The doctor who came in from the fringe

Jay Bhattacharya has been nominated by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health. During the Covid regime, Dr. Bhattacharya was relegated to the “fringe” by the likes of former NIH head Francis Collins and his NIAID colleague Anthony “fallacious” Fauci. John Tierney observes at City Journal that Jay-B is the doctor who came in from the fringe:

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.”

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”

TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) is a free-speech YouTube show and podcast. Hosts Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) believe in open, fact-based discussion of important and controversial issues. In the six-minute TRIGGERnometry clip below (full video here on YouTube and at the bottom), Dr. Bhattacharya assesses the damage done by the Covid regime. Toward the end he urges “some level of forgiveness” of those who inflicted it on us, “but not until we’ve had a solid understanding and acceptance that what we did was deeply wrong.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is one such malefactor. He declared an emergency and ruled Minnesota with an iron fist for 15 months. As Tierney put it in a 2021 City Journal essay, Walz willfully aggravated “the panic pandemic” (“Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus”) for his own benefit.

Walz relied on the panic to enhance his own power and in the event did immeasurable damage to those of us subject to it. As Dr. Bhattacharya suggests with his proviso, Walz and his ilk should at the least acknowledge their error and express a desire to make amends before receiving any meaningful level of forgiveness — which is never going to happen.

Below is the full TRIGGERnometry video of the interview with Jay-B. Even if it makes you angry all over again, as it did me, it is well worth your time.

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