Last week, a federal appeals court confirmed that science cannot function without free speech. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya reflects on a victory for himself—and every American.
Thank you Dr Bhattacharya for everything you've been doing. Its concerning that there are government agencies that have a carve out to continue to carry on with this totalitarian behavior but perhaps we have to take our wins as they come, and this is certainly a win. The sooner this case can get to the Supreme Court the better.
Jay Battacharya, you are a rock star. I remember reading the Great Barrington Declaration when it was published in October 2020 in the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. Since then, I’ve asked numerous people if they’d read it- and, no surprise, very few people had even heard of it! It is incredibly disheartening and frightening that our government would go to such lengths to suppress 3 brilliant minds. These are legitimate, well respected scientists - whose paper was supported by thousands of colleagues. I am thrilled that they have prevailed.
In my 36 years as a practicing nurse working among all types of infectious disease, never had I witnessed such a bizarre response by health and government authorities as I did with COVID. The worst of it was how the government officials (politicians) would issue edicts using limited or biased information then never admit they were wrong or reverse course once the strength of scientific evidence was established and revealed. Thank you thank you, Dr Battacharya and your colleagues, for your work and having the courage and tenacity to take on this important fight.
I am a 69 year old physician who would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharya for his courageous stand. I signed the Great Barrington Declaration as soon as it was made public. I knew in my bones what the ongoing shutdowns were doing to the lives of individuals and that much of what we were being told was of weak to non-existent in terms of scientific evidence. The whole pandemic experience brought home to me the power of fear and how some will exploit that fear. All Americans should spend some time outside the US in 2nd or 3rd world countries; then they would value the freedom that our founders bequeathed to us.
I’ve had the honor of having met Dr. Battacharya through Hillsdale. To say he’s both humble and principled is an understatement. This essay reflects both qualities. Thank you FP for publishing it.
The fight isn’t over. The government still has virtually unassailable authority over scientific research in countless areas from human sexuality to energy. It starts in our public schools with kindergartners. Our administrators tout “complex thinking.” We should laugh in their general direction. What we’ve got is complexity within defined parameters of dogma. We need a lot more people like Dr Battacharya and institutions like Hillsdale to take this monolith down.
I can only say thank God for brave, principled people such as Dr. Bhattacharya. His name should be inscribed with the likes of Nathan Hale, John Paul Jones and Abraham Lincoln.
Don’t be so excited. The government intentionally violated the essence of the First Amendment and they will intentionally do it again as much as they want because there is no deterrent here and there is no significant punishment here for this behavior. They don’t give two shits what the courts say. Symbolic victories are not victories. Victory can be declared when something significant enough happens to force compliance and change behavior. The Biden administration has no such constraints to change their behavior at all and they won’t!
I am overcome with joyous emotion reading about your vindication. I have been following you since the beginning of the pandemic. In the beginning we were very nervous about the virus. It was hard to know who to believe. It was clear that politics played a heavy hand. But you, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad made the most sense to me. Stay in it! Preserve our America values. It’s interesting to me that those I trusted most are all immigrants to the USA.
The first pillar of medical ethics, respect for autonomy, without which the other 3 pillars (beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) cannot stand, was violated repeatedly and systematically throughout the pandemic.
Brave physicians, including Dr. Battacharya and his colleagues, put their livelihoods at risk to fight for our patients and, as he says, all Americans. This suit and the suit against the FDA brought by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who personally saved many of my patients during the Delta wave in 2021 by delivering efficient monoclonal antibodies to patients at risk of hospitalization (before the Biden administration turned off the spigot of this life-saving intervention to Texas and Florida), was successful with 2 other physicians in their suit against the FDA last week. She continues to be vilified in our community to this day. She knew, as all of us on the front lines knew, that the “fully vaccinated” were becoming ill with Covid in droves, while Birx et. al continued to gaslight the public with their silly 95% effective narrative.
Realizing my “democratic republic”, the US government, was behind this shocked me to my core.
They interfered with my ability to give TRUE informed consent to my patients in violation of every one of the pillars of medical ethics.
