Bhattacharya's Bad Habit

Today I happened to catch an interview on the Miller Report that made my eyes roll. Give it a watch. Jay Bhattacharya is at it again.

If you don't know, Dr. Bhattacharya is the current director of the National Institutes of Health. Before that, he built his public reputation pushing data from a fatally flawed 2020 study, the Santa Clara antibody survey, which he co-authored. This study used a test that had a high false-positive rate to study a population where the virus was, at the time, not terribly widespread. What happened was the estimated number of infections became overly inflated, which made the fatality rate look close to the seasonal flu.

Statisticians wasted no time declaring the study a dud.

But that did not stop Bhattacharya from citing it endlessly, until it became the lead statistic for the call to stop the lockdowns. Months later, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for "focused protection" of the elderly while letting the virus spread through the rest of the population. His whole reasoning was based on the low-fatality numbers from the Santa Clara study.

What made my eyeballs do the mambo in my skull was that it was clear from the Miller Report interview that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has not given up his old habit of turning policy disagreements into claims about the science itself. Whether focused protection could ever work at scale during COVID, and if lockdowns were worth their costs, are both entirely debatable questions. But Bhattacharya treats the existence of that debate as proof that authoritarian "gurus" hijacked the science to control how society should run. He's using a framing technique, not correcting a fact, where disagreement is the same as evidence.

He also has the habit of using real scientific values to shield political ones. It is safe to say that most working scientists agree that replication is underfunded and undervalued. Bhattacharya brings this up in the same sentence as cutting funding for "politicized" research areas like DEI. The point on replication is legit. Holding it up next to a funding cut just lets the cut borrow the replication point's credibility.

The most inflammatory material in the interview is what isn't mentioned directly. He holds up rising autism rates in the same breath as heart disease and diabetes without mentioning a cause. Nothing he says is anything a fact-checker can latch onto. So for an audience that is already suspicious of vaccines, what he doesn't say is the whole point, because they can simply fill in the holes themselves.