“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.”
In a previous article, I discussed an organization founded by two Rutgers professors Bryce Nickels and Richard Ebright called Biosafety Now. It described itself by saying:
Biosafety Now is a US-based NGO working for a future where scientific research on pathogens supports human life without also threatening it & public trust in science is restored. Biosafety Now believes that research that creates new, non-natural potential pandemic pathogens poses existential risks to humanity and provides few, if any, benefits for science, medicine, public health, or national security. We are convinced that public health and safety require that all such research be subject to independent external controls, rather than be trusted to the oversight of the scientists performing or the organizations funding the research.
They said elsewhere:
The rapidly increasing power and rapidly decreasing cost of advanced biotechnology has made lab-generated pandemics a threat to the survival of the human species.
So far so good. Having witnessed what the last pandemic could do, I don’t want another deadly virus emerging from a lab or anywhere else.
My article also discussed a revealing social media exchange I had with Professor Ebright in 2024. In 2020 Professor Ebright had strong feelings when Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and friends announced their plan to get rid of the virus by spreading the virus. Professor 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 never produced such pugnacious prose. Professor Ebright also laid out his preferred approach, and it could not have been more opposed to Dr. Bhattacharya’s vision of herd immunity via natural immunity. Professor Ebright said:
Testing, tracing, quarantine of contacts, isolation of cases, partial lockdown and distancing at all times, full lockdown when tranmission is high, masks, and, decisively, when available, vaccines.
When vaccines arrived, Professor Ebright supported mandates too, quoting from an article that said:
There is a straightforward ethical argument to be made for vaccine mandates: Herd immunity is a collective good and its absence a collective harm, so vaccination cannot be a matter solely of personal choice.
I never advocated for mandates or lockdowns.
However, despite wanting to hold Dr. Bhattacharya “accountable” in 2020, Professor Ebright later reversed course and invited him to join Biosafety Now, whose sole purpose was, supposedly, to protect people from dangerous viruses. Professor Ebright justified his willingness to promote a “charlatan and quack” who dispensed “deadly advice” by telling me:
My views on the @gbdeclaration have not changed, but my views on Bhattacharya have changed.
Professor Ebright never revealed what skill set a pro-virus, health economist brought the cause of virology biosafety. He also never explained how how Dr. Bhattacharya had redeemed himself for having caused “hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths“, especially considering Dr. Bhattacharya spread COVID disinformation not just in 2020, but every year since. It continues to this day. Professor Ebright says none of that matters today, however.
To defend his toxic apathy, Professor Ebright treated 2020 as distant historical memory and demanded that everyone else do the same. He lectured me:
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). 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).
Only laptop class professors talk about 2020 this way. Those of us who experienced it in hospitals don’t have Professor Ebright’s luxury of amnesia. And though he treats frontline doctors with contempt and scorn for questioning him, if there’s a new pandemic, we’ll be the ones risking our health, mental and physical, while he’s safe at home spewing bile against us.
“Biosafety Now is ensuring we are much less prepared to fight a future pandemic, as well as existing viruses such as COVID and measles.”
In a follow-up article titled A “Biosafety” Organization Partnering With Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Guard Against Viruses Is Like A Zebra Teaming Up With A Lion To Promote Vegetarianism, I made a bold prediction of my own. I wrote:
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 viruses such as COVID and measles.
Enough time has passed to judge the wisdom of my prediction. Are we less prepared to fight existing viruses? That’s not a hard question to answer, and we are just getting started. Vaccine rates and falling and anti-vaccine disinformation is erupting from the Oval Office, with Biosafety Now leader Dr. Bhattacharya helping to turn Wakefield’s fraud into policy. We’ll be dealing with the consequences for decades to come.
Neither Professor Ebright or Nickels care about this however. As MAHA loomed in the fall of 2024, Professor Ebright minimized the threat, confidently predicting that “measles will be not be running rampant in schools.” For his part, Professor Nickels thought the possiblity of viruses killing and injuring children was funny, joking with Dr. Vinay Prasad at the time:
C’mon Vinay lets do a “debate” where I take the position that RFK Jr will be a disaster for public health and you take the other side?
