Straight to the point

Is This What Winning Looks Like?
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute

If this is winning, it is less fun than I had hoped. 

The confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya as secretary of the National Institutes of Health just ended. They were short, just two hours from soup to nuts. Nothing played out like I had expected. And yet, now that I think about it, it played out exactly as I should have expected. 

Jay’s erudition, humility, and sincerity carried the day. His vast knowledge of medicine, science, and economics is worn casually, but it is unmistakable. It’s inconceivable that political actors could possibly match it. That is known and obvious.

My main interest in watching was in hope of something approaching a real debate over Covid policy, 2020-2023 (and, in some ways, continuing in new iterations). After all, that is why he was in this seat. The previous administration specifically targeted him, calling him a “fringe epidemiologist” and sought to censor his opinions. 

As time went on and the historical trajectory flipped, this quiet academic who stood up for principle when it mattered has found himself picked to head the world’s most powerful scientific agency. 

One might suppose – if society and politics work as one might intuitively think they should – that there would now be a big discussion and debate on lockdowns, with both sides allowed to speak. Maybe this would be the reckoning we’ve all long awaited. 

Instead, there was no discussion and no debate at all. The Democratic side of the aisle did not bring it up once. Three Republicans did and briefly. Jay reiterated what he has said for years and what was stated in the Great Barrington Declaration. 

His position is clear. The role of science is to advise people based on evidence. It is not to use force to interfere with people’s freedoms. Public health agencies should never have pushed school, business, and church closures, nor forced human separation and masks, and so on. He said this clearly, inclusive of vaccine mandates. 

“Science should be an engine for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this or else.”

“It shouldn’t be pushing Covid vaccines.”

“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policy makers have about what the right policy should be.”

“The role of scientists shouldn’t be to say you can’t send your kids to school for two years.”

“If science is a force for freedom and knowledge, it will have universal support.”

There was zero pushback from the other side. They might as well have had their fingers in their ears. There was a change of subject, almost a desperate one. No one took issue with a word he said on this subject. Instead, the only subject from the Democratic side was pressing to make sure that the money keeps flowing out of the NIH to the research centers in their states. 

Are we supposed to believe that the new orthodoxy is that the Covid response was a disaster? No one said that but Jay, Rand Paul, and two other Republicans. From the other side, there was not even a breath of contradiction. 

At the same time, there were no apologies, no admissions of stupidity, no granting that mistakes were made. Instead, we got silence on the whole topic that even the New York Times now admits is the single most important topic of our times. 

After all, the Covid response did in fact set the world on fire. It is a main cause of the utter collapse in the prestige of experts in many sectors, if not all sectors. It’s a central reason why people don’t trust their doctors, why the media is in such disrepute, why the politicians are met with such incredulity. It’s the major contributing factor for ill-health, illiteracy, depression, substance abuse, economic dislocation, job insecurity, and cultural despair. 

And yet, we seem to be at a stalemate. The proponents of the response – or those who simply chose to look the other way – don’t want the subject to come up ever again. It is an affected amnesia. The people who were demonized all along and now turn out to be right want to debate but cannot find any sparring partners. 

We won the match but the bell never rang. The purpose of the bell is to prevent an ambush from behind, which is precisely why this studied silence is so alarming. 

What happens when a new virus comes along, real, manufactured, or imagined? We have no real statements saying that there will not be a repeat. The existing policy is still what it was: lockdown until vaccination. To be sure, with Jay and RFK and others now in the driver’s seat, this is less likely to go down the same way. 

And yet if you look at the handling of the Bird flu, you see the same strategies being deployed in ways that have affected prices and the food supply. Authorities want every bird slaughtered if one tests positive. They feed tax dollars to pharmaceutical companies to develop and distribute livestock vaccines. There has been no change in the policy concerning PCR testing and what that implies for the animals. 

Meanwhile, just before inauguration, the HHS, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of the Interior cooperated in pushing out the first-ever One Health policy for the US, working directly with the WHO, which the US has supposedly left. 

In other words, there is no real change in the policy or the orthodoxy. One reason for that is precisely because of the absence of real public discussion and debate. If such a debate did occur, and if our leaders would at least be open and honest about this calamity (even if they still defend it), we might finally make progress toward putting the world back together again. 

As it stands, there are too many unanswered questions, too much pent-up anger, too much uncertainty about precisely how governments plan to manage pandemics, whether they affect humans or livestock. It simply will not do to pretend that none of this happened and hope it goes away once people are tired of the subject, forget, and push back the trauma into the recesses of the public mind. 

This is all too dishonest for a civilized people. Jay wanted that debate. His interrogators did not. 

Again, this is not the way winning should feel. 

Brownstone Institute’s 10-part history could not have come at a better time. We need more than the right people in high-profile positions. We need a completely new paradigm, which cannot really take hold until that reckoning finally does occur. That begins with frankness and an end to the silence. 

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Below is an AI-generated reconstruction of Jay’s opening statement.

Reconstructed Opening Statement by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, March 5, 2025

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Hearing

Chairman Cassidy, Ranking Member Sanders, and distinguished members of this committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today as President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health. It is an honor to be considered for this role at an institution that has long been the crown jewel of American biomedical science—a place with a storied history of supporting breakthroughs that have saved countless lives and deepened our understanding of human health.

But today, that legacy is at a crossroads. American health is in decline. During the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy in the United States plunged, and it has yet to recover. Hundreds of millions of our fellow citizens—adults and children alike—are grappling with a crisis of chronic diseases: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. These conditions are robbing us of our vitality and our future. At the same time, public trust in science and medicine has eroded, shaken by a series of missteps and a growing perception that our institutions prioritize conformity over truth.

The NIH, as the world’s preeminent health research agency, must rise to meet these challenges. But it cannot do so effectively under the shadow of its recent past. Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of coverup, obfuscation, and intolerance for ideas that diverged from their own. We’ve seen this in the dismissal of legitimate scientific debate during the pandemic, and we’ve seen it in scandals like the fraudulent Alzheimer’s research that undermined confidence in NIH-funded science. This must change.

If confirmed, I pledge to restore the NIH to its foundational mission: funding the most innovative, cutting-edge research to deliver transformative advances in human health—not just incremental steps, but bold leaps forward. My plan is to ensure that NIH invests in science that is replicable, reproducible, and generalizable—science we can trust. Too much of modern biomedical research fails this basic test, and we owe the American people better.

Central to this vision is a commitment to free speech and scientific dissent. Dissent is not a threat to science—it is the very essence of science. For too long, the NIH has stifled disagreement, sidelining early-career scientists and others who dared to question the orthodoxy. I will establish a culture of respect where all ideas can be expressed and debated openly, because that is how we uncover truth. This is not just a principle; it is a necessity if we are to rebuild the public’s faith in our work.

I also share Secretary Kennedy’s urgency in confronting the chronic disease crisis. American health is going backwards, and the NIH must lead the way forward by investigating the root causes of these conditions and developing solutions that prevent and reverse them. This will require rigorous oversight of research that could pose risks—such as studies with pandemic potential—while ensuring the vast majority of NIH work continues to advance the public good.

The NIH’s nearly $48 billion budget is a sacred trust, supporting over 300,000 researchers worldwide. If confirmed, I will steward those resources with care, prioritizing innovation over bureaucracy and ensuring that every dollar serves the mission of making Americans healthier. Together with this administration, we can return the NIH to its gold standard—delivering discoveries that improve lives, save lives, and, yes, make America healthy again.

Is This What Winning Looks Like?
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/