'Karma is a b****': Trump taps epidemiologist targeted by Biden admin and censored online to run NIH



Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an esteemed epidemiologist and professor of health policy at Stanford University, refused to accept the premise advanced early in the pandemic by medical establishmentarians and lawmakers that lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masking for kids, and other ruinous COVID-19 policies were the best ways to prevent infection and get back to normal.

Although he and other principals behind the Great Barrington Declaration were ultimately vindicated, at the time, he faced incredible abuse. President Joe Biden's former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins conspired to issue a "quick and devastating takedown" of Bhattacharya's criticism while many of the professor's peers personally attacked him. Adding injury to insult, Bhattacharya was censored online.

This prime target for suppression by the current administration is now the nominee to serve as director of the next administration's National Institutes of Health.

'The hammer of justice is coming.'

"I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health," President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening. "Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation's Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve health, and save lives."

Dr. Bhattacharya said that he was "honored and humbled" by the nomination and vowed to "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!"

Trump's selection was widely celebrated, especially by those critical of Democratic censorship as well as the scientific establishment's deadly and credibility-destroying hostility to alternative viewpoints.

"I'm so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment," tweeted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services. "Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine."

Blaze News editor in chief Matthew J. Peterson wrote, "This is what winning looks like right here. @Dr.JBhattacharya in this role is right and just. The hammer of justice is coming. The era of blackpilling is over. We live in a new era — a new @frontier_mag_. Pick up your shield and sword and get ready to rumble."

'It will be a major step forward to have an NIH Director who will fight science fraud and repudiate science fraudsters.'

Matt Kibbe, the BlazeTV host of "Kibbe on Liberty" and "The Coverup," which recently featured Bhattacharya, stated, "Jay Bhattacharya was deemed a 'fringe epidemiologist' by former NIH Director Francis Collins, who demonized him for asking obvious questions about the government's authoritarian response to Covid. Now, Jay will take the helm at NIH, and clean house of all those who corrupted public health and did so much damage to Americans during the pandemic. Karma is a b****."

Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University tweeted, "It will be a major step forward to have an NIH Director who will fight science fraud and repudiate science fraudsters. Rather than an NIH Director — like former NIH Director Francis Collins — who prompted science fraud and rewarded science fraudsters."

Earlier this year, Bhattacharya joined Ebright and other scientists in seeking accountability from those scientific journals that happily published "unsound scientific papers" by Fauci, disgraced EcoHealth Alliance boss Peter Daszak, and elements of their inner circle that downplayed the likely lab-leak origins of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace, responding to the fact that Bhattacharya is poised to take over the job of a man who recently sought to destroy his reputation, wrote, "Do not be deceived. God will not be mocked. A man will always reap what he sows."

Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that geriatrics and other higher-risk groups should engage in shielding, whereas healthy individuals should "immediately be allowed to resume life as normal." Healthy individuals, it suggested, would be better off catching the virus and developing natural immunity. This greatly angered elements of the medical establishment who preferred coercive medicine, blanket lockdowns, and school closures.

Fauci called the declaration "total nonsense."

Scores of other so-called experts claimed in a response published in the Lancet, the "John Snow Memorandum," that the call for herd immunity and other proposals raised in the declaration were dangerous and unscientific. The memo was signed by thousands of scientists and endorsed by the Federation of American Scientists.

Extra to facing criticism from his peers, Bhattacharya was censored online. Reporting from Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" revealed that under previous management, the platform put the professor on a "Trends Blacklist," ensuring that his tweets would be suppressed, including his suggestion that pandemic lockdowns were harmful to children.

'All were suppressed.'

Bhattacharya was among the individual plaintiffs who joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials. The case — Missouri v. Biden,which became Murthy v. Missouri — exposed some of the ways the Democratic administration colluded with social media platforms to suppress dissenting voices and criticism of COVID-19 policies.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty noted that the Biden administration

used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden's policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power.

"All were suppressed," wrote Doughty. "It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech."

While the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately let the Biden administration off the hook, claiming that "the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant," the lawsuit helped paved the way for Kennedy v. Biden as well as Dressen, et al. v. Flaherty, et al., a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by vaccine-injured Americans.

'Make America Healthy Again!'

The ruling also helped emphasize the difference between Biden and Trump.

