"Bad news for public health": Jay Bhattacharaya, Trump's pick to lead NIH, got COVID-19 all wrong
SalonBy most accounts, President-elect Donald Trump bungled the federal response to COVID-19, publicly downplaying concern about a virus that he privately admitted was “deadly stuff.” “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear,” Trump said in Feb. 2020, at the same time he was admitting to journalist Bob Woodward that the virus was spreading fast and was more lethal than “even your strenuous flus.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya, Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health and oversee some $47 billion in research funding, agreed with Trump at the time; the public version, at least. “If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified,” Bhattacharaya wrote. “But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise — and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” Bhattacharaya argued that public health experts were almost certainly overstating the danger of the novel coronavirus, suggesting the fatality rate was far below what we were being told. But a 2023 study published by The Lancet found that state governments’ “uses of protective mandates were associated with lower infection rates, as were mask use, lower mobility, and higher vaccination rate, while vaccination rates were associated with lower death rates.” And while Florida had a lower death rate than some blue states, a lead author of the study noted that was because Floridians continued to follow best practices — wearing masks, avoiding public gatherings — even after their political leaders began telling them not to.
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