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In a Mordecai and Haman like twist, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a man of faith, will be stepping into the role once held by the man who tried to censor him and destroy his reputation.

Dr Jay Battacharya was called a “fringe epidemiologist” for opposing Covid lockdowns. Powerful men in Washington coordinated media smears against him. Twitter put him on a blacklist.

Now he has been nominated by incoming President Donald Trump as Director of the National Institutes of Health — the peak medical research agency in the United States.

Dr Bhattacharya is also a Christian and a man of deep faith.

A professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University in California, Dr Jay Bhattacharya first rose to prominence as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

That declaration’s warnings were prescient. There, Bhattacharya and his colleagues — University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and Harvard University medical professor Martin Kulldorff — argued that Covid-19 was best addressed by protecting the vulnerable while minimising social and economic disruptions for the broader population.

Though the Great Barrington Declaration was vilified and censored at the time, it reads like common sense today. No less than three major studies in Australia alone have exposed the devastation caused by lockdowns, all of which could have been avoided if Bhattacharya’s declaration was adopted instead of being blindly attacked.

A Plot Twist of Biblical Proportions

But here is the ultimate irony in Dr Jay Bhattacharya’s promotion: he’s stepping into the role once held by the man who sought to silence him.

Dr Francis Collins was appointed NIH Director by President Barack Obama in 2009 and held that post until his resignation in 2021.

While Dr Collins also professes to be a Christian, and has even written a book about science and faith, his conduct as NIH Director revealed a glaring disconnect between his beliefs and his leadership.

Just four days after Dr Bhattacharya and his co-authors released the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins sent an email to Dr Anthony Fauci and several other colleagues calling the three men “fringe epidemiologists”. He also began plotting “a quick and devastating published take down” of Bhattacharya’s ideas in science journals and the legacy media in order to shift public opinion against him.

In October 2020, @DrJBhattacharya authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to covid lockdowns.

Four days later, Dr. Fauci and then NIH Director Francis Collins emailed each other to plot a “devastating takedown of its premises.

It wasn’t long after… pic.twitter.com/m6u9BfVsxr

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 27, 2024

This email exchange only came into the light through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. But that wasn’t even the worst of the FOIA revelations.

In secret, Collins and Fauci strongly suspected that Covid-19 had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, even as they trashed the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” in public. As previously reported by The Daily Declaration:

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, we now know that at the same time these interviews were taking place, Collins knew that top U.S. and British scientists suspected the Wuhan Institute of Virology — not nature — as the source of the virus. And he was eager to bury the theory, fearful of “great potential harm to science and international harm”.

No doubt, Collins was also concerned about harm to his own reputation. In his role as National Institutes of Heath director, Francis Collins has long supported — and his agencies have generously funded — the gain-of-function research that probably explains the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The efforts of Collins and Fauci were ultimately successful. The Great Barrington Declaration was lambasted in journals and newspapers alike before most people had a chance to read it.

Even Twitter played along, secretly placing Dr Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist” to suppress his reach, in a dirty move that was eventually exposed via the Twitter Files.

Francis Collins Admits He Was Wrong

It would be almost three years before Dr Francis Collins would finally admit he was wrong about lockdowns. In a July 2023 interview, Collins conceded that his favoured approach disrupted lives, ruined the economy and set children’s education back irrecoverably.

Even then, Collins did not apologise to Bhattacharya and his colleagues. He never explained why he smeared and silenced them instead of responding to Bhattacharya’s offer of a debate.

Perhaps Collins’ lack of humility can in part be explained by the generous royalties that he, Fauci and other colleagues received through his support for Covid-19 mRNA products.

Also regrettable is the uncritical support Collins received from evangelical leaders who platformed him and promoted his now-discredited views at the height of the Covid era. As I have previously noted:

The Daily Wire documents that Ed Stetzer, Russell Moore, Tim Keller, Rick Warren and N.T. Wright were among the trusted evangelical names to share their online platforms with Collins, helping him promote Covid views that are now widely doubted or discredited.

In public — including on a livestream panel hosted by Christianity Today — Francis Collins laughed off the “conspiracy” that Covid-19 had escaped from a science lab in Wuhan. Instead, he insisted that the virus had come from nature.

The Gospel Coalition went on to dismiss the manmade theory as a QAnon-level delusion. Relevant magazine hailed Collins as a hero of science while disparaging Christians who held dissenting views on Covid as not “walking in faith”.

And:

The CDC now concedes that cloth masks are not particularly effective against Covid-19, in contrast to Collins’ claim to Russell Moore that they are a “life-saving medical device”. This revelation also makes a mockery of Collins’ and his hosts’ insistence that mask-wearing isn’t just a medical issue but a spiritual one.

Collins’ Support for Abortion, DEI and Transgenderism

The Daily Declaration has also reported on some of the objectionable policies Francis Collins approved while serving as NIH Director:

The Daily Wire notes that “Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother,” and according to Christianity Today, Collins is “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life”.

In fact, for decades Collins has supported policies that make him an unlikely ally of theologically conservative Christians.

He has defended the use of aborted fetuses in experiments, and in his role as NIH director has channeled record-level funding towards the practice. As the Daily Declaration has previously reported, it was under Collins’ watch that barbaric lab experiments took place on fetuses, including the scalps of aborted babies being grafted onto the backs of lab rats and the harvesting of organs from full-term aborted babies.

Collins has also overseen the introduction of diversity, equity and inclusion tests that prioritise or exclude scientists based on their ethnicity. He has described himself as an “ally and advocate” of the gay and trans movements, and has waved through millions of dollars in grants for transgender experiments on children that include sex hormone therapy and mastectomies on young teenage girls.

A sober reflection on Dr Francis Collins’ time at the NIH provides an important reminder about the need for good leadership in health and medical research, and the value of bringing one’s Christian worldview to bare on every aspect of life.

Dr Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination as the new NIH Director is an answer to that challenge — one for which we can all be thankful.