The COVID-Era Smearing – and Resurrection – of Trump NIH Appointee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, dialed up the attacks, dismissing him and his colleagues as what Collins termed “fringe epidemiologists” while their acolytes threw mud from a slew of publications, including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ.

In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bhattacharya’s path from health policy scholar to NIH director nominee is pockmarked with craters from missiles launched to destroy his scientific credibility by NIH leaders and their minions in academia. Even as he seeks to advance medical research, Bhattacharya’s personal experience will likely inform his pledge to clean up the NIH and clear the agency of some career civil servants who silenced dissenting scientific voices during the pandemic and created national policies that were not always supported by the public. 

“Free speech is fundamental for science to function properly,” he notes simply.    

Bhattacharya first caught the attention of the nation’s scientific bureaucracy in April 2020 when he reported that the COVID virus was not as dangerous but more widespread than many of his colleagues and government officials were maintaining. This suggested a policy focusing on the most vulnerable populations with fewer restrictions on younger, healthier Americans. The study was discussed at the highest levels of the government and was passed around by Fauci and others in the White House, according to emails made public by a Freedom of Information Act request.

“For anyone with an open mind, the study’s results implied that the lockdown-focused strategy of March 2020 had failed to suppress the spread of the disease,” Bhattacharya wrote in a 2023 essay. But the paper’s other obvious conclusion put Bhattacharya in the crosshairs of Stanford faculty: It suggested that fear-mongering about the fatality rate of the virus was irresponsible. 

Bhattacharya’s contrary conclusions generated complaints that the research was unsound, and Stanford put together an ad hoc group to investigate. It directed him to change the study protocols, which would have shut down the research. “They also demanded to review and approve any manuscripts we would write,” Bhattacharya said. But he eventually ignored them and kept publishing.

In April 2020, a series of damaging articles by Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee carried allegations that Bhattacharya and his colleagues failed to disclose funding for their study, even though they had actually already disclosed it to Stanford. Buzzfeed is the now-defunct news site that first published the now much-maligned Steele dossier.

Bhattacharya was confused by the articles when they appeared. He later concluded from the intimate details that Stanford faculty were leaking the information to the reporter to harm him, including a false allegation that a “whistleblower” had come forward. 

Responding to the Buzzfeed flurry of reports, Stanford announced a fact-finding investigation of Bhattacharya’s research, which he began calling an “inquisition.” The administration later informed him there was no “whistleblower” as Buzzfeed had falsely reported, and they sent a confidential report that found him and his colleagues at no fault.

“I got a letter which basically says we did nothing wrong. But also a condition that I’m not allowed to release the letter,” Bhattacharya explained in a 2023 interview. “This was a low period in my life. I was getting death threats, racist attacks, because the press was attacking me.” 

Bhattacharya also suspects that some of the attacks at the time were being generated by Stanford’s major funders in the federal government – the NIH’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. Collins and Fauci orchestrated a campaign against Bhattacharya in earnest in October 2020. Collins resigned from his NIH position last Friday and did not respond to questions sent to him through the NIH communications office nor sent to his NIH contact. Fauci did not respond to questions sent to him through his attorney.

That month, Bhattacharya and professors Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for rejecting harmful COVID lockdowns in favor of “focused protection” for society’s most vulnerable, such as the elderly. With the declaration building support, Collins, four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, sent Fauci an email with the subject line “Great Barrington Declaration.”

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the [Health] Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Collins wrote. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?”

Some hours later, Fauci forwarded Collins a “refutation” of the Great Barrington Declaration written for The Nation by his friend and advocate Gregg Gonsalves, an AIDS activist who is now a professor at Yale. Fauci rose to prominence in the 1980s as an HIV/AIDS researcher. “Indeed, and well said,” replied Collins. The Gonsalves essay referenced no actual science but denigrated Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff for ignoring what he called “progressive principles of justice and equality” in favor of “survival of the fittest.”

Fauci has praised Gonsalves several times over the years and, in his recent memoir, singles out Gonsalves and a handful of other activists “for their unflinching support over the past few years.”

Four days after Fauci forwarded Collins the Gonsalves essay in The Nation, Collins dismissed the Declaration in public comments as “fringe” politics. “This is not mainstream science,” Collins argued in a public statement. Gonsalves contacted Collins later that same day, emailing him another essay he had written, again vilifying the Great Barrington Declaration, this time in the Washington Post. 

“Saw your comments on the ludicrous Great Barrington Declaration and wanted to thank you for speaking out and doing it ‘undiplomatically,’” Gonsalves emailed Collins. “After we saw what you had said about ‘fringe’ epidemiology, we wondered why we were so nice in our op-ed.”

Collins then forwarded Gonsalves’ email to Fauci, who responded with a smiley face emoji.

Several months later, Gonsalves was among those who hosted a surprise birthday greeting for Fauci. “We did it!” tweeted HIV activist Peter Staley. “A small gang of Tony Fauci’s HIV/AIDS comrades managed to surprise him yesterday with an 80^th birthday Zoom.” A screenshot of the Zoom shows Gregg Gonsalves beaming into his camera.

Fauci and Collins’ effort to create a “quick and devastating” takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration remained secret until the emails between them and Gonsalves became public in late December 2021. In response, Gonsalves dashed off a Christmas note to Collins and Fauci thanking them for their service and alerting them to their now-public emails “that some on the right have been circulating as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy against the Great Barrington Declaration.”

“It’s interesting that an effort to call out genuinely dangerous recommendations from the GBD is called a conspiracy,” Collins emailed back to Gonsalves. “Truth itself seems to have become a conspiracy in many minds.”

“It’s been a privilege to have you as our leader at the NIH!” Gonsalves replied.

