattacharya’s plan for herd immunity via natural immunity in 3-6 months, though this is what the Great Barrington Declaration was all about. One guest writer even said this about him:
His real dream is for the Covid and D.E.I. culture wars to wind down so he can be the one to forge science’s new peace — to enact deep reform that brings new purpose to the agency… Researchers who know him consistently told me that, sure, he bucked the establishment on Covid, but was eminently sane about it, not a rote contrarian.
Incredible.
In contrast to such fairy tales, my YouTube channel has become a mini library of unassailable history. Even though the videos are a minuscule snippet of the content MAHA doctors produced, collectively they reveal how pandemic disinformation from 2020 led directly to MAHA demolition today. There’s a reason prominent government officials tried to censor it. If the NYTimes wants to honestly report on Dr. Bhattacharya’s dismal pandemic record for the first time, I am happy to donate my collection so Podcast Jay can narrate it himself.
Watch for yourself.
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Jonathan Howard
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."
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