Trump NIH Pick ‘Sanewashes’ a Scientific Crank
The dangers of obsessive contrarianism.
JAY BHATTACHARYA, THE STANFORD physician and economist who is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, has been for the past few years on a contrarian path that has led him in troubling directions. I wrote last week about Dr. Bhattacharya’s history as a COVID “dissident,” a stance nor nearly as “vindicated” as his supporters would have us believe. Now, science writer Allison Neitzel has brought attention to a long article Bhattacharya recently wrote in which he, among other things, sympathizes with and “sanewashes” (as Neitzel puts it) a notorious scientific crank. Let’s take a look.
The article in question, published in mid-October on the website of the Brownstone Institute, is primarily an attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci under the guise of a review of Fauci’s recent memoir, On Call. (It’s worth noting that the Brownstone Institute, founded in 2021 by radical libertarian/anarchocapitalist Jeffrey Tucker as an outfit opposing the alleged tyranny of COVID lockdowns, also hosted a conference this past October—with Bhattacharya as one of the speakers—that featured a panoply of anti-vaccine activists.)
Bhattacharya’s article makes an attempt at balance, framing Fauci’s story as one of “intelligence and diligence” undermined by hubris and praising his role in developing and promoting effective HIV medications. Yet Bhattacharya not-so-subtly tries to discredit Fauci’s legacy even with regard to HIV/AIDS. Thus, he faults Fauci for causing people to shun AIDS patients by stating in 1983 (when Fauci was already a high-level NIH staffer) that HIV might be spread through “routine close contact” within a household; but Bhattacharya doesn’t mention that (1) the panic was fed primarily by a sensationalist press release from the Journal of the American Medical Association and (2) just two months later, Fauci made a strong statement dismissing as “preposterous” the idea that the virus could spread via routine social contact.
On COVID, Bhattacharya repeats the familiar allegations about Fauci’s possible role in gain-of-function research that he believes could have led to the coronavirus lab leak, as well as criticisms of Fauci’s support for social distancing. (He critiques Fauci for ignoring Sweden’s supposed success story, but himself ignores contrary facts.) But the most striking passage in his piece is one that villainizes Fauci for his supposed persecution of University of California, Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, an exponent of the belief that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by drug use and other unhealthy lifestyles. Says Bhattacharya:
In 1991, when University of California, Berkeley, professor and wunderkind cancer biologist Peter Duesberg put forward a (false) hypothesis that the virus, HIV, is not the cause of AIDS, Fauci did everything in his power to destroy him. In his memoir, Fauci writes about debating Duesberg, writing papers, and giving talks to counter his ideas. But Fauci did more, isolating Duesberg, destroying his reputation in the press, and making him a pariah in the scientific community. Though Fauci was right and Duesberg wrong about the scientific question, the scientific community learned it was dangerous to cross Fauci.
To Bhattacharya, this is one example of Fauci’s pattern of steamrolling “scientific critics” in a way Bhattacharya considers unacceptable for “federal science bureaucrats.”
And what is the evidence for this misconduct? Bhattacharya links to a 2022 Substack post by Celia Farber, a journalist who has devoted much of her career to sympathetic coverage of HIV/AIDS “dissenters” while framing her approach as just-asking-questions or just-reporting-on-unpopular-opinions (but, on occasion, leaving no doubt that she endorsed those opinions).
But here’s the remarkable thing: Even Farber doesn’t make the claim that Bhattacharya imputes to her, which is that Fauci almost singlehandedly destroyed Duesberg’s career and reputation. Her claim is that Duesberg’s career was tanked by the medical and scientific establishment—which it was.1 He lost his federal funding. (Farber insinuates that this was due to the machinations of AIDS researchers with mercenary interests.) He was disinvited from conferences—Farber says that some scientists threatened to boycott any conference that had him speak—and ostracized by scientific journals. Berkeley, Farber writes, “dissuaded all grad students from working with him.” She doesn’t even hint that all these institutions and individuals shunned Duesberg because they were under Fauci’s fearsome thumb.
Farber’s only mention of Fauci’s role has to do with getting Duesberg blacklisted by the media—and even that claim is evidence-free:
Anthony Fauci personally made sure Duesberg never appeared on national television, by intimidating the producers who in many cases had already booked Duesberg and flown him to New York. A few times he was cancelled within an hour of air-time, only to turn on the TV and see Anthony Fauci himself on the show.
But Farber does put Fauci’s name in the subhead of her post—presumably because Fauci-bashing is a way to get eyeballs.
Needless to say, the lesson of Duesberg’s downfall is not, as Bhattacharya would have it, that it’s “dangerous to cross Fauci.” Rather it’s that, when you’re thoroughly discredited on a question that amounts to a matter of life and death for millions, the response from fellow scientists is unlikely to be a hearty handshake and a collegial “agree to disagree.” Duesberg wasn’t simply expounding an abstract theory; he was making claims that had a strong and immediate impact in the real world. He argued that HIV is not sexually transmitted and, even more dangerously, that AZT—the principal antiviral medication used to treat AIDS and prevent HIV infection from developing into AIDS—was the actual cause of immune system collapse. Duesberg’s perceived scientific authority played a role in former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s defiance against the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS, parlayed into policies that led to some 300,000 deaths. (Duesberg leaned into this role, participating in a 2000 roundtable of experts convened by Mbeki.)
This is the “scientific critic” that Bhattacharya accuses Fauci of persecuting.
Leaving aside Bhattacharya’s willingness to share a platform with hardcore antivaxers at Brownstone events, his quasi-defense of Duesberg as a wronged dissenter is a disturbing piece of evidence for Bhattacharya’s slide into “anti-establishment” contrarianism—compounded by grievance over what he sees as his own unfair treatment—and willingness to play footsie with quackery.
In a review in Nature of Duesberg’s 1996 book, Inventing the AIDS Virus,2 Cornell University virologist John Moore described Duesberg as a tragic figure, a once-respected scientist undone by hubris—“faith that he is right, and everyone else is wrong.” One may wonder if Bhattacharya is now on the same path.
Indeed, Farber’s hugely controversial 2006 Harper’s article about the suppression of HIV skeptics contained only two passing and neutral mentions of Fauci.
Published by Regnery, a reminder that the right-wing dalliance with junk science long antedates the rise of Donald Trump.