By Andrew Noymer via RealClearPolitics,
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — a Stanford professor who is president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health — brings transparency to this government agency that desperately needs it.
I’m a bizarre person who writes a piece that supports Jay Bhattacharya’s candidacy for NIH leadership. During the pandemic, I disagreed with Jay about the COVID response. Jay supported the Great Barrington Declaration, while I advocated a more active and active public health response, overall, though not entirely similar to what was actually done in the United States. At times, our differences were fundamental, at other times pragmatic. Nevertheless, the disagreements between Jay and myself on this issue were deep.
I discussed Jay’s response to the pandemic via Zoom, so I’m well aware of his views on the COVID response as he’s mine. Our discussion wasn’t archived, but it was broadly similar to the Monk Debate I did with Jay Stanford’s colleague John Ioannidis and the SoHo Forum discussion I did with Jay Great Barrington’s collaborator Martin Kulldorff. These discussions are dated now, but still reflect the deep intellectual divisions that COVID and the collective response to it brought sharp relief.
What makes my approval of Jay even more peculiar is that he and I still disagree about the COVID response. I know because I had the opportunity to speak with Jay and others in October at a conference he organized at Stanford where I served as a panelist. Moreover, Jay invited me to this conference, knowing that he and I would continue to have divergent opinions on the subject. Here and in other examples, I’ve seen Jay’s commitment to listening to different and divisive points of view. Jay is not the one trying to muzzle the dissent.
The most important unresolved point on the COVID agenda is: where did SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID come from? Solving this issue is where Jay Bhattacharya and I have the most in common. I’m on the Biosafety Now advisory board, an organization dedicated to increasing the transparency of high-risk pathogen trials that can harm humans. Jay was also involved with BN for a while.
The stakes couldn’t be higher: COVID killed 15 million people worldwide in 2020 and hasn’t stopped killing, albeit thankfully at a lower rate lately. Identifying the origins of epidemics is one of the cornerstones of public health. This task is woven into its fabric, even before the founding of John Snow’s epidemiological science in the 19th century, to the work of the American pioneer Theobald Smith in the 20th century and to this day. There are a number of questions about COVID that may indicate a SARS-CoV-2 leak from the lab.
The NIH has so far not acted transparently enough about the origins of COVID. It was a funder of research to increase the function of coronaviruses. Former NIH Director Francis Collins and former director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) Anthony Fauci were both major proponents of function-based virology research, some of which are objectively dangerous enough to require the highest security (BSL-4) labs (think: labs inside the airlock and scientists in pressure suits). NIH grants in this area included funding for research from Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Hotez’s Baylor College of Medicine.
But the NIH has not acted to shed light on its actions and has even stoned Congress.
There is nothing fundamentally political about wanting to know where COVID comes from; This is the main function of epidemiology. It is virologists – not those who deal with epidemiology, who want to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID – who have politicized the debate about the origins of COVID. As one of my colleagues at the University of California, Irvine scolded me humiliatingly via email in 2022: “Suggesting lab leaks, or worse, (with no real evidence), feeds right-wing, anti-China conspiracies advocated by the Trump administration.” Other virologists have shown remarkable uncertainty: “What’s the difference between where did it [SARS-CoV-2] come from?” another colleague of mine at the University of California, Irvine, asked at this conference. It’s huge. To prevent a repeat of COVID, we need better regulation of virology to increase functionality and full transparency of coronavirus research in the years leading up to the pandemic.
Jay Bhattacharya understands that the NIH’s budget is public money and that every American is a stakeholder in research done by the NIH, including grants to foreign researchers. He and I had and continue to have deep disagreements about the public health response to COVID, but the most important task the NIH currently faces is to give the world a complete picture of its involvement in the study of the ancestral bats viruses of the COVID virus so that we can better understand how SARS-CoV-2 jumped on humans. Transparency is the main (and principled) solution to the lack of public trust in the institutions. I’m sure Jay’s efforts at transparency could restore public confidence in the NIH.
Andrew Noymer is an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine.
