I am delighted to see Jay Bhattacharya installed as the next NIH Director. He is a principled man and a devout Christian. He proved to be right in his assessment of lockdowns and the risk of the virus in our healthy populations. Well done sir and we look forward to your leadership.
What can we learn from those who tried to silence him and paint him as ignorant and obstructive?
Whether he was right or not depends on your perspective as to what weight to value saved lives vs. disrupted lives. Not a clear distinction. It remains to be seen if he is a fair and effective administrator and follows the science or is beholden to his earthly lords. While he has an MD degree, it is noteworthy that his Ph.D is in economics, not science, which seems appropriate in an administration that tends to see everything as economic in nature. To his credit, he was not anti-vax, although he did spread some disinformation (i.e. falsehoods) about the testing of some of the vaccines.
In answer to your question, I think few would call him ignorant, as his actions were informed and willful, though obstructive is a term that those of both sides could probably agree upon, and only disagree as to whether positive or negative.
Since this is a super-political post, but one that is certainly relevant to the Faith-Science conversation, will let it stand awhile to allow comment, but will move to a private message in pretty short order as it is technically in violation of our policy to avoid politically posts on the open forum, assuming my fellow moderators agree.
Agreed, and the sooner the better.
Bhattachary suggested that the infection fatality rate for SARS-CoV-2 was 0.01% (and used that estimate as the basis for his policy recommendations). The actual IFR was roughly 50 times higher than that.
He suggested that the epidemic would ultimately lead to 20,000 – 40,000 deaths in the US. The number of US deaths to date is ~1.2 million. That number would have been substantially higher had his recommendations been followed, since they would have led to much higher infection rates prior to the availability of vaccines.
The basis of his recommendations was the idea that we could achieve herd immunity against covid by letting those not at high risk get infected. We now know that this was impossible, since herd immunity is not possible against this virus. More importantly, the idea didn’t make sense at the time: given the substantial fraction of our population that was at high risk and the high transmissibility of the virus, herd immunity was simply not possible on those terms.
I’m not seeing a lot of vindication for his positions in subsequent events.
I recently heard he was blacklisted here
I’m replying to keep watch on this thread once it is privatized.
Unless he was here under a pseudonym, he was never suspended or banned as I just checked the do not fly list. and I don’t remember him ever being here. and you have to be pretty offensive to get banned, so think I would remember, so someone is blowing smoke. There may have been discussions about his work that were closed due to the chaos of Covid, as there were a few of those .
Swamidass wrote on X he was blacklisted here. He must have meant that in another sense then.
And sadly, having Bhattacharya and Kennedy at the helm of our bulwark against infectious disease, with novel infections like avian flu and who knows what else could be coming, is frightening.
I would have thought it would be fine to have these discussions if they are focused on honest communication of accurate factual information. Problems arise when people start shouting at each other over subjective value judgments.
That’s right, and as long as it is staying civil, will keep public.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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