Gonsalves remained a dogged Fauci supporter throughout the pandemic, even attacking former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield when he went public in 2023 that he believed Fauci’s funding for gain-of-function virus research in the Wuhan lab may have led to the pandemic. “Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, has been trashing former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci,” Gonsalves tweeted in March 2023. “Anyone who knows Bob Redfield knows what an unsavory character he is.”

Working in concert with Gonsalves, two other academics were especially active in criticizing Bhattacharya’s COVID work: David Gorski, a Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University, and Gavin Yamey, Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. 

“They specifically targeted the scientific community to undermine Jay,” said a Trump transition team member, who is not allowed to speak to the press while shuffling Bhattacharya around the Senate. “There’s a market for hot pieces to attack Bhattacharya, and these academics coordinate on social media, repeating and amplifying the same narrative to dirty him up.”

Gorski is a self-described “misinformation debunker” and runs a website called Science Based Medicine. It doesn’t always get its facts straight. After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021, for example, that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski decried the decision on his X account claiming, “Reported blood clots appear to be no higher than background and very likely unrelated to the vaccine.” The UK government eventually stopped offering AstraZeneca’s jab, and the company finally admitted that its COVID vaccine causes harm in what The Telegraph reported could result in millions of dollars in legal claims.

“Gorski is damaging to science,” said Bhattacharya. “He creates an environment where researchers can’t speak their mind if they cross the biopharmaceutical industry.” Bhattacharya described Yamey and Gorski as part of a network that carried out Collins’ devastating takedown. “I’ll never publish in a big mainstream journal,” he said a couple of years ago in an interview.

“Those of us in academic medicine, all we have is our reputation,” former CDC Director Robert Redfield told RealClearInvestigations. “These attacks, it impacts you substantially. You can’t function. You don’t get invited to talks, and groups won’t have anything to do with you."

In late 2021, Gorski partnered with Yamey on a piece for the BMJ falsely charging that Bhattacharya and other Great Barrington Declaration signers were supported by billionaires “aligned with industry.” Bhattacharya and the other signatories met at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, Yamey and Gorski argued, “has also received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, which was founded and is chaired by the right-wing billionaire industrialist known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business.” 

While Gorski and Yamey provided no evidence that Koch money funded the GBD signatories, the BMJ still published their piece. Association with a nonprofit that has distant links to Koch money was apparently enough to carry the whiff of dark money corruption, a charge that still circulates on social media to this day. 

“The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication,” wrote Martin Kulldorff in The Spectator. “While the AIER has received only a single $68K (£50,000) Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.”

Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, Gorski did not respond when asked why he had not corrected his allegations against Bhattacharya.

It was later revealed that Bhattacharya’s attackers had even more conflicts. In March 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a trove of documents revealing Yamey’s ties to EcoHealth Alliance, a Fauci-funded organization run by Peter Daszak, which subcontracted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. USAID scientist Dennis Carroll ran a pandemic preparedness program called PREDICT and worked with several researchers, including Daszak and Yamey, documents show, to redirect federal funds from the PREDICT program to set up a nonprofit called the Global Virome Project.

After directing federal funds to create the Global Virome Project, Carroll retired from federal service and became head of the organization, along with Daszak as a board member.

“It would appear that Dennis Carroll violated federal law that prohibits the use of official resources for private gain or for that of persons or organizations with which he is associated personally,” Craig Holman of Public Citizen said when shown emails from the document trove.

In March 2023, CBS News broke a story that EcoHealth Alliance may have double-billed the federal government for research in Wuhan, and the USAID Inspector General launched a criminal probe of the group’s finances. Some days before Trump was sworn into office, HHS excluded EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak from working with the agency in response to congressional investigations that uncovered wrongdoing, including using taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 “But the defamatory damage was already done,” Bhattacharya wrote in Newsweek, calling out Yamey and Gorski for their BMJ errors, “and many scientists stayed silent as schools closed and children were harmed, even though they knew better. They did not want to be similarly smeared.”

“Yamey is a narrative enforcer for the pandemic preparedness industry that likely funded the research that caused the pandemic,” Bhattacharya said.

And the smears continue. Referencing the false “dark money” charges by Yamey and Gorski, Lucky Tran, director of communications for Columbia University Irving Medical Center, posted a denunciation of Bhattacharya on the social media platform Bluesky after Trump nominated him. “Bhattacharya has spread disinformation on COVID, fought against lifesaving measures including vaccines, masks, and social distancing, and is backed by dark money groups pushing corporate interests.”

RealClearInvestigations contacted Columbia’s vice president of communications, Vanita Gowda, to ask if Lucky Tran’s post was Columbia’s official position on Trump’s NIH choice. Gowda was also asked whether the university could provide any evidence that Bhattacharya was funded by “dark money.” Gowda did not respond to multiple requests to explain these charges.

USAID’s criminal investigation began with subpoenas sent to several concerned parties. Duke University’s Yamey did not respond to repeated inquires on whether he had received a subpoeana. .

“I am honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump’s nomination of me to be the next @NIH director,” Bhattacharya posted on X. “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”

Redfield said that Collins, Fauci, and other critics should apologize to Bhattacharya for the years of harassment and actions that were both wrong and unprofessional. “If you survive these attacks, and you have a resurrection, you do very well,” Redfield said. “You now have a reputation for substance and standing up for what you believe is true. Not everyone has that. I’m pretty confident he’ll do well, move forward, and do the right thing.”

Editor's note: In 2023, Dr. Bhattacharya was named the first recipient of the Samizdat Prize, an annual award sponsored by the RealClear Media Fund to recognize standout foes of censorship.