mRNA Vaccines Can't Be Trusted, Says Known mRNA Vaccine Prevaricator
No matter how elegant the lies, an NIH Director who lacks credibility among the public he serves cannot fulfill his public health mission
Another day, another opportunity for the anti-scientific charlatans running things over at Health and Human Services to justify policies that will lead to mass mortality. Last week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. went after vaccine adjuvants, removed more experts from ACIP, and cancelled half a billion in mRNA vaccine contracts at BARDA, citing invented safety concerns and fantasy immunology as justification. Then the CDC was shot at more than 180 times and a police officer was murdered as a result of vaccine disinformation spread by Kennedy himself. Rather than address the inconvenient fact that he contributed to a terrorist attack on US federal employees and law enforcement officers in a major American city, Kennedy dispatched a minion to lie on his behalf about mRNA vaccines. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya dutifully answered his boss’s call.
Bhattacharya’s routine is to clutch his figurative pearls over the supposed epidemic of distrust borne from his terrible, bought-and-paid-for pandemic response ideas being correctly opposed by credible experts as dangerous and likely to lead to mass death. He has since complained bitterly to anyone who will listen that he was censored for courageous intellectual dissent. His revolutionary too-hot-for-the-establishment ideas about public health included a plan for COVID mass infection, knee-jerk opposition to public health measures like masks and school closures, and promoting ivermectin (which doesn’t work for COVID) as an alternative to vaccines (which do). Never mind that Bhattacharya’s definition of “censorship” is him being harshly but reasonably criticized by experts for offering public health policy proposals that would likely kill millions of people. Bhattacharya relentlessly made the rounds of the right wing media to agonize about how a health economist who never completed his medical training was not taken seriously when arguing that mass death and overwhelmed health care systems are legitimate pandemic response plans.
Because he lacks the self-awareness to realize that he is a thin-skinned grasping bootlicker and not a brave intellectual dissident being unfairly silenced by the academic establishment, Bhattacharya instead concluded that the public no longer trusts science or health officials at all because they don’t trust him. He has been running with that line ever since. He is the perfect functionary to fill Kennedy’s shoes, as his specialty is to lie about the state of the science while dismissing any evidence that contradicts his claims. It’s very convenient to negate any data-driven counterargument by invoking the supposed lack of trust fomented by allegedly conflicted, free speech-hating bullies.
On this most recent mRNA-themed disinformation tour, Bhattacharya first took his one man show to Steve Bannon’s War Room to say that mRNA vaccines are not a “viable” immunization platform because nobody trusts the technology. He claims the technology is untested without providing evidence to back it up, while neglecting to mention the extensive evidence base demonstrating that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective. He also provides no evidence to support his claims about public trust in mRNA vaccines.
According to Bhattacharya, the public irrevocably lost trust in the mRNA vaccine platform when his colleagues from lamestream public health overhyped mRNA vaccines and even enlisted Stephen Colbert to “silence” Bhattacharya and his fellow high attack rate enthusiasts from the Let It Rip movement.
Then Bhattacharya hosted an episode of The Director’s Desk, an NIH-branded propaganda vehicle/podcast, interviewing Acting NIAID Director Jeffrey Taubenberger, who exudes the most substantive hostage video vibes I’ve ever seen in an official NIH communication. Bhattacharya uses Taubenberger as a prop to imply that whole virus vaccines like Generation Gold Standard (which Taubenberger made) are superior to mRNA technology despite being inferior in many ways: they take longer to develop and manufacture, production inherently has more biosafety risks, they have a worse safety record, and they are less effective.
My blood pressure was already pretty high watching Bhattacharya working the track, strutting from podcast to podcast spreading disinformation about mRNA vaccines like one of the viruses this technology could prevent. He is attempting to rewrite history by constantly ascribing the root cause of the loss of trust in science plaguing America to scientists committing offenses that he is actually guilty of: lying about vaccines, misrepresenting the evidence, and advancing a political agenda for personal enrichment. So it’s a good thing that I take an NIH-developed, FDA-approved hypertension medication, because my stroke risk went up dramatically when I read the latest contribution to the deluge of bullshit that Bhattacharya has rained down upon us.
Bhattacharya wrote a guest op-ed in the Washington Post on Tuesday. Even for a guy who is naturally gifted at being smug and infuriating, Bhattacharya has achieved a new personal best in telling bald-faced lies in a national newspaper. Although he’s no stranger to making demonstrably false statements in the press, this is the first time he has done so with the imprimatur of the NIH Director’s office. And yes, this impacts public trust. Quite a lot, actually.
Trust comes from being truthful and Bhattacharya is not
Scientists are often wrong and we are fallible humans who make mistakes. Being wrong is baked into the scientific method. We go where the evidence leads us, so hypotheses must change as new evidence emerges. Thus, we are often wrong. We also are not perfect communicators, nor were we prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, just as we were not prepared to face the rise of fascism and the destruction of American science. Scientists were wrong and we often communicated this imperfectly (self very much included). But as far as feats of dishonesty go, it’s remarkable how many falsehoods, exaggerations, and outright lies Bhattacharya manages to pack into this relatively short article. Perhaps the most egregious is Bhattacharya’s core thesis that evidence is irrelevant if its politically unpalatable to “the people”:
“No matter how elegant the science, a platform that lacks credibility among the people it seeks to protect cannot fulfill its public health mission.”
In other words, ignore the evidence. If you can manufacture public distrust—or at least create the illusion of public distrust—you can justify any major policy decision even if the data shows it’s a terrible idea. For example, cancelling mRNA vaccine development because the unapologetically anti-vax HHS Secretary said so.
Bhattacharya does not dispute that mRNA technology has “potential” but he says that it failed the public trust test and so it is useless for anything except maybe cancer down the road. He makes a point to credit President Trump for Operation Warp Speed, then blames all the lost trust on President Joe Biden’s “strategy of mandates” to encourage vaccine uptake. According to Bhattacharya, low rates of uptake for updated COVID boosters are solely the result of the Biden administration’s “scientific overreach, public pressure and, frankly, arrogance.”
Biden administration officials aren’t the only ones lacking humility. Bhattacharya speaks with authority on the supposed scientific justification for abandoning mRNA technology. Yet he is so poorly acquainted with experimental molecular, biochemical, and immunological methods that his data analysis methods were described as follows: “he strutted into the room on the last day of the study, glanced at a handful of positive results stuffed into a glove box tallied against hundreds of negative results and declared ‘there’s definitely signal here.’” Prior to the pandemic, Bhattacharya specialized in producing middling papers analyzing the economics of hemodialysis, weight loss, cancer, and aging in the American health care system. He has no discernable experience with experimental biology, laboratory methods, basic science, or vaccine research, yet he never discloses his lack of relevant expertise or his history of being absolutely wrecked by the entire infectious diseases research community for his shoddy studies in this area.
The Santa Clara serology study, which claimed that COVID infection was more widespread than previously thought so open everything back up in April 2020 because COVID isn’t dangerous, was widely criticized for its sloppy study design and statistics, use of a technically problematic test that was highly likely to produce false positives, unethical study recruitment, and financial conflicts of interest. Rather than address the critics in good faith, Bhattacharya felt empowered enough by his findings to propose a mass infection pandemic response plan and author a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming the pandemic was not very deadly in 2021. He continued to talk up his study as if it were settled science more than a year after it was roundly rejected by an entire large community of experts who actually study viruses and epidemics and immune responses. The most clear sign of Bhattacharya’s scientific incompetence is his unwillingness to admit that his hypothesis that COVID was less deadly than it was failed testing and was wrong. The second most clear sign of his incompetence is that rather than defer to actual experts or try to improve his own knowledge, he uses his position as NIH Director to retaliate against colleagues who outstrip his expertise and told him that his ideas would get people killed.
As a result, the scientific section of this op-ed about mRNA’s “special biological features” reads like an undergraduate’s answer on an in-class essay question that they clearly did not study for. Bhattacharya falsely implies that mRNA vaccines have a dubious track record because there are still unanswered questions about where the antigen encoded by mRNA vaccine goes and what it does when it gets there. Will it be expressed forever? How do we know the dose is right? What about off-target effects? I’m surprised he didn’t muse about the likelihood of mRNA vaccines causing “turbocancer” or spontaneous magnetism.
In reality, all these questions have been answered. mRNA vaccine antigens will not be expressed forever in a vaccinated person. SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA lasts for a few weeks at most, and when it is gone, no more antigen will be produced. This contrasts with viral antigens that can stick around for months after an infection. Antigen expression mostly lasts at the inoculation site, although it can be detected in the blood and distributed transiently to other tissues. There is no evidence that systemic distribution of either mRNA vaccine antigens or the lipid nanoparticles that deliver them is harmful or problematic in any way. As a scientist who primarily studies the mechanistic basis for virus antigen-induced host responses, I can confidently say that the amount of protein made for each mRNA vaccine molecule is largely irrelevant to vaccine safety, and the only time it matters for efficacy is if it doesn’t make enough to trigger a robust immune response. That can be adjusted by modulating mRNA dosage, which has been studied extensively.
