By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, is using his Florida grand jury testimony about COVID-19 as part of his pitch.
Florida grand jury testimony is confidential. But on Wednesday, just as his confirmation hearing before a U.S. Senate committee began, the Florida Supreme Court released Dr. Bhattacharya’s name and testimony, granting a waiver sought by Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas Cox.
He “may disclose his status as a witness and/or the substance of his testimony” to the statewide grand jury on COVID-19 “in sworn testimony before the United States Congress, or at any hearing or preparatory session appurtenant to his nomination or duties as Director of the National Institutes of Health [NIH],” the court’s order says.
Bhattacharya’s background is revealing on two levels. The Stanford University professor was an outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdowns promoted by the NIH, the nation’s leading medical research agency. A proponent of “herd immunity,” he has advocated fringe public health views generally in line with new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also, Bhattacharya’s testimony probably influenced the Florida grand jury’s conclusions about how the federal government handled the pandemic. Until Wednesday, the public knew very little about who told the grand jury what during its 18-month term.
The grand jury’s final report found “a pattern of deceptive and obfuscatory behavior on the part of [drug] sponsors and regulators that often straddled the line between ethical and unethical conduct.”
“There are profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States,” the report released in January states.
In remarks prepared for his confirmation hearing before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, Bhattacharya claims NIH officials “oversaw a culture of coverup, obfuscation, and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs” in recent years, NPR reported.
BHATTACHARYA BLASTED FAUCI
During the pandemic, Bhattacharya blasted NIH leadership and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for mismanaging the U.S. response to the coronavirus.
Florida’s statewide grand jury did not discover any criminality on the part of Fauci or anyone else, stating, “We did not find any statute that we believed would be an appropriate vehicle for a criminal indictment.”
Still, Gov. Ron DeSantis has publicly urged Attorney General James Uthmeier to prosecute Fauci, now a professor at Georgetown University.
“We cannot allow Anthony Fauci to escape accountability,” DeSantis posted on X/Twitter during his failed run for president. “I am the only candidate who will bring a reckoning for what tyrants like Fauci did to our country during COVID.”
At Wednesday’s Senate committee hearing, Bhattacharya was pressed to state his views on measles vaccinations. Kennedy has declined to recommend them despite a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas.
And on Tuesday, officials at Miami Palmetto Senior High School said one student had tested positive for measles, according to NBC Miami.
“I fully support children being vaccinated for diseases like measles,” Bhattacharya told the Senate committee. But he went on to say that scientists should conduct more research into the possible link between autism and vaccines, a position at odds with widely accepted evidence there’s no connection between them, The New York Times reported.
Bhattacharya wants to run the world’s largest funder of biomedical research with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers. How long the NIH’s global preeminence will last is uncertain, however.
Hours before Wednesday’s hearing, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk’s band of cost-slashing techies, touted the mass cancellation of NIH grants. Already about 1,200 employees have been fired on DOGE’s authority.
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