“We would have…”
In my opinion, this is one of the most revealing statements of the pandemic. Safe from his Stanford office, typing away at his keyboard, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya claimed he “would have” handled COVID perfectly had it not been for dastardly villains at Twitter and the NIH. If only his plan for herd immunity via natural immunity had been adopted, then schools would have been open, the vulnerable would have been protected, and everything would have been just fine.
Incredibly, from Princeton professors to libertarian podcasters, an extraordinary number of seemingly intelligent people believed him. They honestly thought that just because Dr. Bhattacharya claimed he “would have” done amazing things when COVID raged, that meant he actually had the skills and competence to do them. They were genuinely impressed that Dr. Bhattacharya and his ilk “argued for” a wonderful alternative to the horrible pandemic. They praised him thusly:
The authors of the Declaration argued that for the low-risk majority, normal life should otherwise resume. Schools and restaurants should reopen, and teaching should be in person (with special provision made for older or immunocompromised teachers and students).
Wouldn’t it have been nice if we just ignored the virus and everything turned out OK.
Dr. Bhattacharya was selling them an irresistible fantasy where he was a superhero, COVID Man, More Powerful Than a Deadly Virus, and all the things we loathed about the pandemic, the deaths and mitigations alike, were actually caused by stupid people making stupid decisions, not a novel, deadly virus repeatedly washing over us and changing in unpredictable ways. In his telling, both the origins and consequences of COVID were entirely the fault of the people whose job it was to limit it.
In this way, Dr. Bhattacharya portrayed the pandemic as essentially optional, the product of obviously bad choices, and the credulous opinion class was desperate to believe it the whole thing could have been avoided. None of these people saw what COVID could do and that mattered. They were entirely uninterested in hearing from anyone who worked in a hospital during a COVID surge. A dose of reality would ruin their fantasy.
Health Experts ‘Stunned’ by Trump Officials’ Strict Quarantine Measures.
Well, fate has given us a cruel, but fascinating natural experiment. The COVID fantasy world has collided with the MAHA real-world. The heroic doctors who “would have” done amazing things have been given an opportunity to prove their mettle. Their fictional accomplishments bought them real-world responsibility, and unsurprisingly things are a mess. Many of them have flamed out, leaving chaos in their wake. Tweeting and doing are two different skill sets, it turns out.
Tweeting about RCTs isn’t that impressive
Dr. Bhattacharya remains in power, for now, and he is a changed man. In previous articles, I have documented how he has contradicted his core pandemic stances now that he has actual responsibilities.
Some of these changes have been for the worse. Though Dr. Bhattacharya at least feigned concern for the “open exchange of ideas” when it came to his YouTube videos, today he is an eager, key member of MAGA’s vast censorship regime.
However, in Friday’s article I discussed how Dr. Bhattacharya has also completely changed his approach to dangerous viruses. Under his leadership, the headlines read Health Experts ‘Stunned’ by Trump Officials’ Strict Quarantine Measures. All of a sudden, he is taking viruses very seriously and is desperate to stop them. He is deploying the same “draconian lockdowns” and “extraordinary measures” he decried daily for years, and he is holding steadfast despite significant criticism and pushback.
As a reminder, here’s what locked down Americans are saying right now about their experience:
The regulations require these orders to be issued within 72 hours of a person’s being ‘apprehended.’ But the CDC/HHS folks evaded that requirement by continuously obfuscating whether we were here voluntarily since our arrival last Monday, even in response to repeated, pointed questions. So, I think we have plenty of reasons to believe they are acting in bad faith.
And:
At this point, I don’t actually trust them to use information responsibly. I’m no longer willing to offer them additional information because of a violation of trust. I’ve in fact asked that the information that I previously provided them in good faith be removed if I can legally do that. Now it’s a violation of trust.
