The HHS Hall of Heroes appropriately features three legends when it comes to limiting infectious diseases: John Snow, Ignaz Semmelweis, and Joseph Lister. The most recent addition to this list of giants is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, our current NIH director and former CDC leader. However, not only have measles and cyclosporiasis spread during his brief tenure, but we also must remember what he said when COVID raged to judge whether or not he deserves membership in this esteemed group.
To do that, let’s flash back to October 2020, a pivotal point in the pandemic. Vaccines arrived just two months later, but so did the pandemic’s worst wave, when 3,000 Americans would die of COVID daily. We knew by then that infections in younger people invariably spilled into older people, and those of us who worked on COVID units knew the virus was not always benign for them either. Indeed, COVID became a leading killer of young adults in 2021. Everyone had every incentive to avoid the virus at that time, both for ourselves and our neighbors.
However, Dr. Bhattacharya felt differently at that time. While other doctors were working on COVID wards, he was dressed in a suit, ensconced in a bucolic retreat in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with a film crew recording his pronouncements. When it came to people under age 70, Dr. Bhattacharya was on the side of the virus, and he didn’t hide it all. Staring into the camera, he announced that he wanted to:
Let people face the risk of the disease who actually don’t face a very large risk of mortality if they were to be infected.
John Snow discovered a water pump was the source of a cholera outbreak. Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated that hand washing could reduce infections and save lives in obstetrical clinics, while Joseph Lister proved that sterilizing surgical instruments did the same. For his part, Dr. Bhattacharya spread fake statistics to purposefully infect countless millions of people with a novel, mutating, dangerous virus at the worst possible moment of the pandemic.
As one social media commentator said, one of these is not like the others. It’s pretty obvious who stands out, and since our current HHS leaders won’t remind you of why, it’s up to us to remember.