The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
In a previous article, I discussed scientists who believe that allegedly leaking SARS-CoV-2 from a lab was one of the greatest crimes in human history, but that purposefully spreading it was merely a forgivable oopsie. Specifically, I discussed the partnership between Biosafety Now, an organization that purports to be dedicated to preventing a potential pandemic, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an anti-vaccine doctor who partnered with a pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate to deliberately spread SARS-CoV-2 during an actual pandemic. A “biosafety” organization partnering with Dr. Bhattacharya to guard against viruses is like a zebra teaming up with a lion to promote vegetarianism.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a member of the Board of Directors at Biosafety Now, identified two core problems with SARS-CoV-2:
- It likely came from a lab
- Not enough unvaccinated people contracted it
This makes no sense.
Dr. Bhattacharya cared about the origins of the virus, but not about its consequences, which he relentlessly minimized. In 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya claimed that immunity to COVID was durable and that the mass infection of unvaccinated, “not vulnerable” people would end the pandemic in 3-6 months. He wrote:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
Dr. Bhattacharya continued to encourage “natural infection” in this group even after vaccines were available and immune-evading variants arrived. Despite the tragic consequences of such anti-vaccine misinformation, some people are actively trying to make us forget all about it.
We should resist them.
Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff are not merely wrong. They are charlatans and quacks who are dispensing deadly advice, and who need to be held accountable for their role in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and founder of Biosafety Now, had strong feelings when Dr. Bhattacharya announced his plan to get rid of the virus by spreading the virus in 2020. Dr. Ebright said at the time:
Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff are not merely wrong. They are charlatans and quacks who are dispensing deadly advice, and who need to be held accountable for their role in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
I’ve never said anything that harsh.
In our brief conversation about why he jettisoned his values to legitimatize and amplify a quack he blamed for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, Dr. Ebright told me:
My views on the @gbdeclaration have not changed, but my views on Bhattacharya have changed. His advice was wrong. Dead wrong. But it now is 2024 (not 2020), and the discussion at hand is how to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic (not how to respond to the last one).
Once Dr. Bhattacharya passed Dr. Ebright’s one essential test- he said SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab– literally everything else about him became irrelevant, including the fact that he was “dead wrong”. Obviously, Dr. Bhattacharya’s conjecture regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mean that he now has meaningful insights into how to actually make virology research safer. After all, he’s a health economist who didn’t really do anything during the pandemic, aside from spreading misinformation to promote his failed “plan” of herd immunity through mass infection on YouTube and Fox News. Apparently, this skill set is so unique and valuable in the field of biosafety, that no one should care that Dr. Bhattacharya tried to spread a deadly virus during an actual pandemic.
Although actually promoting biosafety requires cooperation from multiple stakeholders, Dr. Bhattacharya won’t bring people together to work for this common goal. He was intentionally divisive, insulting people who needed bodyguards. In addition to repelling the very people needed to promote biosafety, Dr. Bhattacharya does not enhance the credibility of Biosafety Now, nor does his presence inspire confidence in the judgement and sincerity of its leadership. From the start of the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya was very confident about this new virus- it was no big deal and it was all going away. Yet, every prediction he made turned out wrong. To pick one example amongst many, he said in March 2021:
The virus is seasonal and late fall/winter is its season. It is very unlikely, given that this is the case, that the virus will spread very widely during the summer months.
Six months later, the headlines from Florida, where Dr. Bhattacharya advised the governor on COVID, read In Florida, a Summer of Death and Resistance as the Coronavirus Rampaged.
Dr. Ebright no longer cares about any of this and he doesn’t think anyone else should either. I still care, however, and given that Dr. Bhattacharya was always wrong about the consequences of COVID, why should anyone trust him to be an honest broker about the origins of COVID? Why should anyone trust a biosafety organization that is totally indifferent to his failed forecasts and the real-world harm they caused, during an actual pandemic?
But it now is 2024 (not 2020), and the discussion at hand is how to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic (not how to respond to the last one).
