How the once-blacklisted Dr. Jay Bhattacharya could help save healthcare

Now seated at the helm of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is poised to reshape not only the agency’s research priorities but the very culture that pushed him to the fringe.

Imagine spending your career studying infectious diseases, only to find that the real virus spreading uncontrollably is censorship. That was the reality for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist who committed the unpardonable sin of questioning the COVID-19 lockdown orthodoxy. His punishment? Digital exile, courtesy of Silicon Valley’s Ministry of Truth.

In December 2022, the Twitter Files exposed what many had long suspected: Twitter had quietly placed Bhattacharya’s account on a Trends Blacklist. This ensured that his posts, often critical of lockdowns and mask mandates, would never see the light of day on the platform’s trending topics. In other words, Twitter’s algorithm worked like a digital bouncer, making sure his dissenting opinions never made it past the velvet rope.

And Twitter wasn’t alone. Facebook, ever eager to please its government handlers, scrubbed the Great Barrington Declaration from its pages. That document, co-authored by Bhattacharya and other esteemed scientists, dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, locking down entire populations wasn’t the best strategy. Instead, it proposed focused protection for the most vulnerable while allowing the rest of society to function. For this, it was sent to the digital equivalent of a gulag.

These experiences took center stage during Bhattacharya’s Senate confirmation hearing for the directorship of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Republican lawmakers, who suddenly found themselves cast as the last defenders of free speech in scientific discourse, saw his nomination as a win.

During his testimony, Bhattacharya didn’t mince words. He detailed how the Biden administration played an active role in orchestrating the suppression of alternative views. It wasn’t enough for officials to push their own pandemic policies — they needed to ensure that no one, regardless of expertise, could challenge them in the public square.

The Science™ vs. The Science

Bhattacharya’s testimony laid bare an uncomfortable truth: the pandemic was a crisis of speech. “The root problem was that people who had alternative ideas were suppressed,” he told Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.). “I personally was subject to censorship by the actions of the Biden administration during the pandemic.”

In a functioning society, that statement would spark bipartisan outrage. Instead, it barely registered. The people who spent years chanting “trust the science” were never interested in science at all.

Real science thrives on debate, skepticism, and the understanding that no single expert — no matter how credentialed—holds absolute truth. But during COVID, science became The Science™ — a government-approved doctrine enforced by Silicon Valley moderators and federal bureaucrats. Deviate from it, and you weren’t just wrong. You were dangerous.

A government-sanctioned muzzle

Bhattacharya wasn’t silenced in some haphazard, accidental way. The Biden administration actively leaned on social media companies to “moderate” voices like his. In practice, that meant tech executives — most of whom couldn’t tell a virus from a viral tweet — decided which epidemiologists the public was allowed to hear.

He responded with a lawsuit against the administration, accusing it of colluding with Big Tech to crush dissent. But in a ruling as predictable as it was revealing, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, arguing that Bhattacharya and his fellow plaintiffs lacked standing. Meaning: Yes, the government may have pressured private companies into silencing critics, but unless you can prove exactly how that harmed you, don’t expect the courts to care.

The real role of science

Despite everything, Bhattacharya didn’t argue for scientists to dictate policy. Unlike the public health bureaucrats who spent the pandemic issuing commandments from their Zoom thrones, he made it clear: “Science should be an engine for freedom,” he said. “Not something where it stands on top of society and says, ‘You must do this, this or this, or else.’”

That distinction matters. Science informs, but policy is about trade-offs. The problem wasn’t that officials got things wrong — it’s that they refused to admit the possibility. Instead of allowing open debate, they silenced critics. Instead of acknowledging uncertainty, they imposed rules with absolute certainty.

Bhattacharya wasn’t censored because he was wrong. He was censored because he questioned people who couldn’t afford to be.

His confirmation hearing made one thing clear: science wasn’t about data. It was about power. And in Washington, power doesn’t like to be questioned.

Science, money and power

At the heart of the hearing was a fundamental question: Who controls science that people are allowed to talk about? The NIH, with its $48 billion budget, is less a research institution and more a financial leviathan, shaping the direction of American science through the projects it funds (or doesn’t) fund.

Bhattacharya’s nomination comes at a moment when the battle lines around scientific freedom, government intervention, and public trust in research are more entrenched than ever. The pandemic shattered the illusion that science was above politics. Instead, it exposed just how much political and corporate interests shape what counts as “settled” science.

