And do not overlook the full interview here:
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Quote from Jay Bhattacharya from the interview:
The ideology of the lockdowns was that we are all merely biohazards, and we should treat each other as such.
Iām sorry, the ideology of lockdowns? And none of the people I work with in public health view their fellow human beings as āmerely biohazards.ā That is pretty much antithetical to why they work in public health in the first place.
(Edited to better indicate the source of the quote)
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Point taken. His words not mine. I donāt think itās meant to be taken quite the literally.
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Understood that those are his words. At the same time, you pushed back or pushed for nuance on other topics.
So how literally should we take it? He could have simply said that he thought a different set of mitigations would have been more effective, or that the second-order consequences of the mitigations were not themselves properly mitigated, or anything else that focused on policies and tradeoffs. But instead he chose a framing which made claims about the people who proposed and implemented those policies. If his goal is to rebuild trust, I donāt see how that helps. When a similar approach is employed regarding evolutionary biologyāclaiming that it is an ideological commitment because evolutionists donāt have a Christian world viewācertainly hasnāt helped built trust in biologists among conservative Christians.
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I think you should take it as an accurate representation of his words, and recognize its words that are resonating with many. You should not read it as a position I am promoting or agreeing with.
Acting as journalist here, my goal was to give him a fair interview with minimal editorializing by me. This isnāt my oped, and shouldnāt be read as a statement of my opinion. If you read the whole interview, youāll find a disagreed with him on quite a lot, but I also was bending over backwards to hear him out, as I would with anyone on all sides of these debates.
That said, I wasnāt triggered by what he said on these points. Because Iāve certainly seen many other claims that are similar. (E.g. we arenāt loving our neighbors if we donāt take the vaccineā¦a point Iām inclined to agree with but skeptics howled about).
I think we can certainly disagree with Jays point, but there is some legitimacy to this one. Iād be curious what you think would be better phrasing. And Iād also welcome a response to this aspect of the interview too, which Iād love to publish it!
As for rebuilding trust, he isnāt talking about rebuilding trust of the public health establishment with him. Rather he is emphasizing the need for us (in mainstream science) to rebuild trust with the public, and I very much agree this is a critical need.
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Sure; I wouldnāt have thought otherwise.
OK, but that doesnāt necessarily mean he took the most fruitful approach. For example, in the interview you brought up the Nature endorsement of a presidential candidate. I expect that endorsement resonated with many, but as you pointed out, that didnāt mean it was effective at achieving the intended result.
Sure, any statement which makes unsubstantiated assumptions about someone elseās motivations is unlikely to be helpful.
As I indicated before, it is possible to talk about policy decisions and tradeoffs, what was known when the decisions were made and what options were possible, the outcomes of those decisions and what the outcomes of alternatives might have been without making inferences about the motivations or worldviews of the decision makers.
Yes, I understood he was talking about public trust in science & public health, not the trust of public health in him. Which is why I was comparing his approach to achieving that goal to a pattern which has not helped to build public trust in science in the past. If Nature should not have repeated a failed approach with endorsements, it stands to reason one should also not repeat approach of framing disagreement as a matter of ideology and lacking Christian perspective when that is known to not build trust.
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I can sympathize with his position. Having chosen to work for Kennedy and Trump, he can hardly contradict them or explicitly reject their positions, and so he must either support pernicious nonsense, obfuscate, or resign. He chooses, so far, the second alternative. And I suppose he rationalizes that by thinking of all the good he can do even with such superiors to placate.
Still, does he have fall into the Trumpian trope of turning the press and biomedical establishment into enemies of the people and of truth itself? That seems like choice, not necessity.
His interview ought to be fact-checked.
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