I have no insight into what that led to Dr. Bhattacharya’s dramatic change of heart. The most plausible explanation is that the White House recognized that after their failure to contain measles, other viruses killing Americans would not generate good headlines as the midterms approached. As one person put it on social media:
This is not actually the tiniest bit surprising, because while it’s fun and games to shit all over public health when there’s no imminent threat, there is nothing that would be worse for Trump, his people, or his legacy than a second pandemic.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s superiors likely demanded that he put up a strong defenses against deadly viruses, thus forcing him to choose between losing his job or undermining his entire justification for having it in the first place.
Dr. Bhattacharya chose to keep his job. He saw what happened to his friends at the FDA when they failed Trump, and he was willing to sacrifice his COVID identity rather than suffer their ignominious fate. As Jeff Kunzler, the author of the Pandemic Accountability Index, pointed out, his Twitter avatar even says “no more lockdowns.” Everyone knows that by harshly locking down Americans today, Dr. Bhattacharya is betraying everything he stood for regarding COVID and has become the “biomedical security state” he warned about. No matter how much be blathers on about “medical freedom,” his actions speak for themselves. As Dr. Julia Raifman recognized:
Maybe it was never about anti-lockdown and always about scapegoats for dividing & diminishing core institutions that support social goods, from public health, to equity, to education.
Another possibility is that Dr. Bhattacharya ordered these lockdowns himself. Perhaps it’s finally dawned on him that he is the medical establishment, and it’s his job to protect Americans from dangerous viruses. Dr. Bhattacharya is many things, but he is not stupid. He knows that podcasts and Tweets won’t stop a virus, and he is aware of something important- if another pandemic emerged, we are much less prepared to handle it than we were in 2020, precisely because of his disinformation and that of his MAHA brethren. Their efforts to spread doubt and sabotage our pandemic response succeeded, and Dr. Bhattacharya is now forced to deal with the consequences of his own actions.
Competent pandemic response teams cannot be conjured out of thin air, and his current attempts to valorize the CDC workers he previously trashed are futile. His mistrust genie has escaped and can’t be put it back in the bottle. If COVID 2.0 arrived, we’d be doomed, and I suspect Dr. Bhattacharya has enough insight into his own leadership abilities to know this. He doesn’t want Ebola and hantavirus spreading under his watch. He wants to get ahead of the game.
Based on his stringent responses to these viruses, there’s every reason to believe that if Dr. Bhattacharya actually had responsibility in 2020, he “would have” used the exact same “extraordinary measures” he is actually using today. Had he been in charge 6 years ago, he would not have been able to keep schools open or protect the vulnerable. But such silly speculations and guessing games about a hypothetical 2020 where Dr. Bhattacharya ran the show misses the point entirely. The real version of Dr. Bhattacharya is using travel bans, mandatory airport testing, and forced quarantines. That’s all that matters. The COVID superhero version of Dr. Bhattacharya existed entirely on social media and YouTube.
As such, literally everything he “proposed” and “argued for” regarding COVID can be thrown in the trash. His entire COVID output was just empty words and baseless boasts. All of it. The same is true for the sheltered pundits who promoted his fantasy of an optional pandemic. All of their well-reviewed books and “heterodox” podcasts portraying Dr. Bhattacharya as COVID Man can be similarly tossed away based on his real-world performance the past year.
But while Dr. Bhattacharya’s past cannot be erased and the enormous damage he did cannot be reversed, I am surprised but pleased that he is taking deadly viruses seriously, especially considering he’s torched his COVID reputation in the process. Unlike some other doctors, his ending in the absurdist MAHA soap opera has yet to be written. My goal here is not to say “you’ve to hand it to” Dr. Bhattacharya or to defend his specific actions, but to recognize that reality forced him to concede an important principle- under extraordinary circumstances, the government can use extraordinary measures to protect Americans from grave threats.
It seems having real-world responsibility for the first time has taught him a valuable lesson- it’s better to try to stop dangerous viruses rather than play catch-up after a lot of people have already died. That’s all his critics have ever said, and it’s nice to see he’s catching up to us, finally. This all may be a momentary blip, but as long as Dr. Bhattacharya is truly committed to keeping Americans safe from dangerous viruses, no one should undermine him the way he undermined his predecessors. Our message should be, welcome aboard and good luck. We are rooting for your success.