The Media Research Center has long loved Jay Bhattacharya because serves as a politically correct “victim” to push right-wing anti-vaccines. Christine Salgado bestowed victimhood on him in a December 2022 post:
COVID-19 lockdown critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya revealed more details of Twitter’s censorship of him on Sunday, drawing praise from Twitter CEO Elon Musk for his “rigorous adherence to science.”
[…]Bhattacharya said pre-Musk Twitter placed him on a trends ”blacklist” his very first day on the platform in August 2021, probably due to his pinned tweet of the Great Barrington Declaration and general complaints users made to Twitter. The declaration, originally written by Bhattacharya and two other doctors in October 2020, opposes COVID-19 lockdown and masking measures and has since been signed by over 934,000 people, including 63,267 medical practitioners and scientists.
Social media companies censored the declaration because it contradicted the narrative that the COVID-19 science was “settled” and that all qualified doctors agreed on masking and lockdowns. Bhattacharya’s tweet of the declaration immediately marked him for Twitter targeting.
Salgado censored the fact that the Great Barrington Declaration was medically problematic because it irresponsibly embraced “herd immunity” at a time when COVID was killing thousands of people and it was unclear whether herd immunity would be effective against it (given that it’s now clear COVID vaccination needs to be administered on a regular basis like the flu vaccine, which means it isn’t very effective at all.
The defenses of Bhattacharya continued:
- Clay Waters huffed in a June 2023 article about “the Twitter blacklisting of Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for going against the “expert” trend demanding mandatory lockdowns and masking, a supposedly ‘extreme’ position now vindicated by science.” Waters offered no evidence that this is the case.
- Luis Cornelio groused in an August 2023 post that “Dr. Bhattacharya’s open letter against government-mandated lockdowns” — that is, Great Barrington Declaration — “has been censored at least twice.”
- David Searc asserted in a June 2024 post that “Bhattacharya was placed on a secret black list by Twitter because he posted content not consistent with lockdown narratives or guidelines during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
- Another June 2024 post, by Christian Baldwin, noted a interview Bhattacharya did with Reason magazine in which he “discussed the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, emphasizing the importance of preventing government censorship” — which Baldwin turned into self-promotion by claiming that the case “partially relied on research conducted by MRC.”
The MRC’s Dan Schneider gushed hard over Bhattacharya during an Aug. 30 interview:
Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most prominent health experts who came out against the government’s indiscriminate COVID-19 policies, minced no words when discussing rampant censorship targeting Americans.
During an interview on Friday’s installment of the MRC UnCensored podcast, Bhattacharya delivered a categorical rebuke of censorship, telling host and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider: “It’s so fundamentally un-American to censor speech.”
Bhattacharya, one of the architects of the Great Barrington Declaration, hinted that pulling back the curtain on the Censorship Industrial Complex “will lead to the death of it” and highlighted the urgent need for legislation to tackle the assault on free speech. “We need legislation, I think, to fix that. … I think there’s there’s work to do. But the forces of censorship in the United States are on the backheel, and we need to keep pushing really hard on it,” he said.
Writer Luis Cornelio made sure to burnish Bhattacharya’s victimhood credentials:
Bhattacharya can confidently speak on censorship as he and his ideas were targeted by social media platforms. According to MRC’s CensorTrack database, Bhattacharya was shadowed-banned by Twitter (now called X). Similarly, Facebook disabled the Great Barrington Declaration’s page, which exposed the imminent dangers of pandemic-related lockdowns.
“It was pretty terrible. It was like the entire sort of Censorship Industrial Complex machine was aimed at defaming me and anyone who agreed with me on, for instance, keeping schools open,” he recalled during the podcast.
No mention, apparently, of the declaration’s irresponsible advocacy of herd immunity when the science didn’t support it.
Unsurprisingly, this all led to Donald Trump nominating to head the National Institutes of Health. Salgado heavily gushed in a Dec. 2 post:
Trump named Stanford epidemiologist and staunch free speech advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead a major branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump cited Bhattacharya’s prestigious career and his role in formulating the much-censored, COVID-19-era Great Barrington Declaration (which critiqued lockdown policies), when he announced Tuesday, “I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health.” He added, “Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with [Health and Human Services Secretary nominee] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.” Bhattacharya gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was censored for his critiques of draconian COVID-19 policies.
Accepting the nomination, Bhattacharya tweeted, “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”
Unlike former NIH director Francis Collins, who insisted that supposed “misinformation” spreaders like Bhattacharya should be censored and “brought to justice,” Bhattacharya has a documented record of backing free speech.
No mention, of course, of the problematic aspects of the Great Barrington Declaration.