“The central problem right now, I think, is the fear that people still feel about COVID.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya began his career as a pandemic pundit in March 2020 by writing a powerful defense of lockdowns. He said:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
Though Dr. Bhattacharya felt extraordinary measures were justified for dangerous viruses, he spent the rest of the pandemic trying to convince people that SARS-CoV-2 did not rise to the occasion. Indeed his next sentence was:
But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
SARS-CoV-2 turned out to kill and injure a lot of people after all, though Dr. Bhattacharya never looked back. As SBM readers know, he gained fame and power by falsely numbing people to its risks. He was the boy who cried lamb. Though there are countless examples, in April 2021 Dr. Bhattacharya said, “the central problem right now, I think, is the fear that people still feel about COVID.” The Delta and then the Omicron variants arrived soon after that, killing countless people who followed his instructions and lived without fear.
“This is not COVID”
Fast forward to today, and Dr. Bhattacharya is making the media rounds, yet again trying to pacify people about a virus, though he is now doing so in his role as acting CDC director. “This is not COVID,” he said about hantavirus, implying that maybe, just maybe, COVID was a big deal after all. “We don’t want to cause a public panic over this,” he added. The risk is “very, very, very low‘” he said in another interview. After bashing and purposefully undermining dedicated CDC employees for years, Dr. Bhattacharya lavished praise on them, saying “I’ve been so impressed by the professionalism of the people that are there. The disease outbreak people are true professionals.” It’s the exact same thing as with COVID- calm down, there’s nothing to worry about, everything is going to be just fine.
“It’s a violation of trust” “They are acting in bad faith.”
Despite his soothing words about hantavirus, now that he has real-world responsibility for the first time ever, Dr. Bhattacharya is using extraordinary measures to contain it. Lockdown Jay is back. According to an article titled American Passenger Blocked From Leaving Federal Hantavirus Quarantine:
“They are requiring us to remain in a locked facility and threatening us,” said Ms. Perryman, 47, “and denying us the right to home quarantine.”
Federal health officials did not respond to requests for comment. But the order Ms. Perryman shared with The New York Times says officials believe she would “constitute a probable source of infection to other people” if she left the facility to travel to another state.
The mandatory quarantine, citing public health law, was authorized by Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It turns out that Tweeting about how one “would” handle a virus is a lot easier than actually having to handle a virus. As someone said on social media, “It’s a lot easier to shoot one’s mouth when one has no responsibility or accountability for decisions that affect millions of people.”
Dr. Jeremy Faust also reported that locked down Americans are not happy with Dr. Bhattacharya right now. He revealed that “Violations of this order may subject you to a criminal fine and/or up to one year in jail” and quoted one passenger as saying:
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.
Dr. Faust also spoke to Ms. Perryman who said:
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.
Talk about a biomedical security state, and it’s not just with hantavirus. Dr. Bhattacharya is also issuing travel bans to contain Ebola. In an alternate universe where Kamala Harris’s CDC director did any of this, there is no doubt that Dr. Bhattacharya would invite Ms. Perryman on to his podcast to let her vent about this “violation of trust” and the horrors of the authoritarian CDC. That’s all he did previously.
“New leadership… are the first needed steps to restore trust”
To be clear, quarantining people to limit hantavirus seems reasonable to me. It’s better to be safe than sorry with dangerous viruses, even though hantavirus is obviously not COVID, and I’m not particularly worried about it. However, this is because trusted experts reassured me, not because of anything Dr. Bhattacharya said. He’s never acknowledged his countless previous errors and hurled juvenile, unprofessional insults at anyone who pointed them out. As such, the problem isn’t that Dr. Bhattacharya is necessarily wrong about hantavirus, it’s that he’s totally untrustworthy.
Given that Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t treat COVID as COVID, can we trust him to level with us if a dangerous virus emerged? Would Dr. Bhattacharya, Kennedy, and the doctor who hosted the Erection Connection podcast would be able to competently handle it, especially given they’ve already botched measles and deliberately sabotaged our pandemic response? Would the “true professionals” remaining at the CDC be allowed to do their job, free of political interference?
Of course not. It’s obvious to everyone that Dr. Bhattacharya has no idea what he is doing and is making things up as he goes. He had his chance to prove his mettle at the CDC, and the verdict is in- “it’s a violation of trust; they are acting in bad faith.” All of this come on top of his well-established ineptitude and malevolence at the NIH.
So, what should incompetent public health leaders do once they’ve lost the trust of the American people? Well, back when he was a content creator who specialized in spreading disinformation and doubt, Dr. Bhattacharya answered that question himself.