Nuremberg type tribunals should take place, not for retribution, but as a signal to medical professionals that this behavior is condemnable, and must NEVER happen again. Unfortunately, it continues even with this ruling, while Birx is back working for Pharma to pay for another vacation home. Orwellian dystopia meets good old-fashioned unethical and greedy behavior sanctioned by our own government right in front of our very eyes.
Dr, B, you are my hero is this dystopic mess. God bless you and Godspeed!
The truth can stand on its own. Only lies need to be forcefully upheld. I have lost so much trust in our institutions through the past few years, hopefully this is a step forward to more truth coming forward into the light.
The events surrounding the Great Barrington Declaration are still vivid in my mind. Our grade school children were wearing masks to school and had long stretches at home in radically subpar online learning environment. From August- October 2020 we were beginning to question what was actually going on. Weeks after the Declaration our entire family contracted covid, which for us meant loss of taste and stuffy noses. By the new year Vaccine For All was being included in the Ministry of Truth’s Newspeak regardless if you were young healthy and hd natural immunity. We experienced huge pressure during this time from our progressive PA community. Dr Bhattacharya was one of many who became a symbol of hope for us.
“But I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young.”
This makes two of us. While I’m grateful to you and others who have pushed back with success, I have concerns about departments, agencies, bureaus, institutions, Et al. The unelected controls the elected. Which has been an issue prior to covid. The pandemic pulled the curtain back.
I have followed this free speech hero for 3 years, and we all should be grateful for his steady and reasonable efforts to end this tyranny. I would like to see him take on Stanford’s own “Internet Observatory” next, where there has been and will likely be again, speech censorship work related to the elections. As a Stanford alum, this kind of program embarrasses me and does exactly what it accuses its conservative opponents of going - it interferes with the election by steering the discussion and debunks narratives that are not “approved”. I hope this case reaches the Supreme Court so that this administration can be exposed for its tyranny in the most visible way possible.
You are not alone in disbelief of how our country violated our free speech rights in the past few years. Many of us had our blinders ripped away and have been horrified and so disillusioned. The worst part for me is the number of our fellow citizens who supported this along with our government and painted anyone who disagreed as selfish or ignorant and actually wanted the dissenters imprisoned.
Thank you Dr Bhattacharya for everything you've been doing. Its concerning that there are government agencies that have a carve out to continue to carry on with this totalitarian behavior but perhaps we have to take our wins as they come, and this is certainly a win. The sooner this case can get to the Supreme Court the better.
Jay Battacharya, you are a rock star. I remember reading the Great Barrington Declaration when it was published in October 2020 in the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. Since then, I’ve asked numerous people if they’d read it- and, no surprise, very few people had even heard of it! It is incredibly disheartening and frightening that our government would go to such lengths to suppress 3 brilliant minds. These are legitimate, well respected scientists - whose paper was supported by thousands of colleagues. I am thrilled that they have prevailed.
In my 36 years as a practicing nurse working among all types of infectious disease, never had I witnessed such a bizarre response by health and government authorities as I did with COVID. The worst of it was how the government officials (politicians) would issue edicts using limited or biased information then never admit they were wrong or reverse course once the strength of scientific evidence was established and revealed. Thank you thank you, Dr Battacharya and your colleagues, for your work and having the courage and tenacity to take on this important fight.
I am a 69 year old physician who would like to thank Dr. Bhattacharya for his courageous stand. I signed the Great Barrington Declaration as soon as it was made public. I knew in my bones what the ongoing shutdowns were doing to the lives of individuals and that much of what we were being told was of weak to non-existent in terms of scientific evidence. The whole pandemic experience brought home to me the power of fear and how some will exploit that fear. All Americans should spend some time outside the US in 2nd or 3rd world countries; then they would value the freedom that our founders bequeathed to us.
I’ve had the honor of having met Dr. Battacharya through Hillsdale. To say he’s both humble and principled is an understatement. This essay reflects both qualities. Thank you FP for publishing it.
The fight isn’t over. The government still has virtually unassailable authority over scientific research in countless areas from human sexuality to energy. It starts in our public schools with kindergartners. Our administrators tout “complex thinking.” We should laugh in their general direction. What we’ve got is complexity within defined parameters of dogma. We need a lot more people like Dr Battacharya and institutions like Hillsdale to take this monolith down.