Dr. Bhattacharya refuses to revisit his poor predictions and ensconces himself in a safe space to avoid anyone bold enough to remind him. He wants his misinformation to be deleted from history, and the folks from Biosafety Now are happy to encourage amnesia on his behalf. That’s what Dr. Ebright was trying to do when he said:
It now is 2024 (not 2020), and the discussion at hand is how to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic (not how to respond to the last one).
It may not seem this way, but there’s a lot to unpack there, especially considering that Dr. Ebright’s demand is part of larger movement where We Want Them Infected (WWTI) doctors seek to memory-hole SARS-CoV-2 and its victims.
In Dr. Ebright’s telling, 2020 is ancient history and as relevant to today as 1520. Dr. Ebright implied that while it’s vital to care about the first COVID infection, we should be indifferent to the billions of infections after that. He feel it’s inappropriate to remember the “charlatans and quacks” who spread “deadly advice,” even though the cost was “hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths“, as Dr. Ebright put it in October 2020.
In dismissing COVID as yesterday’s news, Dr. Ebright is saying that headlines such as Florida Delta Wave Cases Plunge, Leaving Record Deaths in Its Wake, no longer matter. Why would he do this? Because if that headline still matters, then Dr. Bhattacharya’s COVID misinformation still matters, and Biosafety Now would be an organization that promotes dangerous “charlatans and quacks”. Of course, that headline still matters, Dr. Bhattacharya’s COVID misinformation still matters, and Biosafety Now is absolutely an organization that promotes dangerous “charlatans and quacks”.
Moreover, Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t abruptly stop spreading misinformation in 2020 as Dr. Ebright implied. Dr. Bhattacharya spread misinformation about COVID in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Pick a random article of his and he will say some version of “the pandemic is on its way out.” He started saying this in March 2020 and never stopped. Conversely, he never encouraged young people to take any precautions against COVID, not even an effective vaccine. Dr. Bhattacharya’s past COVID misinformation was not a deal-breaker for Dr. Ebright, and Dr. Bhattacharya’s current COVID misinformation isn’t a deal-breaker either. According to the folks at Biosafety Now, nothing Dr. Bhattacharya said or ever will say about an actual pandemic should matter at all.
Incredibly, Dr. Ebright makes these demands for the sake of protecting us against deadly viruses. Although COVID is still killing and injuring people every day, Dr. Ebright claims that to prevent the next pandemic, we are all required to forget the last pandemic. Dr. Ebright believes that anyone who still cares about COVID is impairing his work, somehow. Dr. Ebright claims the vital task of biosafety requires that Dr. Bhattacharya be shielded from criticism for his efforts to spread a virus during an actual pandemic.
Dr. Ebright is not alone in his demands for amnesia. WWTI doctors now claim every reaction to COVID was an overreaction and that mitigation measures were an avoidable choice. It’s only possible to believe such absurdities if one entirely deletes from memory what the virus could do when it was allowed to spread unchecked. There’s a reason why WWTI doctors never share headlines such as An Insane Situation’: Inside the Chaos at Bellevue Hospital or School Closures Reported in Five FL Counties; Districts ‘Drowning’ in COVID. Like Dr. Ebright, WWTI doctors want the virus and its consequences forgotten entirely. At times, this requires them to totally deny that the plan for herd immunity via natural immunity even existed, even though they wrote it down, Tweeted it out, and spoke about it often on camera. I discussed this blatant negation of obvious reality in two prior articles (here and here), and you can watch an example here.
Notably, Dr. Ebright did not demand that Dr. Bhattacharya stop talking about “the last one”. It’s perfectly fine for him to drone on and on about lockdowns, even though they ended long ago, while the virus is still circulating widely. There’s an obvious reason why Dr. Ebright demands amnesia about Biosaftey Now members, but not from Biosafety Now members.
These images are 6 weeks apart. Read the article here.
