Jay Bhattacharya and the Resistance to Debating Whether There Was a Pandemic in 2020
This post is going to cost me.
I will (once again) lose friends, followers, and associates because of what I’m going to say about Jay Bhattacharya - a person whose advocacy in 2020 I respect and appreciate. It happens every time I challenge his views in public or private - or express an opinion about the need for others who disagree with him to openly challenge his views - and I don’t expect this time will be any different.1
I believe Jay Bhattacharya’s position on the COVID pandemic is incorrect & misguided, and that substantive and necessary scientific debate among those who dissent from the government’s COVID narrative is being avoided because people are afraid or loathe to publicly challenge him and other high-profile individuals who are anti-mandate/anti-lockdown allies but pro-pandemic.
Criticisms of issuing “purity tests” or “in-fighting” - and fears over losing cross-promotions and other opportunities & relationships - have stymied robust public dialogue over key issues and questions underlying the COVID-19 event and pandemics in general.
Recent tweets are illustrative.
Today Dr. Bhattacharya said, “In the next pandemic caused by a pathogen with the epidemiological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, governments everywhere will impose a lockdown policy until mandatory vaccination. Until repudiated by the public, it is the new normal.”2
Consistent with the view he has espoused for four years, Jay Bhattacharya is asserting
a) there was pandemic in 2020,
b) a pathogen called SARS-CoV-2 caused that pandemic,
c) there will be another pandemic,
d) this future pandemic will be/can be caused by a pathogen with characteristics similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Martin Neil’s reply and Jonathan Engler’s response are consistent with my view that a pandemic did not occur.
Since I’m blocked by Dr. Bhattacharya, I responded by posting a screenshot with my reaction: “There was no pandemic. Pandemics are biologically & epidemiologically impossible. Until the last ‘pandemic’ is exposed as the fraudulent & staged event that it was, the More-Powerful will wield ‘Next Pandemic’ against the Less-Powerful.”
Bhattacharya engaged Jonathan Engler’s reply by acknowledging “considerable iatrogenic harm” but said he considers it “naive to think that it is possible to avoid future lockdowns by ‘dismantling the narrative as a whole,’ whatever that means.”
(“Dismantling the narrative as a whole” means challenging the government’s claims that a pandemic occurred, SARS-CoV-2 was a sudden spreading risk-additive pathogen, etc. Summary here.)
Bhattacharya went on to characterize the view that the entire pandemic story must be challenged as a “purity requirement” that ensures “nothing of value will be accomplished” and said the core need for coalition is around “lockdowns” as a public health response.3
I replied under my new X account by pointing out that it was perhaps a kind of “purity requirement” to insist that people must coalesce on lockdowns because questioning whether a pandemic occurred and whether pandemics are even possible is a waste of time. Bhattacharya quickly blocked me.4
I hope others are more successful than I was in encouraging Bhattacharya - one of the Great Barrington Declaration authors - to at least acknowledge that the question of whether a pandemic occurred in 2020 is an important one, even if he would prefer not to engage it, and does not constitute a “purity requirement.”5
More importantly, I hope that those who champion free speech and say they value different viewpoints can stop trying to stifle debate among people who agree that mandates, etc. are wrong but disagree about other critical issues related to the COVID event.
If you don’t want to discuss a particular issue, then don’t. But if you say things like “next pandemic,” then understand you are drawing your sword and will be met by fellow dissidents who are ready to duel — which is a GOOD thing for science (and public policy!), not a bad one.
FOLLOW-UP
Jay Bhattacharya is also a member of The Norfolk Group. I react to their paper, which presumes a pandemic occurred:
has asked for his name to be removed from the Great Barrington Declaration.
Added post-publication: Link to an exchange between me and Jay Bhattacharya in April 2023 over which I was scolded by then-associates.
By “it,” I assume he means “a policy of lockdown.”
Lockdown has no legal meaning in federal or state communicable disease codes. It’s a term used for prisons and other hyper-localized settings for highly temporal situations (e.g., active shooter). Public health and other officials broke and circumvented existing laws regarding quarantine and isolation.
I support people’s right to block whomever they choose for whatever reason they choose.
To me, a purity requirement (aka purity test) would be more like, “I am not dialoguing with anyone who got the COVID shot” or “I refuse to ally myself with that person because she is voting for Donald Trump.” I don’t think Bhattacharya is issuing a purity test per se regarding his view that COVID dissidents must coalesce around lockdowns but is using what he considers to be the most important issue as a way of deflecting those who challenge his belief that a pandemic occurred.
Almost 5 years is far too long to clearly tell the truth about the obvious and be considered a sincere and credible ally in it's pursuit. I won't invent excuses for any involved in this awful performance, it wasn't even that complicated to see.
It seems to me that Bhattacharya wants to salvage public health by giving them credit for handling a "pandemic" but wants to keep them from using bad tools like lockdowns the "next time around". To call public health out for committing a vast medical fraud is too far for JB to go.
What he doesn't seem to realize is that public health has become another politicized mess. which deserves to disappear. I haven't respected them for years and I think, after Covid, a large majority of the public doesn't respect them either.
I'm not sure that pushing JB or others to understand your point of view is going to ever get through because he's committed his whole life to improving medicine and public health policy and the cognitive dissonance is too hard for him to deal with so he blocks it out by blocking you.