Bhattacharya noted on X following the court's ruling, "The Supreme Court just ruled in the Murthy v. Missouri case that the Biden Administration can coerce social media companies to censor and shadowban people and posts it doesn't like."

"This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech," continued Bhattacharya.

The candidate promising to protect free speech and hold censorious tech companies accountable ultimately won the day, putting Bhattacharya in a position where, if confirmed, he is unlikely to again be shut up and shut out.

"Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America's biggest Health challengers, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease," Trump noted in his announcement. "Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!"

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Bhattacharya will oversee the world's top medical research agency, its $48 billion budget, and 27 institutes and centers.

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The Biden administration suffered another crushing defeat Tuesday in the Missouri v. Biden saga.

A U.S. district judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration in July, barring its agencies and top officials from leaning on social media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce "content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

Like the White House, the Biden Department of Justice expressed its displeasure with the Trump appointee's decision and filed an appeal.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dashed the administration's hopes, upholding the lower court's ruling. However, among the apparent rogue agencies the three-judge panel left unchecked was one of the worst offenders.

On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit remedied this oversight, expanding the injunction to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, noting that "for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment."

The White House appears ready to take this battle to the Supreme Court.

What's the background?

The plaintiffs in the suit included the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; Jill Hines, the activist behind the "Reopen Louisiana" initiative; and the states of Missouri and Louisiana.

Bhattacharya noted in a recent op-ed that that he joined the suit in August 2022 at the request of the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general with the aim of ending the government's role in running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of critics and questioners of the Biden administration's COVID-19 policies.

President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various other Biden administration officials and entities were named as defendants.

In his judgment filed on July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote, "If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech."

According to Doughty, the plaintiffs were "likely to succeed on the merits on their claim that the United States Government, through the White House and numerous federal agencies, pressured and encouraged social-media companies to suppress free speech."

On the basis of this understanding, Doughty barred Biden administration officials, including in the FBI, DOJ, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from engaging social media companies regarding "the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

TheBlaze previously reported that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre similarly indicated the DOJ was "reviewing this" and that the Biden White House disagreed with Doughty's decision.

The DOJ asked Doughty for a stay of the injunction, which he denied.

On July 10, the department asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay, suggesting that a failure to stay might — among other things — hinder the Biden administration in fighting "misinformation circulating online [that] could impede relief and response efforts" after a natural disaster.

A partial win

A three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion on Sept. 8 validating the argument that the Biden administration had been violating Americans' First Amendment Rights by unlawfully censoring them by proxy via social media companies, reported Newsweek.

The panel confirmed that the White House, surgeon general, CDC, and FBI likely had violated the First Amendment. Accordingly, the judges affirmed the district court's judgement with respect to these entities. However, the Appeals Court reversed the injunction as it pertained to all other officials.

This partial victory was bittersweet, noted RealClearInvestigations editor Ben Weingarten, not only because the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the State Department were not subjected to the injunction but because CISA got out unscathed.

Weingarten told lawmakers in May, "CISA has served as a censorship 'switchboard,' collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it."

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has called CISA "the 'nerve center' of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story."

Going the distance

The Republican attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana requested a rehearing on Sept. 28. The court obliged them.

The three-judge panel withdrew its previous opinion and extended the injunction to CISA as well.

"We find that, for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment," says the opinion. "First, CISA was the 'primary facilitator' of the FBI's interactions with the social-media platforms and worked in close coordination with the FBI to push the platforms to change their moderation policies to cover 'hack-and-leak' content."

"Second, CISA's 'switchboarding' operations, which, in theory, involved CISA merely relaying flagged social-media posts from state and local election officials to the platforms, was, in reality, '[s]omething more,'" continues the opinion. "CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had 'switchboarded' was true or false. Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently."

The Fifth Circuit judges further bolstered the district court's view that the Biden White House, the FBI, the surgeon general, the CDC, and CISA "likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions. In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment."

The defendants are barred from coercing or significantly encouraging a social media platform's content moderation decisions. They have less than a week to update their request to the Supreme Court.

In its third supplemental memo to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding an emergency stay application on behalf of the defendants, the DOJ accused the Fifth Circuit on Oct. 5 of having reached its decision on the basis of a "flawed conception of the state-action doctrine," stressing that it will impose "grave harms" on thousands of government employees.