The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife. The man once branded too dangerous for social media, blacklisted for questioning lockdowns, and effectively erased from mainstream discourse is now being handed a key role in the very government that tried to silence him. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, once forced to the margins, is now at the center of power.

A new administration has decided that maybe — just maybe — silencing dissenting scientists wasn’t the best pandemic strategy. And in a twist no Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to pitch for being too on-the-nose, Bhattacharya wasn’t being welcomed back into the conversation — he’s being put in charge of it.

Bhattacharya was confirmed following a party-line vote Tuesday evening. The decision came after a similarly partisan endorsement from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), clearing the final hurdle for President Donald Trump’s nominee.

Equally central to his testimony was Bhattacharya’s call for a sweeping shift in NIH priorities. He proposed a decentralization of research funding, stressing the need for greater inclusion of dissenting voices in the scientific process, an apparent rebuke of the consensus-driven culture that dominated during the pandemic. He emphasized targeting resources toward projects with a clear and measurable impact on public health, dismissing other NIH initiatives as “frivolous.”

Now seated at the helm of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is poised to reshape not only the agency’s research priorities but the very culture that pushed him to the fringe. His confirmation, hard-won and unapologetically political, is already shaking the scaffolding of a scientific establishment that long equated conformity with consensus.

Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.

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Health

Organ donation industry’s redefinitions of death threaten living people

Published on November 25, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Heidi Klessig, M.D.

Playing fast and loose with the definitions of death for the sake of organ donation must stop.

Another congressional committee is investigating more whistleblowers’ complaints regarding the organ transplantation industry. United States House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert are seeking answers from Carolyn Welsh, president and CEO of the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network (NJTO), regarding multiple allegations of legal and ethical violations on her watch.

The complaints include the horrific case of a “circulatory death” organ donor who reanimated prior to organ retrieval. Despite the fact that the patient had regained signs of life, NJTO executives actually directed frontline staff to continue the organ recovery process. (Thankfully, hospital personnel at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, refused this request.) NJTO is also accused of pressuring the families of potential donors by falsely implying the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles had registered a consent to donate when that was not known to be the case. NJTO apparently also continued to insist that people were registered donors even after they had removed their consent to donate from their driver’s licenses. The official complaint further states that NJTO allegedly tried to delete evidence pertaining to the committee’s investigation.

Since 1968, when 13 men at Harvard Medical School redefined “desperately injured” people as being dead enough to become organ donors, organ procurement has continued to push the boundaries of life and death in a never-ending quest for more organs. When the first and only multicenter prospective study of brain death discovered in 1972 that a brain death diagnosis did not invariably correlate with a diffusely destroyed brain, principal investigator Dr. Gaetano Molinari pointed out that “brain death” was a prognosis of death, and not death itself. Dr. Molinari wrote:

[D]oes a fatal prognosis permit the physician to pronounce death? It is highly doubtful whether such glib euphemisms as ‘he’s practically dead,’… ‘he can’t survive,’ … ‘he has no chance of recovery anyway,’ will ever be acceptable legally or morally as a pronouncement that death has occurred.

But despite Dr. Molinari’s doubts, history shows this is exactly what has been accepted, and the rising numbers of people who have been taken for organ harvesting while still alive bears this out. Even though “brain dead” TJ Hoover III was still looking around and visibly crying such that two doctors refused to remove his organs, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates ordered their staff to find another doctor to perform the procedure. “Circulatory death” donor Misty Hawkins was found to have a beating heart when her breastbone was sawed open for organ procurement. And Larry Black Jr. was rescued from the operating room table just minutes before having his organs removed, and went on to make a full recovery.

Given that we have been stretching the definitions of death for nearly 60 years, is it any wonder that organ procurement personnel appear to be thinking “he’s practically dead,” “he can’t survive,” “he has no chance of recovery anyway” as they push still-living people towards the operating room?

But it’s not just organ procurement teams that are pushing these new definitions of death. Just three weeks after failing in their attempts to broaden the legal definitions of death by revising the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) published a new brain death guideline that explicitly allows brain death to be declared in the presence of ongoing brain function. Since this obviously does not comply with the UDDA, which requires “the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain including the brain stem,” the AAN has been trying to get around the law by contacting state health departments, medical boards, medical societies, and hospital associations requesting that they acknowledge the AAN’s brain death guideline as the “accepted medical standards” for declaring neurological death.

