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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The Canadian Medical Association’s inexplicable stance on pediatric gender medicine

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The Canadian Medical Association’s inexplicable stance on pediatric gender medicine

Published on June 16, 2025

Todayville

By Dr. J. Edward Les

The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide from its shelves — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs

Physicians have a duty to put forward the best possible evidence, not ideology, based treatments

Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it, along with three Alberta doctors, had filed a constitutional challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26 “to protect the relationship between patients, their families and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions.”

Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16; it also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18).

The unprecedented CMA action follows its strongly worded response in February 2024 to Alberta’s (at the time) proposed legislation:

“The CMA is deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care, including the Alberta government’s proposed restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for pediatric transgender patients.”

But here’s the problem with that statement, and with the CMA’s position: the evidence supporting the “gender affirmation” model of care — which propels minors onto puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and in some cases, surgery — is essentially non-existent. That’s why the United Kingdom’s Conservative government, in the aftermath of the exhaustive four-year-long Cass Review, which laid bare the lack of evidence for that model, and which shone a light on the deeply troubling potential for the model’s irreversible harm to youth, initiated a temporary ban on puberty blockers — a ban made permanent last December by the subsequent Labour government. And that’s why other European jurisdictions like Finland and Sweden, after reviews of gender affirming care practices in their countries, have similarly slammed the brakes on the administration of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to minors.

It’s not only the Europeans who have raised concerns. The alarm bells are ringing loudly within our own borders: earlier this year, a group at McMaster University, headed by none other than Dr. Gordon Guyatt, one of the founding gurus of the “evidence-based care” construct that rightfully underpins modern medical practice, issued a pair of exhaustive systematic reviews and meta analyses that cast grave doubts on the wisdom of prescribing these drugs to youth.

And yet, the CMA purports to be “deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care,” which begs the obvious question: Where, exactly, is the evidence for the benefits of the “gender affirming” model of care? The answer is that it’s scant at best. Worse, the evidence that does exist, points, on balance, to infliction of harm, rather than provision of benefit.

CMA President Joss Reimer, in the group’s announcement of the organization’s legal action, said:

“Medicine is a calling. Doctors pursue it because they are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients. When a government bans specific treatments, it interferes with a doctor’s ability to empower patients to choose the best care possible.”

Indeed, we physicians have a sacred duty to pursue the well-being of our patients. But that means that we should be putting forward the best possible treatments based on actual evidence.

When Dr. Reimer states that a government that bans specific treatments is interfering with medical care, she displays a woeful ignorance of medical history. Because doctors don’t always get things right: look to the sad narratives of frontal lobotomies, the oxycontin crisis, thalidomide, to name a few.

The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: it illustrates what happens when a government drags its heels on necessary action. Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide, given to pregnant women for morning sickness, from its shelves, three months after it had been banned everywhere else — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs, along with other severe anomalies. It’s a shameful chapter in our medical past, but it pales in comparison to the astonishing intransigence our medical leaders have displayed — and continue to display — on the youth gender care file.

A final note (prompted by thalidomide’s history), to speak to a significant quibble I have with Alberta’s Bill 26 legislation: as much as I admire Premier Danielle Smith’s courage in bringing it forward, the law contains a loophole allowing minors already on puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to continue to take them. Imagine if, after it was removed from the shelves in 1962, government had allowed pregnant women already on the drug to continue to take thalidomide. Would that have made any sense? Of course not. And the same applies to puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones: they should be banned outright for all youth.

That argument is the kind our medical associations should be making — and would be making, if they weren’t so firmly in the grasp, seemingly, of ideologues who have abandoned evidence-based medical care for our youth.

J. Edward Les is a Calgary pediatrician, a senior fellow with the  Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy,  and co-author of “Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy: A Comparison of Transgender Medical Policy for Minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe.” 

Health

RFK Jr. purges CDC vaccine panel, citing decades of ‘skewed science’

Published on June 14, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Robert Jones

RFK Jr.’s HHS has removed all Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices members in an effort to reset public confidence in vaccine oversight.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dismissed every member of the CDC’s top vaccine advisory panel, citing what he described as a “decades” of “conflicts of interest” and “skewed science” in the vaccine regulatory system.

RFK Jr.’s abrupt decision to “retire” all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday and confirmed by HHS shortly thereafter.

The move marks the most sweeping reform to federal vaccine policy in years and follows months of internal reviews and mounting public skepticism.

Kennedy accused the ACIP of being “little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” claiming “it has never recommended against a vaccine.”

“The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies,” Kennedy wrote. “This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.”

ACIP holds the power to influence which vaccines are recommended by the CDC and covered by insurers. But according to Kennedy, it has failed in its duty to protect the public.

He cited multiple government investigations—dating back to 2000 and 2009—finding that ACIP members were routinely advising on products from pharmaceutical firms with which they had financial ties. Committee members were also issued conflict-of-interest waivers from the CDC.

Kennedy pointed to the 1997 vote approving the Rotashield vaccine – later withdrawn for causing severe bowel obstructions in infants – as a case study in regulatory failure. Four of the eight members who voted for it had financial stakes in rotavirus vaccines under development.

He explained “retiring” the 17 members, “some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration,” by saying that without such a move, “the Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority” until 2028.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has already halted recommendations for routine COVID-19 shots for healthy children and pregnant women and cancelled COVID-era programs to fast-track new vaccines.

It remains unclear who will replace the outgoing ACIP members, though HHS confirmed the committee will still meet later this month, now under new leadership.

“The new members won’t directly work for the vaccine industry,” he promised. “They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry—unafraid to ask hard questions.”