The Most Perilous Choice by Trump? Jay Bhattacharya
If I had to single out one individual from the eclectic mix of nepotistic anomalies, eerie figures, second-tier celebrities, misguided souls, fanatic extremists, and blunderers that are set to populate President Donald Trump’s closest group of advisers, cronies, and sycophants, I’d choose the one with the highest potential for harm. Indeed, Trump’s initial team features a cast that might make your skin crawl—characters frightening enough to make you spit out your coffee or nervously check the firearm hidden under your jacket during a diner meeting about detention camps and rolling back environmental protections. It’s a daunting task to pinpoint the worst among these unsavory characters.
Among them are a serial animal killer, a less-charismatic clone of Reinhard Heydrich, and a group of enthusiasts cheering on environmental destruction. Within Trump’s cabinet selections, there’s a man with a bizarre affinity for bear flesh and whale remains, alongside a disturbing desire to resurrect diseases like smallpox and polio. Yet, it takes more than a yearning for the ailments of yesteryears to truly alarm me. It’s somewhat ironic that the most seemingly upright, polished, well-qualified, and mild-mannered individual from this gallery of infernal creatures strikes me as the most frightening. Nothing is quite as terrifying as a murderer who comes across as the boy next door. Imagine someone like Ted Bundy serving in a Trump administration.
I must highlight Jay Bhattacharya (Trump’s pick to replace Francis Collins as the director of The National Institutes of Health) as the standout horror from this group of ethical aberrations and obsequious flatterers. Bhattacharya could easily pass as harmless if he showed up at your doorstep handing out brochures—I’d readily accept copies of The Watchtower and Awake from such a benign-seeming individual. Most parents would be pleased if their daughter introduced him as a suitor. Surprisingly, he even has a following among some who are considered left-leaning, including fans like Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, and you could add Russell Brand to that list. Bhattacharya is often associated with free speech issues—remember, Twitter once silenced this seemingly sincere doctor. Jacobin magazine, back in 2020, conducted a gentle interview with one of Bhattacharya’s ideological allies, Martin Kulldorff. Sometimes, on the left, we seem more concerned about a killer’s right to free speech than the danger he poses.
Bhattacharya’s platform was never truly about free speech; it was about amplifying the corporate desire to profit, even at the cost of human lives.
The concept of free speech has misled many well-intentioned people, despite its diminished significance in a media landscape dominated by wealth. Bhattacharya has been portrayed by both right-wing extremists and their enablers as a challenger to the formidable “deep state,” silenced for his audacity.
You may recall that this Stanford Professor of Medicine co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. This right-leaning COVID-19 strategy benefited from limitless funding from the oil industry and aimed to gather academic mercenaries to deceive the public. Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research—a Koch Network affiliate based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bolstered by substantial stock trading funds—must have been confident in the public’s tendency to overlook details. Pre and post-pandemic, Bhattacharya has maintained fellowships and affiliations with The Hoover Institute, The Epoch Times, Hillsdale College, and The Brownstone Institute, the latter being a faux grassroots organization sporting a Brooklyn aesthetic but operating out of Austin, Texas.
This offshoot of the Great Barrington Declaration—another brainchild of the indefatigably promiscuous, Koch-linked Jeffrey Tucker—focuses on downplaying COVID-19 and spreading anti-vaccine propaganda, while occasionally dabbling in climate change denial. Investigative journalists Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch exposed that the Brownstone Institute is largely financed by undisclosed sources. To grasp the absurdity of Bhattacharya’s stance, consider his statement in a 2022 interview on The Hoover Institute’s website:
It’s a disaster that it’s become a partisan issue. Public health, when it becomes partisan, is a failed public health.
If there’s one skill essential for a fascist accomplice, it’s a complete lack of self-awareness, irony, and hypocrisy. I’m reminded of Rudolf Hoss—the notorious Auschwitz commandant—who noted in his autobiography (compiled under British custody before his execution) that his administration was successful due to the cooperation between staff and prisoners, seemingly unable to grasp the vastly different stakes for victims and perpetrators. Similarly, Bhattacharya seems oblivious to how his narrative might appear blatantly illogical—how can someone so deeply embedded in the Koch Network claim to be a victim of partisan medical narratives?
Bhattacharya’s take on the GBD is essentially a libertarian view masquerading as public health policy. Public health under a libertarian guise is a glaring contradiction—the role Bhattacharya is poised to play in a fascist regime is one he has already performed with disturbing efficacy: step aside and pretend the mounting casualties are sacrifices at the altar of freedom.
