The Price Of The Lockdown – OpEd

“The COVID era, to me, represented a fundamental break in my understanding of how science and public health operated.” That was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. With memories of that same era, the people have good reason to hear him out. 

“I thought public health had the best interest of the working class, the poor, in mind,” the NIH director explained. “And the COVID era shattered my illusions on all of those fronts. In particular, what happened in March of 2020 represented a fundamental break that public health authorities had with the public.” In the face of deep uncertainty, “something had to be done to guide people,” but the effort went wrong. 

“What you’re not allowed to do is assume that the thing you’re doing is going to work,” the NIH director explained. “You’re also not allowed to assume that the thing that you’re doing will have no harms. So you close the schools. You know for certain that you’re going to harm a generation of children. That’s a certainty.” 

Dr. Bhattacharya saw the need for “honest calculations” and “you could see the relative risk really easily in the data. It was really older people that were at high risk of dying from the disease. So that key epidemiological fact was known, I’d say, by January 2020.” The infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was “much lower than we thought.” Dr. Bhattacharya assumed that would change the approach but “instead, I faced, essentially, attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.”

Targeting the Dissenters

In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), former NIH director Francis Collins called Dr. Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist”. It tasked Fauci to attack the Great Barrington Declaration. Bhattacharya co-authored that declaration with other medical scientists, most, if not all, more qualified epidemiologists than Fauci and Collins. 

Dr. Bhattacharya called for “a scientific debate and discussion,” but instead, “the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing.” And that was bad news for the people. 

“If all of the basic promises that we have about our civil liberties are premised on there not being uncertainty over the spread of an infectious disease,” the NIH director said, “then you just don’t have a free country.” That is Dr. Bhattacharya’s description of white coat supremacy, rule by medical bureaucrats who never face the voters and are seldom, if ever, held accountable. In the current era, the politician most dedicated to rigid bureaucratic rule is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

In 2020, Gov. Newsom imposed the most draconian COVID-19 regime, with shelter-at-home orders, school lockdowns, and rigid rules for family gatherings. “Don’t forget to keep your maskon in between bites,” said the governor, who partied sans mask with lobbyists at the upscale French Laundry.  

In a June 2020 appearance with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gov. Newsom said, “If you can’t practice physical distancing, are you practicing love?” During the COVID era, by all appearances, Gov. Newsom never contacted Dr. Bhattacharya, then a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and never endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration. In the current era, the governor’s stance has not changed. 

In 2025, California’s Department of Public Health maintained that infants and toddlers were“higher-risk” individuals and called for the same vaccine requirements, with no attention to possible side effects. Gov. Newsom set out to, in effect, create a new Centers for Disease Control in an alliance of western states. 

The governor hired public health officials who had been dismissed from the CDC, allegedly “politicized” in the Trump administration. After the administration cut loose from the World Health Organization, Gov. Newsom did his best to keep California attached to the globalist bureaucracy. 

The NIH

Dr. Fauci, a big fan of the WHO, maintained that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. Others saw the source as a lab leak, and as Dr. Bhattacharya told Ross Douthat, “If you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain.” The NIH director will double down on replication, “essentially democratization of who gets to decide what’s true and false in science,” and as such, “a second scientific revolution.”

Dr. Bhattacharya has eliminated a huge conflict of interest by removing Christine Grady, Dr. Fauci’s wife, from her post as chief bioethicist of the NIH Clinical Center. The NIH also cut loose Jeanne Marrazzo, Dr. Fauci’s successor at NIAID. 

On his last day in office, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci without indicating any crime he had committed. As Dr. Bhattacharya sees it, if our civil liberties depend on unelected bureaucrats who shun debate, force draconian polices on the people, and disregard possible harm, “then you don’t have a free country.” That’s something to remember moving forward.

• This article was also published by the Independent Institute