A deeply gratifying and wonderfully ironic story ran above the New York Times’ fold headlined, “Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H.” The sub-headline gloriously added, “As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers.”
It’s an out-of-the-park home run. I consider Jay to be a friend, even though we’ve never been in the same room together. Call it battlefield camaraderie. I first spoke with Jay in the summer of 2021 while assembling my first vaccine case. I needed unimpeachable experts to help me squash the notion the jabs were covid cure-alls, so the government could not meet the high standard for violating Florida’s constitutional right to privacy.
Remember the insanity of the summer of 2021, as the jab mandates began to take shape, and as mask mania continued slowly climbing toward its grotesque summit. Somebody in the resistance sent me Jay’s cell number, and explained he was a senior professor of health economics and epidemiology at Stanford, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
I don’t have to tell you that, as a small-firm lawyer from Gainesville, Florida, I thought the chances of getting help from someone of Jay’s prominence was a long shot, but I texted him anyway. I made my best pitch for why my case — the first case seeking a broad injunction against a vaccine mandate in the country — was a good candidate for his help.
To his everlasting credit, Jay immediately agreed to help. Not only that, he refused to take any payment for his time. After we spoke, I discovered he was also helping other lawyers, all across the country, at great professional risk and despite it making him a pariah among his colleagues.
Not only that, Jay kept showing up to help lawyers like me even though he faced scorn and derision from hostile judges. For instance, the Times’s story noted that, in 2021, Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee bashed Jay in a final order, officiously opining, “His demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda,” and piling on that the court was “simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya.”
In other words, Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw called Jay a liar. In writing. On the official record.
Those kinds of judicial digs can pile up, and they become part of a professional’s permanent record. But still Jay soldiered on. In October 2020, with two other sane scientists, Jay authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter (now signed by almost 1 million scientists and influencers) reasonably arguing for a focused protection strategy for vulnerable communities, instead of broad mandates and lockdowns.
Human coral snake and then-head of the National Institutes of Health Frances Collins* (*girl’s name) publicly labeled Jay and his co-signers as “fringe epidemiologists.” FOIA records show behind the scenes, cowardly Frances Collins and his top toady, the revolting human cockroach Fauci, together coordinated a secret “takedown” media campaign to smear Jay and destroy his reputation.
Amidst all that, Jay helped then-controversial Florida Governor DeSantis (“Death-Santis”) roll back ineffective and massively destructive covid policies, by appearing on Governor DeSantis’s “science panels,” which allowed the Governor to publicly consult scientists, in a brilliant political maneuver that defeated stupid claims the Governor was not “following the science.”
All of his pro-freedom and pro-science activism dearly cost Jay, whose reputation was slowly bleeding out through thousands of tiny invisible paper cuts, as corporate media whipped everything it could against the professor, trying to discredit and marginalize him. Last year, undaunted and unbeaten, Jay signed on for more, serving as a plaintiff in the “Twitter files” lawsuit against the federal government for pandemic censorship, enduring even more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Through the peaks and valleys of pandemic successes and setbacks, Jay and I have enjoyed several meaningful, man-to-man, and frank conversations. Jay is a humble, honest, incredibly giving person, always exuding calm, respectful courage and immediately capturing a room’s attention as the evident voice of reason. Jay is an all-in Christian who once sent me a Powerpoint on covid he prepared for his home church.
Four years ago, Frances Collins — as useless a bureaucrat as ever stepped — slandered accomplished Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” and tried to ruin his livelihood. Now, Frances Collins is unemployed, and is touring the podcast circuit with his guitar. And in a historic turnaround story for the ages resembling Biblical Joseph becoming Pharoah’s right-hand-man, Jay is taking Frances’ job.
“Experts agree,” the Times glumly admitted, that “a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.” And I, for one, cannot wait.
What a wonderful day!