USA Today indicated that the DOJ declined to comment. Brandon Wales, executive director of CISA, has suggested his agency does not censor speech.

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Stanford University professor of medicine who challenged COVID lockdowns: 'Academic freedom is dead'



A tenured Stanford professor who called into question the efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, lockdowns, masking for infants, and Dr. Anthony Fauci's recommendations throughout the pandemic gave a damning evaluation of the state of critical thought and academic freedom earlier this month, suggesting that they are not dying on campus but dead.

Thought crimes

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a tenured professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Earlier this month, Bhattacharya raised the matter of a censorious and dialogue-averse university community at the Academic Freedom Conference at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conference was met with fierce opposition in the days and weeks leading up to the event.

The aim of the conference was "to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture."

A host of Stanford academics signed an open letter accusing the observers of trolling Stanford with their talk of academic freedom, claiming that the event would not leave the university "unscathed."

The letter called on Stanford to "emphatically dissociate itself" from the event, going so far as to accuse gay Pay-Pal cofounder Peter Thiel, who made remarks at the event, of homophobia and other speakers of racism.

Those opposed to the event were altogether unable to prevent Bhattacharya from joining a panel titled, "Academic Freedom Applications: Climate Science and Biomedical Sciences," and stating, "We live in an era where ... you have a scientific bureaucrat who ironically tells the world that if you question him, you're not simply questioning the man, you're questioning science itself."

Bhattacharya was referencing Fauci's suggestion that by criticizing him — the scientist who ran the agency that funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab — "you're really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you're attacking science."

"We have a high clerisy that declares from on high what is true and what is not true," Bhattacharya suggested, adding that the collapse of academic freedom has accelerated significantly in the last two of the 36 years he has spent at Stanford.

"When you take a position that is at odds with the scientific clerisy, your life becomes a living hell," Bhattacharya told the conference. "You face a deeply hostile work environment."

He emphasized that while the university prides itself on having academic freedom, nothing could be further from the truth, especially when "academic freedom only matters when you take controversial positions."

Academic Freedom Applications Climate Science and Biomedical Sciences youtu.be

Bhattacharya expounded on his thinking in a recent interview with Fox News Digital, saying, "The basic premise is that if you don't have protection and academic freedom in the hard cases, when a faculty member has an idea that's unpopular among some of the other faculty – powerful faculty, or even the administration ... if they don't protect it in that case, then you don't have academic freedom at all."

"Power replaced the idea of truth as the guiding light," he added, noting how many scientific communities were cowed into uniformity and uncritical thinking during the pandemic.

Nothing against or outside the state's official narrative

Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Oct. 4, 2020, "Great Barrington Declaration," a document expressing "grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies" and recommending instead a "focused protection" approach.

According to the declaration, public resources should be focused on those most vulnerable to succumbing to COVID-19. Everyone else who is at minimal risk should build up natural immunity and "resume life as normal."

Anticipating the fallout of lockdowns and school closures, Bhattacharya and his co-authors recommended that schools and universities remain open for in-person teaching; extracurricular activities resume; and low-risk adults work normally, rather from home.

At the Academic Freedom Conference, he noted that the purpose of the document was to "tell people that there was an alternative and that the scientific community had not coalesced around a single lockdown-focused policy ... that there was not a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, that in fact many epidemiologists, many doctors, many other people – prominent people – disagreed with the consensus."

For publicly doubting claims advanced by the Biden administration and the media about the good of lockdowns, he was roundly castigated.

Last year, CNN called him "crazy" and accused him of spreading "dangerous COVID disinformation."

Fox News Digital reported that extra to the media, he was also denounced by so-called health leaders, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, who deemed his declaration "nonsense and very dangerous."

In his talk, Bhattacharya referenced former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Francis Collins' letter to fellow health bureaucrats imploring them to issue a "quick and devastating published take down" of the declaration's premises.

\u201cNew email dump showing Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins coordinating a propaganda campaign to attack the Great Barrington declaration last October. More coming soon so here's a teaser...\u201d
— Phil Magness (@Phil Magness) 1639776786

Bhattacharya previously told UnHerd that early in the pandemic, "there was a debate going on inside the scientific community, and Tony Fauci and the federal government of the United States could not abide that […] because they implemented an extraordinary policy that required absolute consensus."

While the government "suppressed and censored and smeared" independent thinkers and critical scientists, there was no support to be found on campus, only "a chill."

