The People Who Locked You Down Are Worried About Jay Bhattacharya Having "Too Much Power"

Feb 23, 2026

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya — Bhattacharya at a Senate health committee hearing in February. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Let me see if I have this straight.

The same people who wanted to chain you to your bedpost for months. Who barred your children from school for years. Who mandated that you strap a flimsy cloth over your face and inject yourself with a brand-new approach to vaccines. Who told you which businesses were “essential” and which could die. Who closed the churches on Easter and turned grandmothers into prisoners behind glass.

These people are now deeply concerned that Jay Bhattacharya — the Stanford professor who dared to question all of it — has too much power.

You can’t make this up.

The Latest Panic

The Hill published a piece this weekend breathlessly reporting that “public health experts and former federal staffers are uneasy” because Bhattacharya, who already runs the NIH, has been tapped as acting CDC director while the administration finds a permanent pick.

The usual suspects are trotted out. Kayla Hancock from “Protect Our Care” — a progressive health advocacy group — calls Jay “someone who very clearly has an ax to grind with science.” James Alwine, professor emeritus at UPenn, says Bhattacharya’s motivations “don’t align” with the CDC’s mission of “promoting and protecting public health.”

A former CDC physician named Elizabeth Soda offers the quiet part out loud: “MAHA’s beliefs, I think, are just so contrary to what CDC represents.”

Let that land for a second.

The woman is saying that “Make America Healthy Again” — the idea that Americans should actually be healthier — is “contrary to what the CDC represents.”

She’s... not wrong. Just not in the way she thinks.

What the CDC Actually Represents (A Refresher)

We’ve been tracking the CDC’s record at Rational Ground for nearly six years now. Let me remind you what they’ve been up to:

They hid data. The CDC sat on critical case surveillance data and released it only under pressure. When it finally came out, we found that nearly half of newly reported COVID-19 deaths were six or more months old. They weren’t tracking a pandemic. They were curating a narrative.

They manufactured data. They changed the definitions — literally. “Vaccine.” “Pandemic.” “Herd immunity.” “Natural immunity.” When reality didn’t match the policy, they rewrote the dictionary. We documented 70 separate anti-science moments from the COVID era, many of them originating from the CDC itself (the list itself curated by Dr. Jay as well).

They censored dissent. Jay Bhattacharya joined Twitter in August 2021 and was immediately shadow-banned — placed on a “Trends Blacklist” so his evidence-based arguments could never reach the trending page. This wasn’t a rogue content moderator. The Twitter Files revealed a systematic, government-coordinated censorship operation. The CTIL Files showed it was being planned as early as 2018.

They ignored natural immunity. For the better part of two years, the CDC pretended that natural immunity didn’t exist — despite centuries of immunology and mounting evidence that recovered individuals had robust, durable protection. They even pushed vaccine mandates on people who had already recovered. Over 60% of vaccinated Americans had already had COVID. The mandate was performative obedience, not science.

They sacrificed the children. School closures produced catastrophic learning loss — particularly in blue states that followed CDC guidance most faithfully. Kids were forced to eat six feet apart, outdoors, in silence. Toddlers were masked. Zoom school became the norm. (A reminder that school “advocate” Randi Weingarten’s fingerprints were all over it.)

They buried the vaccine injuries. While pushing an emergency-authorized product on every American regardless of risk profile, they downplayed evidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis — particularly in young men who faced minimal risk from COVID itself. (We compiled 388 studies documenting the phenomenon they told you was “extremely rare.”)

This is the institution that these experts think Jay Bhattacharya will damage?

They’re Not Worried About Power. They’re Worried About Accountability.

Let’s name the real fear here. It’s not that Jay has “too much power.” It’s that the CDC has too much to answer for — and now someone who knows exactly where the bodies are buried is running the place.

Jay is not some outsider. He’s a Stanford professor of medicine and health economics. He ran one of the earliest seroprevalence studies that showed the infection fatality rate was far lower than the apocalyptic projections. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration — a document proposing “focused protection” for the vulnerable while letting the rest of society function. For this, Francis Collins called him a “fringe epidemiologist” and called for a “devastating takedown.”

We know this because we read the emails. Because we fought the censorship. Because we were there — at the Rational Ground conference with Jay in 2022, on Capitol Hill with him in 2023, in the Wall Street Journal writing about his blacklisting, and in the hearing room when he testified before the Senate just three weeks ago.

When Jay testified on February 3rd, he said it plainly: “I want to assure the American public that we have ended any support for dangerous gain-of-function at the NIH.” One sentence. Done. The research program Anthony Fauci swore didn’t exist — ended.

That’s what power in the right hands looks like.

The Irony Is Deafening

The Hill quotes Alwine suggesting that Bhattacharya is “getting back at those who criticized him.” As if holding people accountable for documented failures is a personal vendetta.

When Jay sat down with the New York Times last month, he explained his naïveté: “I thought that the data would change everybody’s mind about how to manage the pandemic. Instead, I faced attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.”

He thought being right would be enough. We all did.

Now he’s in charge. And the people who were wrong — wrong about lockdowns, wrong about school closures, wrong about masks, wrong about natural immunity, wrong about censorship, wrong about gain-of-function — are worried that the man who was right about all of it might actually do something about it.

Good.

Jay’s Email to CDC Staff

Here’s what’s actually happening at the CDC, as opposed to what The Hill’s anonymous hand-wringers want you to believe. In his email to CDC staff on Friday, Bhattacharya laid out three principles:

Update guidance transparently as new data emerges
Ensure every investigation reflects responsibility to the communities they serve
Strengthen internal review processes for accountability and openness

Transparency. Accountability. Openness.

The lockdowners are terrified of transparency. That tells you everything.

We’ve Been Here Before

I’ll close with something Jay said in his NYT interview that has stuck with me:

“What if you opened Pandora’s box? What would you do? You’ve unleashed hell on the world. And you’re responsible for it. What would you do?”

That’s the real question the CDC’s defenders don’t want to face. Not “Does Jay have too much power?” but “What will he find when he opens the books?”

We’ve been documenting the answer to that question for six years. 150+ studies on lockdown harms. The complete Fauci failure catalog. The censorship apparatus. The school closures. The Twitter Files. All of it.

Jay Bhattacharya doesn’t need to “grind an ax.”

The evidence grinds itself.

..Dr. Jay walking the halls of Congres with my daughter Harley in March 2023..

I’ve walked the halls of Congress with this man. My daughter Harley rode on his shoulders. Jenny and I threw him a party. He’s not a zealot. He’s a scientist who never stopped being one — even when they tried to destroy him for it.

The people who ran the worst public health disaster in modern American history are upset that someone competent is finally in charge.

Cry me a river.

If you’re new here — welcome. We’ve been doing this since July 2020. Subscribe to Rational Ground for the evidence-based reckoning that the establishment press still can’t bring itself to deliver.

Previous coverage of Jay Bhattacharya at Rational Ground: