“I’m not talking about 2020. I’m talking about 2026.”
In September 2021, as the devastating Delta wave was receding and the devastating Omicron wave was lurking, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hit his singular note- everyone should stop worrying and talking about COVID. “The emergency phase of the disease is over,” he said. “We should be treating COVID as one of 200 diseases that affect people.”
The world would be a much better place if Dr. Bhattacharya had followed his own instructions. However, rather than model the behavior he demanded from others, he continued to treat COVID as the only disease that affects people, talking about it constantly for years on end. Even today in August 2026, Dr. Bhattacharya is desperate to return to his safe space and relitigate irrelevant battles from six years ago.
As a reminder, COVID overwhelmed hospitals and morgues in 2020, and Donald Trump was president when America locked down. For his part, Dr. Bhattacharya speculated that COVID had “one-tenth of the flu mortality rate” and that it would kill 20,000-40,000 Americans that year. He also claimed that immunity to COVID was long-lasting, that Sweden and New York had herd immunity, and that the mass infection of unvaccinated people under age 60-70 would end the pandemic in 3-6 months.
Obviously, Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t want his reminiscence of 2020 to include any of that. An accurate remembrance of COVID’s victims, the politicians who ordered lockdowns, and what people like Dr. Bhattacharya actually said is strictly verboten in the MAHA/MAGA revisionist history fantasyland.
Although he won’t defend his own words, Dr. Bhattacharya’s core mission in 2026 is to let everyone know he was right about 2020 all along. And so like Groundhog’s Day, he is once again on Fox News, spreading misinformation about Fauci, lockdowns, and vaccines over and over again, as if he had no other concerns or job to do.
There are multiple examples of him discussing 2020 this week alone. In the video below, Dr. Bhattacharya’s interviewer, Margaret Brennan, knew it was 2026 and begged him to focus on that. That’s like trying to get my dog to ignore tasty treats, and predictably Dr. Bhattacharya only wanted to talk about the start of the pandemic.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Should parents trust that they can go vaccinate their kids when their doctor tells them to do so for them to go back to school?
JAY BHATTACHARYA: Yeah, I think– I think that the– that parents, for most kids, especially for the measles vaccines, the DTP, all the standard childhood vaccines, it’s very important that parents vaccinate their kids. As far as can- they feel confident sending them back to school? You know, I just– just to push back some. It was a tremendous mistake to cause parents to fear that– about sending their kids to school during the Covid pandemic. The kids were better off in school. We shouldn’t be scaring the public–
BRENNAN: I’m talking about what people do now. It’s August. About to be September. Kids are going back to school. I’m not talking about 2020. I’m talking about 2026.
BHATTACHARYA: Yes, but, Margaret, you’re talking about the– you’re talking about– we’re talking about the why people have–
BRENNAN: Clarity from the federal government and the top health official…
BHATTACHARYA: Yes, OK, just so we’re clear. If you want clarity, let me give you some clarity.
BRENNAN: Please.
BHATTACHARYA: The reason why you have this problem in public trust is because what happened in 2020 has not yet been addressed. To be–….
BRENNAN: Yes. We want to send our kids to school.
BHATTACHARYA: I’m not– but now addressing what happened in 2020 is part of that.
BRENNAN: OK.
BHATTACHARYA: If you want to say why there’s this loss of public trust, you have to really wrap your arms around that.
“The movement is responding to their current stress with fantasies about bringing back the glory days. “
Dr. Bhattacharya is hardly the only MAHA/MAGA luminary stuck in a time warp. Dr. Vinay Prasad, who wrote an article titled Should We Just Stop Talking about COVID19? 2.5 years ago, still talks about COVID constantly. He’s back to making silly anti-Fauci YouTube videos, as if his own disgraceful tenure at the FDA was some fever dream. So are Jeffrey Tucker, the pro-tobacco, child labor advocate behind the Great Barrington Declaration and Dr. Scott Atlas, another advocate of herd immunity via mass infection who treated zero COVID patients.
The old gang is back together, and the groupthink of the MAHA/MAGA hivemind is on full display. They all want to keep spreading misinformation about Fauci, lockdowns, and vaccines over and over again. That’s their happy place, and they all say the exact same things. According to the What’s Resonating newsletter:
Right-leaning accounts posted 2,300 times about Fauci yesterday—for comparison, that’s more post volume than the Super Bowl (1,900 posts for right-leaning accounts, same for left-leaning accounts). The coordination is notable—Fauci was mentioned in an astonishing 20% of all right-leaning posts yesterday, with three entities mentioning him more than 75 times in a day.
