A faithful presence in national healthcare

Jay Bhattacharya was a smart teenager, and he knew it. Growing up in public housing in Massachusetts and raised by a woman from the slums of India, he was proud of how far his intelligence had taken him. When it came to measuring people’s value in society, he judged them based on their brainpower. The more they excelled at mathematics, science, and similar pursuits—all the things that he as a teenager happened to excel at himself—the higher they rose in his estimation. But that was before he became a Christian.

After a conversion experience in college, Bhattacharya started to see people differently. Today, his life’s work is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of society’s most vulnerable. As President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, he has been tapped to continue that work at the highest levels of the American healthcare system.

Trump’s Cabinet picks so far could be understatedly called a mixed bag, with plenty to give conservative Christians pause. However, there’s nothing but good to be said about Bhattacharya, both professionally and personally. A prominent target of sustained reputational attacks by the outgoing administration’s health czars, the professor, physician, and scientist arrives on a tidal wave of righteous celebration. His table-turning nomination has been praised not only by friends and colleagues but also by ordinary Americans to whom he gave hope that they weren’t alone—sometimes in person.

Bhattacharya has said that he’s not an activist by nature, but during the COVID years, one could say he had activism thrust upon him. It all began in the early days of 2020, when he spearheaded the nation’s first seroprevalence study in Santa Clara, Calif., and found a mortality rate from the coronavirus much lower than the one being widely repeated: only 0.2% versus 3% or 4%. Amid the ensuing backlash, Stanford University insisted on retesting the positive subjects with a new kit, then discredited the whole study with a false positive percentage Bhattacharya claims was based on a mathematical blunder (dividing by the total number of initially positive volunteers instead of by the entire sample size). When Bhattacharya pointed out the error, he was suppressed.

All that was just a warmup for October 2020, when Francis Collins infamously attempted to squelch the Great Barrington Declaration as the work of “fringe epidemiologists” like Bhattacharya and co-authors Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. Bhattacharya has joked that the open letter was “the least original thing I’ve ever worked on,” with the relatively modest thesis that it would be better to lift national lockdowns with “focused protection” for the vulnerable. But instead of opening up a healthy debate when it was most desperately needed, Collins and his colleagues chose to make their will gospel. Instead of trying to solve a scientific problem, they were trying to solve a PR problem.

Bhattacharya continued raising various objections to the received COVID policy wisdom after joining Twitter (now X) in the summer of 2021, with special concern for how children and the poor were being negatively affected. He quickly built a following, but Twitter management blacklisted him so that no one outside his silo could read his tweets. Eventually, he was locked out altogether. Elon Musk’s end-of-2022 takeover then catalyzed a shocking exposé of the censorship industrial complex that had kept the social media platform in lockstep with the federal government. Among the institutions deeply implicated in the coverup was Stanford, Bhattacharya’s own university.

Bhattacharya would work quietly behind the scenes to restore other X accounts that had suffered a similar fate. Meanwhile, he continued speaking and serving as an expert witness but without collecting fees, believing it was “not right” to take money for the work. In June, he added his name as a plaintiff in Murthy vs. Missouri (originally Missouri vs. Biden), in which two states and various social media users sued the federal government for a redress of their First Amendment grievances. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against them, though this analysis suggests the ruling was debatable.

To this day, Bhattacharya’s Wikipedia entry still contains Collins’ charge that the Great Barrington Declaration thesis was “a fringe notion,” along with other loaded language about his work. Someone noted the obvious contrast with Anthony Fauci’s hagiographical entry on the same platform. However, even The New York Times was forced to admit that Bhattacharya had gotten “some things right,” albeit still employing sleight of hand about what he allegedly got wrong.

Despite his experiences, Bhattacharya has consistently modeled distinctively Christian charity, both in public and behind closed doors. A source tells me how once, in conversation with a fellow “canceled” academic, he explained how his faith had enabled him to forgive his enemies. The other academic wasn’t a Christian but was deeply moved by this example of faith in action.

We shouldn’t cheer Cabinet picks merely because they’re anti-establishment. But Jay Bhattacharya is poised to do much more than just stick it to the old establishment. He’s poised to be an actually faithful presence in the halls of power. For Christians, that’s a cause for much rejoicing.