The libertarian metaphor is notably flexible, akin to a stretchable pair of pants—it fits all situations. Inaction is always justified as beneficial to human welfare. The climate self-regulates—”drill, baby, drill.” Firearms require no oversight—the “good guy with a gun” myth supposedly balances the scales. Bhattacharya, along with Gupta and Kulldorff, distilled the libertarian essence of the COVID-19 narrative—the pandemic would naturally dissipate through herd immunity. The directive for government health agencies was essentially to perform magic and vanish. And that’s precisely what Bhattacharya will do, render healthcare as elusive as a magician’s disappearing act. His function is one of absence, renunciation, withdrawal—but fundamentally one of corporate loyalty, privatization, and enabling profit-driven medical entities to prey on an ailing populace.
The entire premise of the GBD—herd immunity—could be summarized by a child in seconds: treat the pandemic as a casual walk in the park and, voilà, herd immunity achieved! There was a slight nod to “focused protection” for the elderly and vulnerable, including a suggestion that they have their groceries delivered, but no mention of who would bear the costs. Consider that roughly 40% of Americans suffer from obesity, a significant risk factor for COVID-19 mortality, not to mention those affected by smoking, lead and mercury exposure, and the generally poor health of a nation overdosed on high fructose corn syrup and underserved by medical insurance. What you won’t find in the GBD are strategies like contact tracing, isolation, support for workers, mask mandates, and care for the infected—measures that countries like South Korea implemented to dramatically reduce the impact of COVID-19 compared to the U.S. Interestingly, Bhattacharya later backtracked on “herd immunity” in a Salon interview, claiming it was all about focused protection.
Despite being censored, Bhattacharya, the so-called truth-teller, is now set to lead the very agency he accuses of suppression. The reality is more complex. Bhattacharya and his medically credentialed cohorts enjoyed a larger platform than even former Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci. With Trump’s appointment of Scott Atlas to his COVID-19 Task Force, the GBD nearly became the unofficial blueprint for U.S. policy.
According to The Lancet, around 40% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths were preventable—that’s about half a million lives that could have been saved with proper adherence to pandemic protocols. How many of these deaths can be directly attributed to Bhattacharya and the GBD’s influence? While I can’t provide an exact number, when you consider all the sinister, unqualified, bizarre, and distorted figures steering Trump’s administration through turbulent times, none—not Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Kari Lake, Jared Kushner, Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone else—can be linked to the immense scale of suffering that Jay Bhattacharya has ushered into history.
This is how Benjamin Mateus of the World Socialist Web Site described the GBD:
The AIER, a libertarian think-tank, which claims to champion “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is involved in a highly reactionary, anti-working-class, and anti-socialist campaign. The declaration, partially funded by the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, who organized a private gathering of scientists, economists, and journalists to lend a veneer of credibility to the deadly declaration and promote herd immunity as a global policy response to the pandemic.
Derrick Z. Jackson characterized the GBD as a strategy for “herding people to slaughter.” If anyone disputes my choice of Jay Bhattacharya as Trump’s most malevolent appointee, consider this: when have Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tulsi Gabbard ever led people to such a dire fate?
It’s true that other despicable sociopaths will scramble for influence under Trump. Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum, poised to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior respectively, may one day be responsible for more deaths than the hundreds of thousands tentatively linked to Bhattacharya. Indeed, the mass execution of the natural world will coincide with our dismantled, privatized healthcare system. Imagine living downstream from an industrial pig slaughterhouse, without health insurance, and with no public healthcare funding.
Zeldin, Burgum, and Bhattacharya might best be seen as heralds of the grim reaper, or perhaps you’d rather envision them as scarecrows, mannequins, or inanimate props—soulless entities that fulfill our darkest projections.
Bhattacharya was never genuinely concerned with free speech; his real agenda was to empower corporate interests bent on profiteering from public misfortune. Bhattacharya lamented school closures but failed to acknowledge the six million U.S. children potentially devastated by long COVID.
As wildfires transform Los Angeles into a charred wasteland, and Trump’s policies aim to frack and drill until the planet reaches a state resembling the Permian extinction event, be mindful that the lifeless figures populating Trump’s administration will do no more to ease your suffering than a collection of cardboard boxes in an Amazon warehouse. If we seek relief, we must engage in unprecedented acts of resistance.
One final thought—consider the image below and ask yourself…
Does this evoke concerns about the suppression of free speech, or does it remind you that the fossil fuel industry controls our future?
