Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s first statewide emergency declaration issued in response to COVID-19, setting up a long series of orders shuttering down businesses, closing schools, and ordering people to stay in their homes.
When enacted in early March 2020, Cuomo’s order was the consensus policy response to the pandemic, endorsed by the first Trump administration and quickly replicated by most red state governors.
Meanwhile, critics of lockdowns were dismissed as dangerous, fringe characters who were peddling “nonsense” solutions or even experimenting with”human sacrifice.“
As it happens, yesterday was the Senate confirmation hearing of one such lockdown critic—Stanford professor and medical researcher Jay Bhattacharya, whom President Donald Trump has tapped to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Bhattacharya was an early critic of lockdowns and masking. He is perhaps best known for his co-authorship of the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized school closures and society-wide restrictions and instead argued for a strategy of “focused protection” that would “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally.”
This was a hugely controversial position to take at the time.
Former NIH Director Francis Collins demanded a “quick and devastating published take down” in an email to his underling Anthony Fauci. Fauci would later describe the Great Barrington Declaration as “nonsense.”
Public health officials and Democratic politicians either condemned the declaration or ignored it as they tightened pandemic restrictions in the fall and winter of 2020.
Yet five years on, at Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing, Democrats were completely mum about his COVID-era research and advocacy.
Not a single Democrat mentioned the Great Barrington Declaration. None bothered to press Bhattacharya on his opposition to once-consensus opinions on lockdowns, masking, and school closures.
Despite having every opportunity and incentive to attack Bhattacharya as a dangerous crank nominee, the minority on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chose not to even mention what were once his most controversial views.
Instead, Democrats almost exclusively focused their questions on the Trump administration’s recent pauses of NIH grant and advisory committees and caps on grantees’ indirect research spending. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) asked Bhattacharya if he’d lead a campaign against food companies’ advertisement of unhealthy snacks to children.
When Bhattacharya’s COVID views were mentioned, the comments came from Republican senators heaping praise on him.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R–Neb.), Nebraska’s governor during the pandemic, thanked Bhattacharya for helping him to keep schools open. Sen. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) called the Great Barrington Declaration “undeniably right.”
Bhattacharya himself was unapologetic about his criticism of lockdowns—saying that Florida ended the pandemic with lower all-cause mortality than California, as did Sweden vis-à-vis its neighbors.
Democrats’ silence and Republicans’ praise is a remarkable touchstone. It’s yet more proof that five years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown skeptics have won the argument.
Critics of lockdowns can publicly express the idea that lockdowns don’t work as an uncontroversial matter of fact. Past defenders of lockdowns are now unwilling to back the policies in public, not even in a lockdown skeptic’s confirmation hearing for a high-ranking public health position.
This shift of the Overton window is remarkable by itself.
It’s also suggestive of where the NIH is headed in a second Trump administration.
At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya criticized past NIH leaders for stepping outside their role as scientists to tell people what to do during the pandemic and attempting to silence debate instead of encouraging it.
“The role of scientists is to say these are the risks by giving more data,” said Bhattacharya. “Science should be an engine for freedom, knowledge and freedom.”
It’s a refreshing sentiment and one that would seem to take the most authoritarian COVID-era policies off the table in any future crisis.
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