Bhattacharya said that one student who had sought to have the Stanford professor publicly discuss his declaration was reportedly met with "reprisals," given the prevailing noting that "platforming [Bhattacharya] was a dangerous thing."

Bhattacharya suggested that what is actually dangerous is refusing to platform opposing or alternate views: "If you have a legitimate scientific view, a legitimate policy view, to not speak of it ... sends a message that we do not care about the truth."

He indicted the university, particularly its leaders, suggesting that their refusal to support those on campus with differing viewpoints made it abundantly clear that "academic freedom is dead ... and if university leaders do not stand up for it, they do not deserve the positions they have."

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Rand Paul likens Anthony Fauci to 'mafia don,' shares old video of Fauci praising natural flu immunity as 'most potent vaccination'



The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has fallen more than 90% in a little over two months as coronavirus hospitalizations plummet to the lowest levels since the early days of the pandemic. However, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) isn't ready to let Dr. Anthony Fauci forget about his behavior during the pandemic, which he believes is similar to actions taken by a mafia boss.

On Friday night, Paul made an appearance on "The Ingraham Angle" to give his reaction to the explosive Vanity Fair report that claims Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins strongly pushed back against anyone who went against the narrative that COVID-19 originated from a wet market in Wuhan, China. Vanity Fair reports that evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom was suppressed for thinking that COVID-19 originated in a lab and leaked out.

"This is more like what you'd see from a mafia don than from a government bureaucrat or scientist," Paul said of Fauci's behavior. "If you disagree with him, they come down on you hard, and they try to suppress anybody with a different opinion."

"It's really alarming, they will do anything," Paul told host Laura Ingraham.

Paul hypothesized that the top medical bureaucrats thought, "Let's do everything we can to try to suppress his opinion."

The Republican senator from Kentucky mentioned damning emails that surfaced in December that show Collins instructing Fauci to carry out a "quick and devastating" takedown of an open letter published in 2020 that argued that COVID-19 lockdowns were counterproductive. The letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration was authored by three epidemiologists: Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., a professor and public health policy expert at Stanford University. Collins disparaged the three accomplished epidemiologists as "fringe" in an email.

Paul noted that the "three famous epidemiologists" had been suppressed.

"But one of the interesting things about this exposé is it also shows the harm of what government contractors do," Paul continued. "We knew they did this in other areas, but we didn't know it was happening in science."

Paul also shared a video on Twitter of Fauci touting immunity as superior to a vaccine when it comes to the flu.

In 2004, Fauci was on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program, when a 67-year-old caller from Minnesota asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases if she should get a flu shot if she already had the flu.

Fauci responded, "Well it's very difficult to figure out just on that base of information, what's gone on with the caller. There are some people who have bad reactions to, in vaccination, even if it's a killed vaccination. It is possible since the flu vaccine virus is grown in eggs, then you may have an allergy to one of those components, and what you were feeling was actually an allergic reaction."

Host Peter Slen asked if the woman should get a vaccination against the flu, to which Fauci replied, "Well no."

"If she got the flu for fourteen days, she's as protected as anybody can be, because the best vaccination is to get infected yourself," Fauci stressed. "If she really has the flu, if she really has the flu, she definitely doesn’t need a flu vaccine."

Fauci declared that the woman "doesn't need" the vaccination since "the most potent vaccination is getting infected yourself."

Of the resurfaced footage, Paul wrote: "Hmmm…Once upon a time Anthony Fauci could tell the truth…What happened?"

Hmmm\u2026Once upon a time Anthony Fauci could tell the truth\u2026What happened?https://twitter.com/claytravis/status/1509607256714878981\u00a0\u2026
— Rand Paul (@Rand Paul) 1648760110

Last month, Paul declared that he believes that over 95% of Americans have either "antibodies to the virus or antibodies to the vaccine," which he credits for why COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are down.

"That’s why we are doing better with this," Paul said. "We have developed immunity either from having the disease or being vaccinated, and that’s why we are doing better, in addition to the fact that the virus has mutated to a less virulent or less deadly form."

Paul then called Fauci a "menace."

"But he won't admit it because he’s so caught up in putting stickers on your floor, putting masks on your face, putting goggles on you," Paul exclaimed. "The guy is a menace, and he has not been right really about anything since the start of this."

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