Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism

My YouTube channel is a reliable history of the pandemic. The NY Times is not.

The post Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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The NY Times recently published a lengthy interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya titled A Plan to Restore Trust in Science From a ‘Fringe Epidemiologist, which Dr. David Gorksi discussed in his article Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay Wants to Turn NIH Into the “Research arm” of MAHA. However, Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t become Podcast Jay the moment he was sworn into the NIH. He’s been podcasting constantly for 6 years now, and I’ve saved a lot of it. Here, I will share 5 thoughts on Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent interview, using his own words to show how the NY Times is complicit in not just pandemic revisionism, but also the MAHA attacks on science and medicine.

1. The Interview Was Revisionist History, Predictably

Today, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that his 2020 pandemic vision merely opposed lockdowns, a word that appeared 11 times in the NY Times interview, and school closures, a word that appeared 9 times. In reality, Dr. Bhattacharya believed that COVID would kill 20,000-40,000 Americans and therefore wondered if controlling it was “really worth it to suppress the economy.” Watch for yourself.

Notably, the word “immunity” was absent from the NY Times interview. However, a quick reading of the Great Barrington Declaration shows that it was all about herd immunity via natural immunity, and Dr. Bhattacharya spoke about this often in 2020. Watch for yourself.

Dr. Bhattacharya felt that the best way to reach herd immunity was to let countless millions of people “face the risk of the disease” in October 2020, just 2 months before vaccines arrived. Watch for yourself.

To numb people to the virus and further his pro-infection agenda, Dr. Bhattacharya spread copious disinformation in 2020, claiming that COVID’s risk kicked in at age 70 and that the flu killed more children than COVID, even though the opposite was true. Watch for yourself.

This is just a small sample of Dr. Bhattacharya’s disinformation in 2020, though the NY Times didn’t mention any of it.

2. Dr. Bhattacharya Knows How to Destroy Trust, Not Rebuild It

The main theme of the NY Times interview was about trust, who broke it and how to restore it. It opened with this statement by Mr. Douthat:

I want to start with a general diagnosis of the collapse of public trust in the medical establishment in America and how I think the Covid-19 pandemic played into it.

Dr. Bhattacharya himself said:

I just want to make sure people understand that I don’t want the public health authorities to be discredited permanently. I want reform of the public health authorities so that they become worthy of trust.

Of course, Dr. Bhattacharya was the “medical establishment”. He advised Presidents and Governors. He testified before Congress and was omnipresent in the right-wing disinformation media echo chamber. He was a pandemic celebrity who was everywhere, except hospitals, and he used his megaphone to spread distrust of scientists and doctors, claiming that they were liars and part of a “COVID cartel”. Watch for yourself.

Elsewhere, Dr. Bhattacharya endorsed the myth that hospitals and doctors were paid to put COVID on death certificates and therefore the death toll could not be trusted. Watch for yourself.

Dr. Bhattacharya made multiple emotionally manipulative propaganda videos where he warned that measures to stop people from dying of COVID were evidence of a “biosecurity state”. Watch for yourself.

To this day, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that “the engines of science were used for social control”, and this was “evil”. Watch for yourself.

Though the NY Times didn’t tell its readers, Dr. Bhattacharya spent 6 years relentlessly claiming that scientists and doctors were tyrants and liars. His disingenuous blathering about repairing trust today is pure hot dog meme guy.

3. Pandemic Revisionism Is a Pretext for MAHA Vandalism

While keeping an accurate history of the pandemic is worthwhile in its own right, this deliberate COVID revisionism serves a valuable purpose for MAHA. By constantly using the words lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates, as Dr. Bhattacharya made sure to do in the NY Times interview, Kennedy and his crew seek to justify their vandalism today. For example, Dr. Bhattacharya claims that lockdowns from spring 2020 are the reason the US is withdrawing from the WHO in 2026. Watch for yourself.

He also claimed that mandates are part of why he cancelled research into mRNA technology. Watch for yourself.

By enabling pandemic revisionism, the NY Times is also enabling MAHA destruction today.

4. “Bhattacharya should not be in charge of any scientific organization.”

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