SOMERS, Connecticut – Stanford University School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya, M.D. said in an interview with The Star News Network Friday that Americans “should be asking” whether diagnostic code data now being utilized to identify patients who were either never vaccinated or not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be used “illegitimately.”
Bhattacharya responded to a question about the recent implementation in the United States of new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) diagnostic codes that requires doctors at clinics and hospitals to ask patients about their COVID mRNA vaccination status.
Robert Malone, M.D., a pioneer in the development of mRNA technology, observed at his Substack column at the end of January that the ICD classification system “is run by the World Health Organization (WHO), not the US government.”
Malone explained further:
In April 2022, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) announced a new set of codes relating to vaccination status that are cause for concern. These ICD codes are not based on a disease or illness, but are based on COVID-19 vaccination status. It took almost a year, but in January 2023 these codes became available to nearly every medical clinic and hospital in the USA.
While Bhattacharya said it is “often standard to add lots of ICD-10 codes for clinical purposes” so that doctors who are managing a patient’s care can use the data for that purpose, “there are also illegitimate reasons” for collecting the data.
“And the question is what protections do Americans have that those data won’t be used illegitimately, and I think that’s a question that we should be asking our government,” he noted. “Will the privacy protections that Americans normally have with HIPAA and other things, apply to this?”
Bhattacharya was presenting over the weekend along with epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D. – both fellows of Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science & Freedom – at the school’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut, on the topic of “Censoring the Science: The Importance of Free Speech to the Pursuit of Knowledge.”
Blake Center Executive Director Labin Duke began the presentation with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Both Kulldorff and Bhattacharya also co-authored, with Oxford University’s Dr. Sunetra Gupta, the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 that has since been translated into 44 languages and signed by nearly one million scientists, physicians, and citizens.
The Declaration expressed the “grave concerns” of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists regarding the “damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” specifically the lockdowns, which, the authors warned, now approaching three years ago, were already “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
Bhattacharya, who along with Kulldorff and many other public health scientists had been censored through a collaborative effort by federal health officials and Big Tech, also recently announced he is working with other colleagues whose voices were suppressed at the start of the pandemic to form a “truth commission” that will help Americans formulate the questions members of Congress must respond to in order to stop such undermining of national health policy in the future.
Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter, stated in December that Bhattacharya was one of the scientists and physicians who had been banned from the social media platform for many months due to pressure from federal health officials, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“We would have won that debate in 2020 and 2021, had we been allowed to present the science openly,” Bhattacharya told Just the News. “But Big Tech played a malign role in suppressing that debate from happening.”
Watch: Dr. Bhattacharya says America needs apologies and an honest COVID commission https://t.co/CIIVren95U
— Just the News (@JustTheNews) February 16, 2023
In that news report, the physician and health economics expert elaborated on the collusive relationship between the government and social media giants:
And I actually have to say it’s not just Big Tech. This was done at the behest of government actors. I know this from a lawsuit that I’ve been involved with from the Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General Offices against the Biden administration. We’ve documented a concerted effort by government agencies to tell Big Tech what to censor and, in some cases, even who to censor on the COVID debate. Americans were denied debate very, very unfairly by the federal government.
One slide presented by Kulldorff during the Hillsdale Blake Center presentation showed an email, sent October 8, 2020, from former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, to former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Cliff Lane, NIAID deputy director for clinical research and special projects.
In the email message, cc’ed to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, now acting NIH director, with subject “Great Barrington Declaration,” Collins wrote:
Hi Tony and Cliff,
See https://gbdeclaration.org/ This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?
Francis
The Star News Network also asked for Bhattacharya’s reaction to the recent statement by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky that, despite the release of a new comprehensive study showing masks are ineffective in stopping the spread of COVID and the flu, CDC’s “masking guidance doesn’t really change with time.”
During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) asked Walensky to explain how the CDC uses evidence to update or change its guidance.
The question was asked in light of the newly published study by Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which researched 78 controlled trials, and found masks “may make little to no difference” in cases of respiratory illnesses such as COVID and flu.
“One of the limitations in that study was clearly stated that people were not actually engaged in the intervention — so you actually have to wear the mask for it to work,” Walensky said, adding her agency’s “masking guidance doesn’t really change with time – what it changes with is disease.”
“I was absolutely shocked by director Walensky’s comments,” Bhattacharya said during the interview. “What it shows is an incuriousness about scientific results and an inability to discern high quality from low quality evidence,” as well as a fixed adherence “to the idea that masks work and that no evidence can shake her.”
"To say that the CDC’s masking guidance “does not change with time,” despite the recent Cochrane review, is effectively to admit that the CDC’s guidance does not change with new data or evidence, either."
—@MichaelPSenger https://t.co/cohyP3WzLO— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) February 16, 2023
“The answer she gave is disqualifying,” he asserted. “In science we change when the evidence changes. Here, actually, the evidence never changed. The Cochrane evaluation is just an update of the same Cochrane team that evaluated in November of 2020, that came to the same conclusion based on decades of evidence on influenza and masking.”
Bhattacharya noted influenza is transmitted similarly to COVID in some ways.
“It’s another respiratory virus,” he explained. “And a decade or more of high quality randomized studies haven’t found an ability for the masks to protect against disease spread in the community. That was known in November 2020.”
Bhattacharya emphasized the current Cochrane analysis is an update of the previous study.
“So, yes, I was very disappointed with the CDC director’s answer,” he concluded. “It fills me with no confidence about her ability to assess high quality science and her commitment to evidence-based medicine.”
Events at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom focus on Christianity, Western Civilization, and America.
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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Jay Bhattacharya” by Jay Bhattacharya. Background Photo “United States Capitol” by David Maiolo. CC BY-SA 3.0.