The AAN has also just published a position statement of additional guidance on brain death discussing how to handle objections to the brain death diagnosis. Even though the AAN’s brain death guideline does not comply with U.S. law and has been proven to be unable to predict whether or not a brain injury is irreversible, the AAN still wants to make the use of their guideline mandatory. If a family’s objection to a brain death diagnosis cannot be overcome, the AAN says that life support may be unilaterally withdrawn – over the family’s objections. The AAN also says that clinicians are professionally obligated to make a brain death determination, and that they should be credentialed to do so according to the standards of the AAN guideline. Laughably, the AAN recommends the Neurocritical Care Society’s brain death determination course, which consists of a one-hour video, followed by unlimited attempts to correctly answer 25 questions, following which a certificate of completion can be had for as little as six dollars.

The Dead Donor Rule is an ethical maxim stating that people must neither be alive when organs are removed nor killed by the process of organ removal. Redefining neurologically injured people as being “brain dead” and redefining people who could still be resuscitated as being dead according to “circulatory death” standards have for too long allowed organ procurement teams to meet the letter of the Dead Donor Rule through sleight of hand. Playing fast and loose with the definitions of death for the sake of organ donation must stop. Patients with a poor prognosis must not be considered “dead enough” to become organ donors. People registering as organ donors must be given fully informed consent as to the risks involved.

Even utilitarian philosopher Dr. Peter Singer has called brain death an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact. Imposing mandates that force patients and doctors to accept these questionable ethical choices is NOT the best way to establish trust.

Alberta

Alberta introducing dual practice health care model to increase options and shorten wait times while promising protection for publicly funded services

Published on November 24, 2025

Government of Alberta

Enhancing access through dual practice

If passed, Bill 11, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), would modernize physician participation rules to give doctors flexibility to work in both the public system and private settings. Dual practice would allow physicians to continue providing insured services through the provincial health insurance plan while also delivering private services.

Alberta’s government has looked to proven models in other jurisdictions to guide the development of a model that strengthens access while safeguarding the public system. Dual practice exists in New Brunswick and Quebec and is widely used in countries with top-performing health systems, including Denmark, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Australia.

“For years, governments across Canada have tried to fix long wait times by spending more money, yet the problem keeps getting worse. Alberta will not accept the status quo. Dual practice gives us a practical, proven tool that lets surgeons do more without asking taxpayers to pay more. It means shorter waits, better outcomes and a stronger health system for everyone.”

Danielle Smith, Premier

If passed, this dual practice model would be closely monitored to protect Alberta’s public health care system. The government, for example, would ensure that dual practice physicians maintain separate records for the services they provide, so no public funding subsidizes private services.

Bill 11 would include provisions to restrict participation, which could include:

Mandating that surgeons in dual practice must perform a dedicated number or ratio of surgeries in the public system to be eligible to perform surgeries privately.
Restricting specialties to public practice if shortages would compromise public care.
Potentially restricting private practice to evenings, weekends or to underutilized rural sites, as required.

Alberta’s government remains committed to its public health guarantee: No Albertan will ever have to pay out of pocket to see their family doctor or to get the medical treatment they need. These proposed changes comply with the Canada Health Act.

Alberta’s government is also committed to getting Alberta’s dual practice model right and to taking a thoughtful approach to ensure the best path forward. At this time, family medicine providers will not be eligible to be flexible participants within this new model. The priority is to focus on making sure all Albertans have access to a primary care provider. Additionally, surgeries for life-threatening conditions such as cancer and emergency procedures will remain entirely publicly funded with no private option available.

“Albertans are waiting too long for the health care they need, so we are taking bold and decisive action to shorten wait times, increase access and give Albertans more choices over their own health care. At the same time, we will continue building a strong public health system where no one is denied access to the services they need because of an inability to pay.”

Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services

If passed, Bill 11 would create new options for doctors and patients. It would expand Alberta’s health system to provide more care by allowing doctors to treat more patients. Each time a patient chooses to pay for care in a private clinic or a clinic operating on evenings and weekends, for example, resources would be freed up so another patient could receive publicly funded care. This proposed new model would also support physician attraction and retention.

“As dual practice enhances flexibility for Albertans, physicians and medical professionals, safeguards will be established and utilized to protect and grow hospital and public health system capacity.”

Matt Jones, Minister of Hospital and Surgical Health Services

“Albertans deserve choice and timely access to safe care, whether in a private or public setting. With the creation of the dual practice model, we can extend treatment options to patients while helping hospitals focus their resources on the highest-acuity patients.”