I probably will just shout at you that you are an anti-vaxx fascist that loves polio, wants to infect everyone with measles and approves of bear killing etc…
Fast forward to today and Professor Nickels’ social media amusement has become some children’s permanent tragedy. Measles has killed and devastated children while keeping them out of school. Of course, measles isn’t the only existing pathogen to spread under MAHA. That list also includes the flu. pertussis, and cyclosporiasis– viruses, bacteria, and parasites. MAHA is failing with the whole lot of them, not that this matters to the Biosafety Now bros, however. Other people’s children are suffering, not theirs.
What about a new pandemic? Would Trump, Kennedy, Stephen Miller, and Dr. Bhattacharya institute the mitigations Professor Ebright supported when COVID raged? Would they pull off another Operation Warp Speed? Would they competently manage a new virus, regardless of its origin?
I don’t think so, and I am sure neither Professor Ebright nor Nickels could make the affirmative case we are better prepared to handle a pandemic with MAHA/MAGA in charge. This crew can’t even run a meeting or fix a few shot-out windows at the CDC. A terrifying article titled Trump Aims To Rebuild Defenses Against Bioweapons As AI Fears Rise revealed just how much trouble we’d be in if COVID-26 arrived.
The White House is working to strengthen safeguards against biological attacks after staffing cuts early in the second Trump administration depleted expertise in a field where officials increasingly fear artificial intelligence could make it easier to create deadly pathogens.
By the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the White House had built a team of as many as 30 people focused on biological security, according to three former government officials who worked on the issue — two for Biden and Trump, and one just for Biden — and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation.
This specialized staff was charged with coordinating the web of federal agencies that deal with biohazards and provided scientific guidance to top officials. That team rapidly dwindled after Trump returned to office amid cuts and reorganizations, said the three former officials, as well as a fourth former official, who also worked for both administrations. At times, nobody at the White House was dedicated solely to biosecurity, according to three of the former officials.
This is the world the Biosafety Now bros deliberately unleashed on us all.
And thus it becomes clear, Biosafety Now had nothing to do with biosafety, and Professors Ebright and Nickels are total phonies who never genuinely cared about protecting people from dangerous viruses. Their whole schtick was a ruse, performance art, an opportunity for them to fundraise and boost their social media profiles.
Their legitimate sounding organization- Biosafety Now!– also provided cover for their obsessive revenge fantasies against public health officials tasked with containing COVID. An article tilted ‘Lab-Leak’ Proponents At Rutgers Accused Of Defaming And Intimidating Covid-19 Origin Researchers began by saying:
Fraudsters. Liars. Perjurers. Felons. Grifters. Stooges. Imbeciles. Murderers. When it comes to describing scientists whose peer-reviewed studies suggest the COVID-19 virus made a natural jump from animals to humans, molecular biologist Richard Ebright and microbiologist Bryce Nickels have used some very harsh language. On X (formerly Twitter), where the two scientists from Rutgers University are a constant presence, they have even compared fellow researchers to Nazi war criminals and the genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.
Apparently this sort of rhetoric is needed to prevent the next lab leak pathogen. In reality, this vileness generated headlines such as Dr. Fauci Says His Daughters Need Security As Family Continues To Get Death Threats and Anti-Vaxxers Stalked Peter Hotez at His Home. Who in their right mind would step up to contain a future pandemic knowing juvenile, narcissistic trolls will harass them, advocate for their prosecution, and blame them for the whole thing?
No matter how much they blather on about the dangers of a new pandemic moving forward, Professors Ebright and Nickels enabled the “charlatans and quacks” responsible for the devastation of our biosafety response. Thanks to their personality disorders, we are all much more vulnerable to dangerous pathogens, both old and new, from labs and from nature. This isn’t theoretical. The viruses have already started spreading.
That’s all that matters about them, and it’s exactly what I predicted.