Commentary: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Will Rebuild Trust in Public Health

Jay Bhattacharya

Just weeks before President-elect Trump announced that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would be his nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Bhattacharya and I were together at Stanford University for a bold, first-of-its-kind symposium on public health decision making during the COVID-19 crisis. The idea behind the symposium was to shatter the public health echo chamber and bring diverse perspectives together in respectful dialogue. Dr. Bhattacharya and I are close friends, but our backgrounds are quite different. He is firmly at home at Stanford, having gone there as an undergraduate, and then going on to get a medical degree and a Ph.D. there before joining the faculty as a Professor of Health Policy. I, on the other hand, am a blue-collar Midwesterner who enlisted the in U.S. Navy after high school. I carry no titles of academic distinction and was likely the only participant at the symposium without a medical degree or PhD.

Yet, I was invited by Stanford to moderate the symposium’s opening panel with seven leading public health authorities from top institutions across the world. What brought me into this unusual position was my expanding work to rebuild truth and trust in public health—a collaboration that began with former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and the Braver Angels organization, which is nation’s largest movement working to bridge the partisan divide.

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Prominent Epidemiologist Says Data Proves COVID Lockdowns Failed, and Hurt Population

Dr. Harvey Risch

Dr. Harvey Risch, Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, says lockdowns failed to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and had “serious repercussions for substantial fractions of the population.”

“The measures that need to be monitored for a pandemic of this sort are the number of deaths, serious hospitalizations, and serious outcomes of the infection, not the infection itself,” Risch said on a “Just the News, No Noise” special on Friday.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Once Vaunted as the Best in the Word, Stanford University’s Wayward Record is Growing Infamous

Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle.

That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.

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Stanford Health Policy Professor Debunks White House Claim COVID ‘A Far Greater Threat to Kids Than Flu’

As the White House anticipates approval of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application for COVID vaccines for babies and young children, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University, and a founding fellow at the Academy for Science and Freedom, says the claim that COVID is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is” amounts to “scare-mongering.”

Bhattacharya responded in a column at the Wall Street Journal Sunday to White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha’s recent tweet in which he made the claim “COVID is a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.”

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Stanford Health Policy Professor Debunks White House Claim COVID ‘A Far Greater Threat to Kids Than Flu’

As the White House anticipates approval of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application for COVID vaccines for babies and young children, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University, and a founding fellow at the Academy for Science and Freedom, says the claim that COVID is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is” amounts to “scare-mongering.”

Bhattacharya responded in a column at the Wall Street Journal Sunday to White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha’s recent tweet in which he made the claim “COVID is a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.”

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In Email to Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Collins Asked for Media Hit Piece to Smear ‘Fringe’ Harvard, Stanford, Oxford Epidemiologists

Last fall, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director (NIH) Francis Collins asked Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email to pursue a “quick and devastating” media hit piece to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration, recently released emails show.

More than 60,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed the declaration to express their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

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Commentary: Vaccination Rates Not Linked to Lower COVID Rates, Epidemiology Paper Finds

On Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article noting that California has some of the lowest COVID-19 case rates in the US, even though the Golden State’s vaccination rate lags many states that are currently struggling with the delta variant.

“One clear example is the New England states of Vermont and Maine,” the Chronicle reported. “Relatively shielded from the worst of the nation’s previous surges, they have struggled against the delta variant, which has sent their case rates soaring.”

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Commentary: Stanford Epidemiologist Says COVID Vaccination Is Primarily a Matter of Personal Health, Not Public Health

As one-size-fits-all COVID vaccine mandates sweep government, academia, and corporate America, new data are emerging that undermine the public health justifications for these policies. Studies from multiple countries now indicate that vaccination alone is less effective than the acquired immunity many already possess and unable to prevent transmission in the medium-to-long term.

Since the pandemic began, more than 100 million Americans have recovered from the virus. Many are workers deemed “essential” just last year. While the government paid others to sit at home, essential workers were required to continue working, exposing themselves to the coronavirus in a pre-vaccine world.

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