A rebuttal to NIH leadership's screed against pandemic preparedness.

Late last week, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and his Principal Deputy Director, Dr. Matthew Memoli, published an essay in City Journal1 that argues, basically, for a head-in-the-sand approach to pandemic preparedness.

This isn’t that surprising coming from Dr. Bhattacharya. He co-authored “The Great Barrington Declaration”—pandemic fan fiction that, if implemented, would have cost countless American lives by voluntarily increasing the number of Covid-19 infections during the pre-vaccine era, all in the futile pursuit of herd immunity. Now that Dr. Bhattacharya is running the NIH, his ideas on the topic warrant substantial scrutiny.

That’s what we’ll do today.

Once again, I’m using the Fiskkit.com approach, a website that lets readers annotate articles, line by line. This time, however, I’ve enlisted help from virologist (and co-editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Vaccine) Dr. Angela Rasmussen, someone I knew would add much more technically detailed analyses and debunking. She happens to have been involved in some of the most important genetic studies tracing the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the market in Wuhan, so she’s the perfect partner for this. Dr. Rasmussen also authors a sharp Substack entitled “Rasmussen Retorts,” which I highly recommend.

So, buckle up, kids. It’s about to get messy. But you’re sure to learn a lot.

Note #1: We went long. We know that you might not read every word. But we feel that it is important to document expert thinking/analysis about the realtime and potentially catastrophic mistakes that our national leaders are making on pandemic preparedness.

Note #2: Every sentence in the Bhattacharya/Memoli essay appears bolded in quotes below, and is followed by rebuttals or comments by me, Dr. Rasmussen, or both. If you’d like to read this on Fiskkit, you can do so here.

Note #3: Newsletters are the perfect forum for time-intensive deep-dives like this. If you haven’t yet done so, please consider subscribing to and supporting our work. Thank you!

• Inside Medicine

• Rasmussen Retorts

Let’s get to it…

The headline: NIH Directors: The World Needs a New Pandemic Playbook.

The sub-headline: The old one failed to cope with Covid and may even have caused it.

“Over the past two decades, scientists developed a pandemic preparedness playbook that has failed catastrophically.”

Faust: Jay has long talked about the need for nuance in these discussions. Here, he spurns that and declares our strategy to have been a catastrophic