Jay Bhattacharya is a nightmare
My area forces me to interact with NIH/CDC and I am sickened by the way Dr. Bhattacharya behaves. I realize this is not an era of high standards for agency leadership, but I am horrified that Stanford ever allowed this person to float upwards and then his notoriety with the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration somehow gained him the traction for such an important position.
This man has zero experience practicing medicine; he is not licensed. He has never worked as an epidemiologist, never worked as a laboratory investigator, never served in any area of federal service, state service, or public health. He has a PhD in health economics. You know, the process of deciding a human life is worth $50,000 a year and then letting pharmaceutical companies price drugs to the point the "market can bear" it and ensuring government has zero ability to protect veterans, the elderly, or the disabled have protection from it.
In the extraordinary misfortunate situation where I had to listen to this man speak, he as the audacity to speak to career scientists, career public health workers like he is a "bro" on a radio talk show. He quotes films, he quips about things "moving at the speed of bureaucracy" and opines he cannot 'magically sign things into law.' He seems to despise debate, resent any form of feedback, and has issues with data that I would never have expected from someone at Stanford. Is that place a community college now?
What I find particularly reprehensible is this man signed onto the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration and openly, repeatedly attacked public health and health research. He took opportunities during a global crisis to attack and belittle CDC publications and NIH research. He never seemed to understand that... as federal employees there are strict publication and clearance requirements that limit public statements. If he did understand this, he used the very caution that public health depends on to instead attack and diminish career scientists and public health workers. Now that he is in a leadership position he seems to be discovering, to his own surprise, that you can't just author anything with the stroke a pen and a smug look.
I am disgusted that someone like this built an unearned career in public health by attacking an infrastructure he admits he never understood. I am disgusted he has the audacity to say out loud that HHS needs to win back the confidence of the American people. He apparently uses this phrase a lot.
Listen, bro, it wasn't the veterans with 25 years of experience in outbreaks deployments for malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola, and bird flu that were letting the world down. It wasn't the NIH researchers who were pushing out peer reviewed and clearance approved science as fast as they could type that let America down. It wasn't the CDC MMWR staff who you just laid off and eviscerated who were the problem. They were limited in what they could do or say by the bureaucracy you now use a defense for doing nothing yourself.
The people who worked through that pandemic and tried to keep everything working were heroes and were doing it under vicious circumstances of exhaustion. What you did in return was attack them and encourage the public to belittle them. They showed up and then they got attacked by this economist. None of the scientists, epidemiologists, doctors, or nurses I know ever lost the faith of the American public. The faith in institutions was manufactured by the media and destroyed by little scheming men who exploited one of the nation's hardest moments for their own profit.
I am so, so sorry to every single person in HHS who has to meet this man and to all the incredible researchers, editor, and scientists who are suppressed under his lack of expertise. I felt sick in that meeting.