Dr. Brett Habijanac, doctor of medicine in dentistry and fellow of the Royal College of Dentists of Canada

“I believe all options to improve access to health care for Albertans should be on the table. Therefore, the government’s dual practice legislation is a welcome option. Appropriate guardrails must be in place to ensure the spirit of the Canada Health Act is maintained.”

Dr. Emmanuel Gye, family physician

Quick facts

Physicians would continue to bill the provincial plan for public services and may offer private services separately.
Physicians may still choose to work entirely in public or entirely in private settings.

Proposed legislation would modernize physician rules, drug coverage, food safety and health cards while improving oversight and administration in Alberta’s health system.

If passed, Bill 11, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), would amend several pieces of legislation to reflect Alberta’s evolving health needs, strengthen the ability of health care professionals to deliver care and improve accountability and efficiency across the system.

“This legislation represents a new era for health care in Alberta. By putting patients first and supporting providers, we are improving transparency, flexibility and access. With modernized physician rules, stronger drug coverage, enhanced food safety and better health information sharing, Albertans will have world-class care.”

Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services

Protecting drug coverage for Albertans

If passed, amendments would improve coordination between public and private drug plans, ensuring taxpayer-funded programs are used efficiently and remain available for those who need them most.

Private plans would become the first payer for individuals who have them, with public programs acting as a safety net. The legislation would also protect older Albertans by ensuring employers cannot reduce or terminate health benefits for employees aged 65 and older who remain actively employed.

“People shouldn’t be punished for getting older – it’s that straightforward. With this legislation, we’re protecting Albertans by ensuring employers can no longer kick folks off their health benefits when they need them most.”

Jason Nixon, Minister of Assisted Living and Social Services

Ensuring consistent billing and remuneration practices

Alberta’s government is also proposing amendments to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Act to ensure health care providers and clinics are not engaging in improper billing practices and making inappropriate claims. The proposed amendments would strengthen accountability and transparency while generating cost savings by introducing penalties for systemic non-compliance.

Strengthening food safety in Alberta

If passed, amendments to the Public Health Act and related regulations would strengthen food safety across all establishments by improving training for staff, increasing transparency of inspection results and giving inspectors new tools for oversight and investigation.

The changes would also update the Food Regulation, Food Retail and Food Services Code, Institutions Regulation and create a new Public Health Investigator Regulation, ensuring consistent standards, better reporting and increased public confidence in Alberta’s food safety system.

“Enhancing food safety in Alberta is an important step to making sure Albertans have the safeguards and protections in place to keep them healthy and well. If passed, these amendments to the Public Health Act will ensure food establishments are following best practices and that enforcement measures are in place to support proper food safety.”

Dr. Sunil Sookram, interim chief medical officer of health

Improving health cards and information sharing

If passed, the legislation would create a new process for health card renewal, prevent card misuse and allow cards to be seized or suspended if tampered with. The changes would also permit information sharing with the ministries of Technology and Innovation and Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction to support continued efforts to modernize health cards.

Amendments to the Health Information Act would support a more integrated health care system and seamless patient experience to help improve care for Albertans who are accessing the system.

It would also add new authority to enable health foundations to better connect with patients to support innovation and advancement of care in their community in an appropriate manner, in accordance with the requirements set out in regulations.

“Albertans generously support enhancements to health care delivery, innovation and research in their communities each year. We look forward to working with our health partners across the continuum to better communicate with grateful patients. With these changes, we will join other Canadian jurisdictions in connecting patients with health foundations in their community while ensuring the strongest protection of Albertans’ private health data.”

Sharlene Rutherford, president and CEO, Royal Alexandra Hospital Foundation

Advancing a new era of health care

If passed, proposed amendments to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Act and the Provincial Health Agencies Act would support operational changes to implement previously announced objectives like transitioning Alberta Health Services to a hospital-based acute care service provider.

The proposed amendments would also result in the repealing of the Hospitals Act, as all hospital governance and operational provisions would be moved into the Provincial Health Agencies Act.

New dual practice model to increase access and choice

The Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2) includes proposed amendments to the Alberta Health Care Insurance Act that would modernize how physicians participate in Alberta’s publicly funded health insurance plan. The changes would introduce a new dual practice model, giving physicians greater flexibility to provide care in both public and private settings while maintaining safeguards to ensure Albertans continue to have access to publicly funded health services.