From Facebook:
Temple Daily Telegraph (1930): The Anti-Vaxxers
Everyone here will be familiar with the pattern.
DONALD TRUMP’S ANNOUNCEMENT last month of Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as his nominee to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health further intensified the controversy—and alarm—about what the second Trump administration will mean for American science and medicine. Consider the nominees for the most prominent federal health posts: Bhattacharya at the NIH, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, former Florida Congressman Dr. David Weldon at the CDC, Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary at the FDA, and former Fox News personality Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general. This is, unmistakably, a takeover of the public health establishment by COVID-19 contrarians—or, if you prefer, by COVID cranks.
Unlike RFK Jr., a longtime, all-around conspiracy theorist with no medical background, Bhattacharya is an actual physician. He also has a Ph.D. in economics, and a track record of reputable scholarship focusing on policy questions related to public health. But there is no question that Bhattacharya owes his nomination to one thing: his emergence early in the COVID pandemic as a vocal critic of the public health consensus that favored social distancing to mitigate the spread of the virus. Bhattacharya was one of the three co-authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an October 2020 statement that called for “focused protection” for the elderly and other vulnerable groups while letting the virus spread through the rest of the population until herd immunity was reached.
At the time, most scientists thought it was a terrible idea. Among them was then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins; a few days after the statement was posted, he emailed National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, referring to Bhattacharya and his colleagues as “fringe epidemiologists” and suggesting “a quick and devastating published take down” of the statement. Bhattacharya, who later obtained that email via the Freedom of Information Act, told a congressional subcommittee in March 2023 that he and his colleagues were “targeted for censorship” and “targeted for suppression by federal officials” because their arguments were a threat to the establishment’s “illusion” of scientific consensus.
Is Bhattacharya’s claim of broad censorship true? Some internet companies clearly did move to reduce his reach because he was classified as a purveyor of COVID misinformation: Twitter kept his name from trending and Google may have sometimes suppressed or downgraded the Great Barrington Declaration website in its search results. But the persecution narrative leaves out other relevant facts—for instance, that Bhattacharya found champions in senior health officials in the first Trump administration and later advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or that he gained a regular platform in conservative media, such as the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
TODAY, THERE’S A WIDESPREAD BELIEF on the right that Bhattacharya and his co-authors have been proven right in their critique of the lockdowns. Some of their views, such as the opposition to school closures, are indeed now widely accepted. (For what it’s worth, the right’s bogeyman, Dr. Fauci, argued as early as spring 2020 for reopening schools that fall, except in areas with active outbreaks.) But the Great Barrington Declaration’s larger view of how to deal with the pandemic is far from vindicated, as science writer David Wallace-Wells explainedlast month in the New York Times.
For one thing, Bhattacharya and his colleagues consistently lowballed COVID-19’s toll and fatality rates from the start. A March 2020 Wall Street Journal column co-authored by Bhattacharya argued that the virus was probably much less deadly than was being claimed and that it was likely to kill 20,000 to 40,000 Americans, on a par with the seasonal flu. (This was, of course, fully accordant with Trump’s own tendency to downplay and minimize the danger of the virus and to compare it to the flu.) The actual death toll by now is over 1.2 million.
Bhattacharya has recently claimed that the March 2020 column was merely describing a “range of possible outcomes”; but in fact, it explicitly stated that the low estimates were “not only plausible but likely” while the higher ones were “severely flawed.” And Bhattacharya’s pattern of minimizing the danger continued after that. By early 2021, COVID deaths in the United States stood at over 330,000, exceeding his “likely” projections by an order of magnitude. In January, he advisedagainst mass vaccination in India, arguing that most of the population had already been infected and acquired natural immunity. About a month later India became the center of the Delta variant of COVID-19, which killed a quarter million people just between April and July. In late June 2021, Bhattacharya and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the pandemic was “on its way out” in the United States; since then, it has claimed some 700,000 more American lives.
The anti-vaccine movement grew in popularity in the 1920s, interestingly, right after another major epidemic:
https://daily.jstor.org/vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-1920s/
‘Antivaccinationists decried the elitism of public and private bureaucracies. They argued that there was “a well-laid plan to medically enslave the nation” and that “state medicine” was socialism. “Barbarous medical child-slaughter” was a not-atypical 1920s description of vaccination.’
‘Publisher Bernarr Macfadden was one of the most influential of the antivaccinationists. His media empire reached some 40 million Americans through magazines like Physical Culture, True Story, and True Detective Mysteries. His New York Evening Graphic, a tabloid specializing in sex and crime stories, was particularly tabloid about vaccination. Macfadden was not above fake news, eventually admitting that the Graphic’s sensational story “Vaccination Killed My Two Sisters” wasn’t, as originally claimed, written by a doctor.’
Mask hesitancy also existed in the Spanish Flu:
https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/mask-resistance-during-pandemic-isnt-new-1918-many-americans-were-slackers
Bhattacharya based some of his very early claims about the risks of COVID-19 on a flawed paper he co-authored, which as far as I know never made it through peer review. He was making claims of the durability of immunity of the infected long before there was even time to see that in fact, immunity was less durable than what he suggested, so that using infections instead of vaccinations for herd immunity would have taken an even bigger toll than our actual death rate of one out of every three hundred Americans.
And the Great Barrington Declaration’s impressive-sounding name is a based on the name of the town of the libertarian anti-regulation think tank that financed the declaration. Oddly enough, they never provided details of how the “at risk” would be successfully isolated from the rest of the country so commerce could resume quickly – probably because the US population at risk was anywhere from 25% to >50% or more, based on which known risk factors you wanted to include.
That declaration was also released, and promoted heavily, right before the deadliest waves of the pandemic, before vaccines were available.
Bhattacharya was also for a while a Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford – another font of anti-regulation opinion. As the Bulwark notes, he has done some decent work, but larding up our federal healthcare institutions with anti-regulatory mindsets is really dangerous.
Keep receiving thoughts on Darwinian selection.
Sadly, with contagious diseases people with mild cases can give fatal or disabling cases to other people.
Yep. Lot of sad things really.
That was the thing that perplexed me at the time. Yes, the elderly were dying at far higher rates from COVID, and the young almost had a free pass with it. But how can you completely separate the old from the young, even in a nursing home? Just have elderly nurses? It’s the sort of thing that sounds reasonable in theory and completely impossible in reality.
During the Spanish Flu, it was the young who were dying at higher rates, and people were just as resistant against masks and other rules then as they were during COVID – which rather suggests a certain number of people in a population are just selfish and want to rationalize why they don’t want their own freedoms curtailed for the sake of another part of the population.