Jay Speaks At RFK Jr.’s Vice President Announcement Rally
If indeed amnesia is a virtue and memory is a sin, then my soul is in trouble. I think that this largely explains Dr. Ebright’s infantile emotional outbursts towards myself and other doctors, like Dr. David Gorksi, who also refuse to forget. I mean really, what sin did I commit? Here’s what I’ve done since 2020:
- Worked in a hospital and didn’t forget it
- Volunteered for a vaccine-RCT
- Published research on COVID
- Exposed charlatans and quacks who dispensed deadly advice
Dr. Ebright must resent me for one of those things. Although Dr. Ebright feels that celebrity doctors who intentionally spread a virus should be forgiven and resurrected, he feels that doctors who experienced and can’t forget the consequences of an actual pandemic deserve only childish schoolyard taunts. Dr. Ebright, who never treated COVID patients, is done with 2020, and he feels that people who witnessed mass death that year should just get over it already.
I can be snarky, and I don’t pull my punches. However much of my writing is simply a collection of quotes from WWTI doctors. I’ll provide several videos of Dr. Bhattacharya at the end of this article so all of us, especially everyone at Biosafety Now, can remember exactly what he said. I think it’s important and powerful to just let these doctors’ words speak for themselves. Who could anyone object to that?
Dr. Ebright objects to that. He believes that these videos should be entirely forgotten and that only people who are unable to read or reason still care about COVID. He has generously given Dr. Bhattacharya a “do-over” button and furiously demands that others honor his gift. Dr. Ebright unilaterally declared, “the discussion at hand is how to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic (not how to respond to the last one)“, and expects everyone else to just fall in line.
That’s quite a demand, and I reject it. I won’t tell him to stop talking about the lab leak, and he shouldn’t tell me to stop criticizing Dr. Bhattacharya. Even though it earns me scorn and contempt from people who never saw what the virus could do, I believe it’s important to keep an accurate record of doctors who purposefully tried to spread a virus during an actual pandemic. After all, 2020 wasn’t that long ago, COVID hurt a lot of people, and the virus is still here.
Moreover, much of this suffering was preventable. COVID was going to be bad no matter what, but Dr. Ebright was absolutely right that many thousands of people died because “charlatans and quacks” told them vaccines were more dangerous than the virus. Watch the video below to see who told them that. Dr. Ebright feels it’s wrong to remember that real people lost their lives because they listened to the doctor on TV, not the one in the hospital. When Dr. Ebright says “but it now is 2024 (not 2020)“, he’s not just covering for Dr. Bhattacharya, he is purposefully erasing COVID’s victims, past, present, and future.
However, if we don’t remember what WWTI doctors said, they certainly won’t remind us. They are now furiously trying to rewrite history and rebrand themselves, absurdly claiming that all they ever wanted was children in school. Today, Dr. Bhattacharya hides that he advocated for herd immunity through mass infection and lobs immature personal attacks against anyone who reminds him pleas for “natural infection”. I am confident he won’t direct his audience to this article so they can hear what he had to say. Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t really mind it when he’s censored.
Although this pro-infection discourse dominated the early part of the pandemic, today it is totally unmentionable amongst the same WWTI doctors who were responsible for it. Unfortunately, their project of deliberate amnesia is being aided by not just by supposed advocates of biosaftey like Dr. Ebright, but also by venerable newspapers such as the NY Times and venerable institutions such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins. These supposed bastions of truth are all complicit in the Great Forgetting.
While accurately remembering the past is worthwhile in its own right, we also need to learn from our mistakes. Though I often write about the first part of the pandemic, I intend for it to serve as a warning. It would be a huge mistake to censor what WWTI doctors said in 2020 or to consent to Dr. Ebright’s hippocampectomy. When the next virus inevitably arrives, whether from a lab or animal, WWTI doctors will invariably spread misinformation about it and resist efforts to contain it. Don’t take my word for it. Read this interview from last year.
Peter Robinson: All right, a few final questions, Jay. Holman Jenkins in “The Wall Street Journal,” quote: “The world inevitably will face new respiratory viruses. There seems to be no good reason nature would afflict us with a disease that spreads as easily as the flu or COVID and is significantly more deadly, but neither can that be ruled out.” Are we ready for the next pandemic?
