Former NIH Director Francis Collins Called for a ‘Quick and Devastating Published Take Down’ of Jay Bhattacharya’s Common-Sense Great Barrington Declaration

The man President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was clearly considered to be a threat to the oppressive “follow the science” narrative of former NIH Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

With the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, Jay Bhattacharya, in conjunction with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, confronted the reality that the government’s COVID lockdown and mask-up policies were producing “devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

The Declaration was met with swift action by the COVID “lockdown consensus,” i.e., Collins and Fauci.

Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) yielded the following order from Collins to Fauci and Cliff Lane, NIAID deputy director for clinical research and special projects, with a copy to Lawrence Tabak, then-Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH.

Referencing the Declaration – now signed by over 900,000 medical and public health scientists, practitioners, and members of the general public – as a “proposal from … three fringe epidemiologists,” Collins wrote:

Hi Tony and Cliff,

See https://gbdeclaration.org/

This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?

Francis

What did Bhattacharya have to say about why he was bucking the policies of the government/Big Pharma/Big Tech complex which, to him and his colleagues, appeared a far cry from common-sense public health policy? He told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham at the time:

I think denying herd immunity is like denying gravity, gravity exists, and herd immunity exists. Many, many, many infections and viruses and pathogens are controlled in the population by herd immunity. Even if you have a vaccine, it’s still herd immunity that protects people against the virus or the pathogens. So, denying herd immunity is just – it’s like denying biology. It’s just not right.

…

The focus of lockdown strategy that we are proposing, where you protect the vulnerable and let people live their lives, will get us there more quickly with less loss of life and less damage to other aspects of public health that get ignored, I think, by these doctors that are essentially denying basic facts about biology.

Before Elon Musk took over the former Twitter platform, the release of some of the tech giant’s internal emails and documents revealed that Bhattacharya was among those whom it had censored.

Justin Hart, author of “Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane,” discussed in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal how the physician was labeled as “Trends Blacklist.”

Twitter had acted against Bhattacharya after he tweeted, in the summer of 2021: “Mass testing is an insidious form of lockdown by stealth.”

In his post, he linked to an article he wrote that focused on age-based mortality risks and natural immunity – clearly an idea that was abhorrent to the government/Big Pharma/Big Tech regime.

Hart observed:

Dr. Bhattacharya expressed shock on learning his account had been targeted for censorship. “The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt,” he tweeted. Remembering the adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Elon Musk, whose takeover of Twitter led to this and a series of other revelations, replied to Dr. Bhattacharya, “The Sun is coming.”

Since the start of the COVID pandemic policies, Bhattacharya has called out the tyranny of censorship and suppression of free speech. Weeks before Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris, he posted to his X account:

“I’m still having trouble processing the fact that an actual American presidential ticket, that might actually win office, openly embraces censorship, suppression of speech, and mass violation of the first amendment. And the old civil liberties groups are fine with it.”

Bhattacharya’s nomination by Trump drew praise from Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who said about the Stanford University professor:

I'm so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine.