Readers of The Free Press will be familiar with the names of the doctors just appointed to high positions overseeing the nation’s public health. Jay Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health; Marty Makary is the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; and Vinay Prasad has just been named director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research—making him the nation’s top vaccine regulator.
You will recognize their names because they have been writing for The FP since The FP began.
Their voices helped set a standard for much of what we seek to do: present information and insights readers are not getting elsewhere, backed by evidence and rigorous reporting. Bhattacharya, Makary, and Prasad all raised serious questions about the lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandates that Americans were subjected to during the Covid pandemic years.
They demanded transparency, reliable data, and common sense in policy making, instead of the fear-mongering, obfuscation, and draconian crackdowns on normal life that characterized the actions of our public health officials. For this, all three were variously disparaged and maligned. Their views were not only attacked, but suppressed by the government and social media.
Bhattacharya wrote for us about his role in creating the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a “focused” approach to protecting those most vulnerable to Covid, while allowing normal life to go on. For this, he wrote, “I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks.” He became part of a lawsuit against government censorship.
Makary’s first piece for us expressed outrage at college students being treated like prisoners during Covid, and called out how unnecessary it all was: “Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason, and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific, and often downright cruel. Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.”
Prasad wrote a piece for us in 2022 that presciently described some of the decisions he will be making in his new job. He wrote about the folly and consequences of pushing unnecessary Covid vaccines on children: “In an effort to encourage Covid-19 vaccination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may wind up lowering vaccination rates for polio and measles. Why? Because by adding Covid-19 shots to the schedule, the CDC is tacitly implying that this new vaccine is as important to kids as the combination MMR one. This is absolutely false.”
Now these three have the opportunity to see their vision enacted—one that encourages honesty with the public instead of condescension, and that takes seriously the conviction that a scientific culture that encourages dissent will have a better chance of arriving at the truth than one that squelches it.
Carrying this out won’t be easy. We have deep concerns that this administration’s approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel is called for. But we know that these accomplished scientists will take with great seriousness their mandate to restore our trust in public health.
Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad together wrote or were mentioned in almost three dozen Free Press stories over the years, in addition to their various appearances on Honestly or in our community-wide conversations.
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