I can only say thank God for brave, principled people such as Dr. Bhattacharya. His name should be inscribed with the likes of Nathan Hale, John Paul Jones and Abraham Lincoln.
Don’t be so excited. The government intentionally violated the essence of the First Amendment and they will intentionally do it again as much as they want because there is no deterrent here and there is no significant punishment here for this behavior. They don’t give two shits what the courts say. Symbolic victories are not victories. Victory can be declared when something significant enough happens to force compliance and change behavior. The Biden administration has no such constraints to change their behavior at all and they won’t!
I am overcome with joyous emotion reading about your vindication. I have been following you since the beginning of the pandemic. In the beginning we were very nervous about the virus. It was hard to know who to believe. It was clear that politics played a heavy hand. But you, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad made the most sense to me. Stay in it! Preserve our America values. It’s interesting to me that those I trusted most are all immigrants to the USA.
The first pillar of medical ethics, respect for autonomy, without which the other 3 pillars (beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) cannot stand, was violated repeatedly and systematically throughout the pandemic.
Brave physicians, including Dr. Battacharya and his colleagues, put their livelihoods at risk to fight for our patients and, as he says, all Americans. This suit and the suit against the FDA brought by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who personally saved many of my patients during the Delta wave in 2021 by delivering efficient monoclonal antibodies to patients at risk of hospitalization (before the Biden administration turned off the spigot of this life-saving intervention to Texas and Florida), was successful with 2 other physicians in their suit against the FDA last week. She continues to be vilified in our community to this day. She knew, as all of us on the front lines knew, that the “fully vaccinated” were becoming ill with Covid in droves, while Birx et. al continued to gaslight the public with their silly 95% effective narrative.
Realizing my “democratic republic”, the US government, was behind this shocked me to my core.
They interfered with my ability to give TRUE informed consent to my patients in violation of every one of the pillars of medical ethics.
Nuremberg type tribunals should take place, not for retribution, but as a signal to medical professionals that this behavior is condemnable, and must NEVER happen again. Unfortunately, it continues even with this ruling, while Birx is back working for Pharma to pay for another vacation home. Orwellian dystopia meets good old-fashioned unethical and greedy behavior sanctioned by our own government right in front of our very eyes.
Dr, B, you are my hero is this dystopic mess. God bless you and Godspeed!
The truth can stand on its own. Only lies need to be forcefully upheld. I have lost so much trust in our institutions through the past few years, hopefully this is a step forward to more truth coming forward into the light.
The events surrounding the Great Barrington Declaration are still vivid in my mind. Our grade school children were wearing masks to school and had long stretches at home in radically subpar online learning environment. From August- October 2020 we were beginning to question what was actually going on. Weeks after the Declaration our entire family contracted covid, which for us meant loss of taste and stuffy noses. By the new year Vaccine For All was being included in the Ministry of Truth’s Newspeak regardless if you were young healthy and hd natural immunity. We experienced huge pressure during this time from our progressive PA community. Dr Bhattacharya was one of many who became a symbol of hope for us.
Left-wing science, where policy trumps objectivity is an epidemic.
“But I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young.”
This makes two of us. While I’m grateful to you and others who have pushed back with success, I have concerns about departments, agencies, bureaus, institutions, Et al. The unelected controls the elected. Which has been an issue prior to covid. The pandemic pulled the curtain back.
I have followed this free speech hero for 3 years, and we all should be grateful for his steady and reasonable efforts to end this tyranny. I would like to see him take on Stanford’s own “Internet Observatory” next, where there has been and will likely be again, speech censorship work related to the elections. As a Stanford alum, this kind of program embarrasses me and does exactly what it accuses its conservative opponents of going - it interferes with the election by steering the discussion and debunks narratives that are not “approved”. I hope this case reaches the Supreme Court so that this administration can be exposed for its tyranny in the most visible way possible.
Thank you for your service to this country Dr. Bhattacharya.
You are not alone in disbelief of how our country violated our free speech rights in the past few years. Many of us had our blinders ripped away and have been horrified and so disillusioned. The worst part for me is the number of our fellow citizens who supported this along with our government and painted anyone who disagreed as selfish or ignorant and actually wanted the dissenters imprisoned.