Of all Donald Trump’s spicy picks for government, the wisest, in my view, is Jay Bhattacharya. The unassuming Stanford professor and famed lockdown sceptic might not come with an army of wellness bros, like RFK Jnr. He might not be as wisecracking as the state-dismantling DOGE double act of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And his presence in the corridors of power is unlikely to freak out the deep state as much as, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s. And yet he will bring something precious to the second Trump administration, a virtue that is as essential as it is rare: the art of doubt.
This week, Bhattacharya gave his last health economics lecture to his Stanford students before he heads to Bethesda in Maryland to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dickens himself would have struggled to conjure up such a reversal of fortunes. For four, long years Bhattacharya was shamed as a scientific heretic. His blasphemy was to question lockdown. To give impious voice to his honestly held belief that it was wrong to lock down the entire population in response to Covid-19. For this, he was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, a threat to life itself, just as past heretics were branded the polluters of men’s souls and warpers of men’s minds whose ideas might even kill.
Yet here he is, in 2024, off to run the US government’s public-health research agency. The very agency whose aloof boffins and smug bureaucrats joined in the witch-hunting of him in the Covid era. The Hill calls it ‘the right kind of revenge’. For in appointing Bhattacharya to the NIH, Trump isn’t just flipping a fake-tanned middle finger at ‘the libs’. No, he’s handing the NIH to someone who is ‘eminently qualified’ to run it – Bhattacharya has been an esteemed professor of medicine for years – while also ‘replacing the arrogant, believe-our-science elitists’ with ‘a person they regularly disparaged’. Bhattacharya is being rewarded for his heresy, and it is richly deserved.
We should remind ourselves of the censorious lunacy that ruled in the Covid years. Bhattacharya’s thoughtcrime was to pen the Great Barrington Declaration along with two other scientists worried about lockdown: Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration’s proposal was fresh and modest: that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be preferable to blanket shutdowns of society. Yet if you went by the elites’ frothing response to the declaration, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Bhattacharya and Co had proposed that every Covid-addled youth snog the nearest 80-year-old.
The media raged. The declaration is ‘unscientific’, wailed the New York Times. Big talk from a paper that gladly refers to men who murder women as ‘she’. There was sly censorship of the declaration online. The top charge against Bhattacharya and his colleagues was that they were ‘sow[ing] doubt’. The British Medical Journal actually used those words. It branded the three dissenters ‘merchants of doubt’. As if doubt is a bad thing. As if doubt were not the keystone of reason. Doubt was once celebrated as the chief ingredient of Enlightenment. ‘If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things’, said Descartes. Steady on, René. Not all things. Not lockdown. Doubting that is tantamount to profanity.
The demonisation of the doubters, the harrying of Bhattacharya for ‘sowing’ scepticism, was a testament not only to the draconian vibe of the Covid moment but to modern authoritarianism more broadly. Doubt is the greatest sin under the tyranny of expertise. Nothing causes greater dread to the self-styled expert classes than the thought of the masses thinking. Our role is not to wonder, and certainly not to dispute, but merely to receive. To imbibe, dutifully and gratefully, the wisdom of our credentialled superiors, whether on Covid, climate change, transgenderism or whatever. This is why you so often hear the phrase ‘the debate is over’ these days: because we have been reimagined as mere subjects of the professional managerial classes who require, not the liberty to doubt, but the illumination of our betters.
This was Bhattacharya’s moral felony: not only to doubt but to encourage others to doubt, too. He was a contributor to the ‘disease of misinformation’, as some referred to dissenting opinion in the lockdown era. His elite harassers saw it as their solemn duty to protect us little people from this ‘disease’ of alternative thought, to immunise us against the wicked ‘merchants of doubt’ by injecting us with their preordained truths. Here’s the thing: it is Bhattacharya’s very readiness to doubt that makes him a more trustworthy guardian of American science than some of his predecessors. For isn’t doubt – of religious revelation, traditional belief, ‘truths’ not yet proven – central to the entire scientific method? In bristling against lockdown orthodoxy, even as his fellow scientists bowed to it, even as they made moves against him for his intellectual insubordination, Bhattacharya proved himself a more fitting heir to the daring spirit of the scientific age.
There was another thing Bhattacharya did during lockdown that counts very much in his favour: he stood up for the working class. He clocked early on what study after study has since shown: that shutting down society was far more punitive and immiserating for working people than it was for the professional class. As he said on my podcast in May 2022, lockdown established a new ‘caste system’ in the West. One where it was really only ‘well-off people with jobs that could be done remotely’ who were ‘locked down’, while the others, the riff raff, essentially served them, emptying their bins, delivering their food, cleaning their streets. ‘I don’t like to sound hyperbolic’, he said, ‘but this really was the most unequal policy possible. We took this class division and then we turned it into a virtue.’
When scientists abandoned scepticism in favour of doing the bidding of their governments, Bhattacharya made a plea for debate. And when the bourgeois left abandoned the working class – too busy relishing their newfound freedom to do nothing all day long to be able to spare a thought for the poor whose jobs continued or just disappeared – Bhattacharya spoke out against these Covid castes. His new appointment represents the vindication of a heretic, and I for one wish him the best of luck.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy