It's Time to Redefine "Fringe"
Critics of the rumored nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health need to check the election returns
Matt Taibbi
Nov 18, 2024
The Washington Post couldn’t get through an article about Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya without using the F-word. The sub-headline from Saturday read, “The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his “fringe” ideas on Covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.”
It couldn’t leave out the C-word, either:
[Bhattacharya’s] stances — and alliances — have also alienated him from many public health professionals, including on Bhattacharya’s own college campus…”We need to have an honest conversation about how a handful of prominent contrarian academics backed by corporate interests continue to tank evidence-backed policy, including COVID-19 protections,” Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who received her PhD in biology from Stanford this year, wrote last month…
If Donald Trump creates the position, I volunteer to be Secretary of Feeding People to Komodo Dragons. The first round of tossings into the lizard-pit will involve “experts” who still use grossly snobbish terms like “fringe” and “contrarian” to describe beliefs held by most of the population:
Racket readers are familiar with Stanford’s Bhattacharya, who played a role in the Twitter Files and went on to become a plaintiff in the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case. There’s probably no more visible symbol of the digital censorship era than Jay and co-plaintiffs Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty. Given that speech issues were reportedly right behind inflation among the top concerns of voters, it’s hard to see how anyone could keep throwing the “fringe” tag with a straight face.
Jay’s crime was conducting an early field study called “ COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California” that uncovered two surprises about what was then still a new pandemic story. The first was that far more people were already infected with Covid-19 in Santa Clara in early April, 2020 than was expected, as many as 50 to 85 times more. He also found the infection mortality rate of Covid-19 was far lower than authorities were suggesting, closer to 0.2% than the nightmare 3.4% number the WHO put out, and still lower for the healthy and non-elderly.
This led Jay to conclude that a) lockdowns and other interventions would not be likely to stop people from getting such a contagious disease, and b) the lower mortality rates for people outside of a few high-risk groups meant the costs of lockdowns probably outweighed benefits.
The country by now mostly agrees. In March, Harvard conducted a study of attitudes about Covid-19 policies. Fourteen percent believed Covid was only a threat “to the small share of people who were very old or frail.” The biggest group was the one Jay likely falls in: the 45% of people who believed Covid-19 a threat to “a lot of people, including people who were very old or frail AND those who had underlying medical conditions.” A smaller group of 37% characterized the disease as “a serious health threat to everyone.” Who are the “contrarians” in that distribution?
On lockdowns: after the initial panic, whenever the public was asked to make yes or no decisions about school closures, most said no. There was the 79% of parents of K-12 students who supported a return to in-person learning a year into the pandemic, and the 51% of Americans in 2022 who believed school closures were unnecessary. Even CNN, when referencing the 2022 poll, ran a headline story about how the coronavirus debate about school closures “ has hurt Democrats.” Even if you believed polls overcounted opposition to school closures by ten or even twenty percent, the remainder would still be a large percentage of Americans: hardly “fringe.”
Through the Trump era, “contrarian” was and is the most irritating of propaganda terms, implying acceptance of official views is the human animal’s natural orientation. The era saw broadsides against “ contrarian doctors” like Jay, while the New York Times derided their former reporter Alex Berenson in a “ Covid Contrarians Go Viral” piece. Once of America’s current crew of bêtes noires, Joe Rogan, is regularly derided for a willingness to “ absorb contrarian perspectives,” as if that were not the obvious mission of any talk show host, and the Stanford Daily in 2020 admonished its own professor in Jay for writing a “ contrarian Covid declaration.” The Post this weekend made sure to include that Rogan was among Bhattacharya’s “media cheerleaders,” to remind you that Bhattacharya codes as verboten even if nothing about his actual person seems objectionable.
Anyone who’s met Jay will report that he’s one of the world’s most affable people, a listener by nature and moderate not just in policy, but behavior and temperament. His elevation to this post represents a successful demonstration of the democratic instinct. He published research that coincided with the experiences of working parents, who saw that their kids seemed to be suffering more from not being at school than they appeared to from Covid-19, then voted accordingly.
To watch him now being trashed as a fringe kook and a tool of “ dark money” who just wanted to force Covid on the world to widen the labor pool would be shocking, except that no propaganda response can be a surprise. A paper with the Washington Post’s circulation issues would normally be careful before calling anyone else “fringe,” but these still aren’t normal times, are they?
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