Jay Bhattacharya: We’re gonna lock down again with the next pandemic, guaranteed. If the current configuration of power in public health and politics stands, we will respond by saying, “Look, the lockdown’s the only way,” and just as happened in 2020, it’ll be the laptop class that’ll benefit, and the poor and the vulnerable and children who will be harmed.
We should be prepared for this. Laptop class doctors like Dr. Bhattacharya have no problem creating extra patients for other doctors. With dangerous and deluded characters like Robert Kennedy Jr. potentially gaining power, the idea that we should voluntarily erase our COVID memories isn’t just noxious, it’s also foolish and dangerous.
Unfortunately, Mr. Kennedy has more public legitimacy now than ever because prominent professors at Stanford, UCSF, and Johns Hopkins have vouched for him. Claiming to be an apolitical public health expert, Dr. Bhattacharya even spoke at one of his rallies where he received a glowing introduction from Del Bigtree. It’s no surprise that legendary anti-vaxxers are enamored with Dr. Bhattacharya. He speaks their language.
Dr. Ebright and everyone at Biosafety Now is totally fine with all this. Even though Mr. Kennedy is currently promoting the propaganda movie Vaxxed 3: Authorized to Kill, Dr. Ebright is only upset that anyone would dare criticize Dr. Bhattacharya. It doesn’t bother him at all that a board member of Biosafety Now, whose purpose is to keep us safe from viruses, promotes America’s #1 anti-vaxxer. Dr. Ebright feels this too should be censored and forgotten.
Unlike Dr. Ebright, I would never legitimize a doctor who lauded a prominent anti-vaxxer who already has a body count of dead children. I genuinely care about limiting dangerous viruses, and I am very worried about the future. Not only are vaccine-rates dipping thanks to misinformation spread during COVID, we are much less prepared to handle a pandemic than we were in 2020. Quackery has been normalized in small, but influential parts of American medicine. Read about Dr. Joseph Ladapo if you think I am exaggerating.
Unfortunately, WWTI doctors also have unearned legitimacy because seemingly credible organizations with with catchy names, like Biosafety Now, vouched for them and deluged their critics with juvenile japes. When Dr. Bhattacharya histrionically claims that mitigation measures were an epic catastrophe and that vaccines for young people were a tragic mistake, more people will trust him thanks to Biosafety Now’s stamp of approval. If COVID-25 arrives, there’s no way the public would adhere to mitigation measures as they did in 2020. People have been instructed to forget COVID’s carnage and to trust anti-vaxx liars like Mr. Kennedy. They have been told outright to stop trusting public health, and as a result many people now believe that measures to contain a deadly virus are useless at best and a sign of impending Nazism at worst. By legitimizing Dr. Bhattacharya and his ilk, Biosafety Now is ensuring we are much less prepared to fight a future pandemic, as well as existing virus such as COVID and measles.
An organization that is supposedly dedicated to protecting us from deadly viruses is actually making us much more vulnerable to them. Either they don’t know this or they don’t care.
I will work with any person from any party and any background to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic.
Dr. Ebright also explained his willingness to partner with Dr. Bhattacharya by saying:
I will work with any person from any party and any background to prevent a next lab-generated pandemic. The importance and urgency of the objective over-ride partisan differences and ideological differences (as should be clear to any rational person).
Let’s put that to the test.
Dr. Ebright may be sincere here. It’s hard to imagine how his standards could be lower. To prevent a potential pandemic, he is willing to partner with a doctor, who during an actual pandemic, never saw patients and spread blatant anti-vaccine, pro-virus misinformation.
In contrast, I worked in a hospital and tried to counter the charlatans and quacks who dispensed deadly advice during that actual pandemic. I don’t think anyone from Biosafety Now can say that. So, will Dr. Ebright be willing to work with me? Like him, I want to keep the world safe from dangerous viruses. If Biosafety Now actually shares that goal, I’ll bring them a valuable perspective they currently lack (as should be clear to any rational person).
They’ll just have to tolerate the fact that I reject their demand for amnesia, and I have a strong feeling their dedication to biosafety doesn’t go that far.