The Dangerous Rise of Jay Bhattacharya
Misinformation,False Predictions and the Future of Public Health
Written By Dr. Jonathon Howard Published: 3/5/ 2025
As a doctor in New York, I witnessed what SARS‑CoV‑2 could do when it spread unchecked. I saw more people die in spring 2020 than in my entire career, including some healthy, young people, and I saw COVID severely injure people without killing them. That horror has passed, but grave risks remain. COVID isn’t gone, measles and pertussis are returning, and a new pandemic is possible. Meanwhile science itself is under attack. A deluded anti-vaccine activist, Robert Kennedy Jr., has risen to power and has canceled meetings and clinical trials regarding vaccines. Research is being defunded, scientists are being purged, data is disappearing, and language is being policed. Journalists are writing about a “collapse” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
At a first glance, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a mild-mannered health economist nominated to head the NIH may appear to be the perfect antidote to the madness, and the presidents of Harvard and Stanford, his home institution, have vouched for him. However, his pandemic record does not inspire confidence that he will adjust his opinions with new evidence or place science ahead of ideology.
Dr. Bhattacharya rose to prominence by spreading a singular message from his office and Fox News studios; COVID was overblown and was going away. In March 2020, he authored Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? with Dr. Eran Bendavid. It began:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
This robust defense of stringent mitigation measures made sense given COVID’s carnage abroad. COVID’s danger was no secret by the time it reached the U.S. However, Dr. Bhattacharya wasn’t concerned. He wrote about the "limited scale of the epidemic" and said predictions of mass death were "deeply flawed." He surmised that COVID had “one-tenth of the flu mortality rate”, and that only 20,000-40,000 Americans would perish. Reality quickly proved otherwise. Three weeks later, even with “extraordinary measures", the death toll in the U.S. topped 40,000.
Although, Dr. Bendavid eventually admitted their predictions were “way off", Dr. Bhattacharya never looked back or deviated from this message, regardless of the reality on the ground. As the pandemic progressed, he prematurely declared the danger to be gone and minimized every variant. He said COVID had been “defanged” on: April 14, 2021; May 3, 2021; July 21, 2021; July 28, 2021; and January 6, 2022. In 2021, he greatly over-hyped vaccines, saying they blocked transmission and eliminated severe disease. Future historians can understand how the pandemic unfolded by reading Dr. Bhattacharya’s predictions and knowing the opposite happened.
In July 2020 he said Sweden had reached herd immunity. Months later, Sweden limited public gatherings to eight people amidst a COVID surge. In May 2021, he said COVID was "clearly a seasonal disease" and discussed herd immunity in the U.S. by saying “we are kind of already there.” When the Delta variant obliterated his bold declarations just two months later, he told Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
I don’t think the Delta variant changes the calculus or the evidence in any fundamental way…We have protected the vulnerable—by vaccinating the older population, we have provided them with enormous protection against severe disease and death.
Weeks later, Florida reported record COVID deaths, and schools, “drowning in COVID”, couldn’t stay open. Undaunted, Dr. Bhattacharya recorded an interview titled Why No One Should Panic About the Omicron Variant. The headlines later reported soaring death rates in older people and a record number of pediatric hospitalizations and deaths.
Dr. Bhattacharya made false and dangerous claims to numb people to COVID’s risk. In 2020, when no one was vaccinated, he said that “for younger populations under 70, it's much milder." The next year, even with effective vaccines, COVID became a leading killer for every age group. He also said that the flu was more dangerous for children. In reality, the flu killed just one child in the 2020-2021 season, while COVID killed around 150 children in January 2022 alone. He dismissed a 1 in 500 risk of death for a 40-year-old as “quite moderate” but spoke seriously about rare, temporary vaccine side-effects.
Most famously, Dr. Bhattacharya co-authored The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) in October 2020. This was a pivotal moment. Vaccines arrived 2-months later, but so did the worst wave, when 3,000 Americans died daily. Though today Dr. Bhattacharya claims that his pandemic vision arose from his concern for the poor, children, and working class, the GBD was written under the guidance of Jeffrey Tucker, an anti-vaccine, pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate then with the American Institute for Economic Research, and in 2020 Dr. Bhattacharya wondered if limiting the virus was “really worth it to suppress the economy".
The GBD was based on several flawed premises:
● People were vulnerable or not
● These groups could be rapidly and completely separated for months on end
● Death was COVID's only meaningful harm
● COVID reinfections were rare
● Herd immunity was inevitable
However, its core belief was that spreading the virus was necessary to tame the virus. It proposed allowing “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.” It claimed that “as immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls”.
Dr. Bhattacharya objected to mitigation measures not because he thought he failed to slow the virus, but precisely because he knew that’s what they did. As such, he wanted schools open without testing, masks, and vaccines, and even said it was “more dangerous for public health” to vaccinate everyone than no one. He lamented that suppressing SARS‑CoV‑2 “postponed the inevitable” and delayed herd immunity, which he claimed would arrive in just 3-6 months, if only the virus was allowed to do its job.
Things didn’t work out that way. Yet incredibly, in 2023, after 1 million deaths and with SARS‑CoV‑2 still spreading, Dr. Bhattacharya claimed his vision had been “vindicated.” He further entwined himself with the elements that are now taking a wrecking ball to our scientific agencies. He developed connections to powerful right-wing king makers, such as Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, and spoke at a rally for Kennedy, where he was introduced by Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine luminary who has hinted at violence towards doctors and journalists. Dr. Bhattacharya himself often behaved in juvenile and unprofessional ways towards doctors who worked in hospitals, telling the public to blame frontline healthcare workers, not the virus, for everything they didn’t like about the pandemic.
Dr. Bhattacharya later celebrated Kennedy’s ascent by recognizing that he would “disrupt the medical establishment”, to put it mildly, and he has since adopted many of his views. Dr. Bhattacharya called for mRNA vaccines to be removed from the market, cast doubt on routine immunizations, such as the HPV and hepatitis B vaccines, and even expressed openness to the myth that vaccines cause autism. He is overtly hostile towards the NIH, saying “The rot, having accumulated over decades, was plain for all to see”. He has pushed for cuts to the NIH and discussed withholding funding from universities that do not meet his definition of “academic freedom”.
When it came to COVID, Dr. Bhattacharya portrayed himself as an outsider, with no responsibility for anything that happened. However, once he is confirmed, it will be his job to repair the NIH from everything that’s happened since inauguration day. He’ll be judged by whether or not he succeeds. He is the “medical establishment” now, and it’s our job to hold him accountable.