Trump defiant

Fight! Fight! Fight! The announcement late yesterday that president-elect Donald Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) underlined quite forcefully the certainty that the outsider nature of all of Trump’s picks to head all the health-related agencies in the federal government will led to major changes in how those agencies operate.

Bhattacharya had been blacklisted for his very vocal opposition to the government’s lockdown and mandate policies during the COVID epidemic. He along with Martin Kulldorff, one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines and who was also blacklisted during the epidemic, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration that strongly criticized the policies of imposed by these health agencies, calling instead for a return to the standard response to infectious diseases that had been followed successfully for more than a century.

Putting Bhattacharya in charge of NIH is incredibly ironic. When he along with Kulldorff had come out opposed to the lockdown and jab mandates advocated by Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, Collins in league with Anthony Fauci, then head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), put together a back-room campaign to have Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and many others blacklisted across social media. This campaign also had Kulldorf removed as a member of the CDC’s vaccine safety advisory committee.

Two years later, Collins is now gone, is being sued for his actions, and Bhattacharya has replaced him.

Trump’s defiant choice of Bhattacharya however is only one of many similar decisions, beginning last month with the choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

On Tuesday the president-elect also nominated Jim O’Neill – a former federal health official and close ally of conservative donor Peter Thiel – as deputy secretary of the health department. … Trump has also picked Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine mandate, to run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dave Weldon, a physician and former Republican congressman who has also cast doubt on vaccine safety, was picked to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Kennedy and O’Neill’s department of health would oversee the agencies run by Makary, Weldon and Bhattacharya, but all five need to be confirmed by the Senate.

Last week Trump also nominated TV personality Dr Mehmet Oz to be the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

All have to be confirmed by the Senate, but we should not expect that to be a problem. Not only is the Senate controlled by Republicans, the public is firmly in favor of Trump’s actions here. It is unlikely the opposition in the Senate will be strong enough to block their approval.

More important, every single one of these picks were very vocal opponents of the disastrous and scientifically wrong policies imposed by these agencies during the epidemic. Every single one of them will now be in a position to force major change at these agencies, and they will be able to do so in tandem, working together to fight off any resistance by the bureaucrats below them.

Making the government once again use the Truth booth

Expect major changes to come fast and furious in the government health community. Expect significant cuts in staffing, and a major change in how grants are issued, and to whom. Above all, expect a radical change in the health advice these agencies issue to the public. No longer will the COVID jab be promoted blindly. No longer will mask and social distancing be advocated, since neither accomplish anything, and the former can actually increase the chances you will get sick.

Instead, these new appointees will simply go back to the standard advice given for decades before the COVID panic made people lose their minds. Wash your hands, quarantine the sick only, and let new respiratory illnesses spread quickly through the rest of the population in order to bring about herd immunity as fast as possible and thus best protect the elderly and chronically ill from such diseases.

Or to put it another way, the government will no longer be using fear to justify a grab for power. It will instead be following what is known and issuing advice based on that actual knowledge.

What a concept!