In her article MAGA Has Pandemic Nostalgia Amanda Marcott explains why the disinformation superspreaders who spent years telling everyone else to “move on” from COVID are constitutionally unable to do so themselves. “It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation,” she wrote. She continued:
Fascist movements have historically thrived in times of great social stress that leave people vulnerable to misinformation and eager for scapegoats to blame, and the pandemic era was no different. With people isolated and bored at home during the lockdown, many were more willing to engage in conspiracy theory content that runs rampant online. The pandemic was the peak of QAnon, sucking in millions with elaborate fantasies that Trump was a savior out to defeat a worldwide Satanic child cannibalism cabal. Many people, some of whom had even identified as liberal in the past, were radicalized to the right. Fauci became a favorite scapegoat for people who wanted to believe there was an evil mastermind behind the virus, instead of viral replication and transmission. It’s easy to forget it now, but Jan. 6 was fueled by Covid-19 and the sense of disconnection that drove a lot of once-ordinary people to lose their intellect and rationale.
Five years later, MAGA isn’t doing so hot. Between the Iran war and a faltering economy, Trump’s presidency is failing, and his approval ratings are in the toilet. In this environment, it has become increasingly hard for conservatives to play the victim when Trump has unleashed a secret police in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is rounding up people and sending them to detainment camps. People aren’t as isolated; they are reconnecting with the real world. MAGA media is fracturing, and their audiences are a small fraction of what they had during the pandemic. Republican in-fighting has grown to the point where podcaster Tucker Carlson, once a loyal Trump ally, is fueling speculation that he’s going to start a third-party.
Right-wing politics has always been about escaping from contemporary problems by hiding in nostalgia. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a painfully literal version of that mentality. So it’s no surprise that the movement is responding to their current stress with fantasies about bringing back the glory days. By reviving the harassment campaign against Fauci, the GOP has inadvertently revealed the time they long to return to, an era that is remembered by most people as miserable and deadly.
That sounds right to me.
Beyond this, there are many reasons why individuals like Dr. Bhattacharya are nostalgic for their glory days of 2020. He rose to fame that year selling a seductive fantasy where he was in charge and we barely noticed the virus. He marketed himself as a superhero who “would have” perfectly tamed COVID, and powerful people believed him. Billionaires, MAGA politicians, and academics lauded his imaginary accomplishments and he didn’t have to do anything beyond Tweeting and podcasting. He certainly never saw anyone die of COVID.
Things are very different today. Dr. Bhattacharya has a real job with real responsibilities for the first time. He’s learned that it’s a lot easier to cast stones from the outside than to deliver concrete results, and his superhero narrative was punctured long ago. The people who once celebrated him are as quiet as church mice about his performance in office. As MAHA crumbles, the glowing praise has been replaced with scathing criticisms.
Today, he is required to nod along with Trump, Kennedy, and Stephen Miller as they spew lies about vaccines, turning Wakefield’s fraud into policy. That’s his job now. It’s no wonder he didn’t want to talk about this with Ms. Brennan. 2026 is not going well for him.
It’s also no wonder he wants to turn back the clock. However, 2020 is more than just a security blanket for Dr. Bhattacharya, it’s an indispensable tool for him. It is a distraction and a shield, his reflexive excuse for his current failures.
According to Dr. Bhattacharya, it’s not his fault measles and explosive diarrhea are spreading under his watch. Fauci is to blame for that. The anti-vaxx disinformation of his bosses, Trump and Kennedy, isn’t responsible for falling vaccination rates. That’s Biden’s fault. Though Dr. Bhattacharya and his ilk spent years spreading disinformation and doubt, he now claims ancient COVID policies are responsible for the lack of trust today.
He’s hardly alone in blaming his predecessors for his current failures. Last year, while in office, Kennedy lied and said the MMR causes encephalitis, blindness, and kills children. Today, he wants us to believe that babies aren’t getting vaccinated because of what Fauci wrote in his diary in 2020. MAHA uses 2020 as their get out of jail free card for their incompetence in 2026. Their mantra in power is “everything’s fine and don’t blame me anyway”.
“Only 50% of Americans say they trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to improve public health right now, down from 77% last year.”
COVID created MAHA/MAGA doctors, and they’ll forever be trapped in pandemic grievance. 2020 will never be over for them, and they’ll never stop using it as an excuse for their incompetence and malevolence.
The silver lining is that Dr. Bhattacharya’s old tricks aren’t working anymore. Droning on about 2020 just doesn’t generate the same rage as it did previously. Normal people moved on long ago, and we can all see through his charade today. Everyone knows that he and Kennedy are the medical establishment, and although neither of them will tell you this, they are responsible for everything that’s happening now. No one can make the affirmative case they are succeeding, and the American people have rightfully lost confidence in them. Cringe AI cutouts won’t fix that.
Not long ago, when he was out of power and all he had to do was spitball opinions on social media, Dr. Bhattacharya had big feelings about what failed leaders should do in his situation.
It’s hard to argue with that.