Don’t get me started on Bhattacharya’s concerns regarding “unintended proteins.” Unintended proteins happen all the time. Right now, your cells are making far more unintended proteins from our own endogenous mRNA than you would from a mRNA vaccine. mRNA vaccines are codon-optimized so they are unlikely to produce such proteins beyond normal errors in translation or modification (cells screwing up protein synthesis). There is no evidence that mRNA vaccines encode harmful proteins at all (intended or not), nor is there evidence that such proteins present any risk. The point of vaccination is to prevent sickness and death, not to elicit questions that are actually both accusations and admission of incompetence at basic molecular and cellular biology.
Bhattacharya closes out his analysis of the evidence base supporting mRNA vaccines by saying that he doesn’t believe they’ve been either really great or really terrible, but their impact can never be measured because all models are wrong (true, but that doesn’t mean they are uninformative). He concedes that mRNA vaccines didn’t cause mass harm, but about how many people’s lives did they really save? As few as 2.5 million, according to Bhattacharya’s Santa Clara study co-author and OG scientific contrarian John “All Papers Are Wrong Except Mine” Ioannidis. Still, even when reckoning the worst possible vaccine performance, that’s 2.5 million human beings who are alive today because of mRNA vaccines. Not a bad track record, if you ask me.
Trust falls
Bhattacharya does not wish to dwell on the past, because that might mean discussing his inconvenient track record of encouraging mass COVID infection, misrepresenting vaccine science, and generally being a venal contrarian opportunist. He is here to evangelize about the technology of the future (cut to Taubenberger blinking twice to indicate that he is alive but it’s not safe to talk) and he absolutely loves the direction his bosses are going in. Specifically he is on board with spending NIH money on the finest vaccines that medical antiquity has to offer—whole-virus inactivated vaccines, just like grandpa used to make. Despite presenting no evidence that this vaccine platform is superior to mRNA and the comparatively larger requirement for time and resources to manufacture them, Bhattacharya says that this plan is consistent with “the Operation Warp Speed model.”
Bhattacharya is pulling the tried and true “if you didn’t want to be raped, you shouldn’t have worn that dress” routine on US government vaccine policy. If scientists wanted mRNA vaccines to be trusted, they shouldn’t have been rolled out so quickly, promoted as critical tools for ending the pandemic emergency, or mandated for workplaces and schools. If public health officials hadn’t been so arrogant about clinical testing and getting regulatory approval for vaccines that saved millions of lives, then maybe the public would believe the evidence that Bhattacharya willingly ignores attesting to their safety and effectiveness. In reality, mRNA vaccines are allegedly not trusted by the public because of lies that people like Bhattacharya have profited from spreading.
It’s particularly galling that he concludes this insufferable testament to his own bad faith by claiming that the MAHA approach to public health respects the intelligence of the American people. Lying to people is not respect. He presents no evidence that supports his position that mRNA vaccines have passed the American event horizon of trustworthiness and cannot be rescued or redeemed. Instead he describes this as a “candid” public conversation in which he is attempting to justify depriving Americans of a lifesaving technology developed with their tax dollars because it is politically unwelcome to his patrons in the regime.
We will move forward with scientific rigor, transparency and humility. At the NIH, we will fund promising research based not on hype, but on evidence. And I will continue to use my platform to communicate candidly in public conversations where debate and disagreement are welcomed.
As usual, Bhattacharya packages his asked-and-answered questions and insinuations of wrongdoing by his political enemies as legitimate scientific dissent rather than a thinly veiled attempt to evidence-wash purely ideological policy decisions. But lying is not a matter of “debate and disagreement.” It is a matter of not telling the truth. To restore trust in evidence-based science and health, Bhattacharya should stop lying about them.
His other ideas notwithstanding, promotion of ivermectin for covid is completely disqualifying. He's going to have to really lean-in to his new status as a MAGA quack, because there's no regaining credibility after this.
Great post. Just want to add that he also admits that the covid vaccine did save some people-- "mostly elderly." As in, it didn't save anyone who wasn't on their way out. Of course this is completely false but it fits into his and his boss's eugenics approach. God, these people are just the worst.