HHS Science Is Rotting From the Head
How RFK Jr and Jay Bhattacharya Are Undermining Science at HHS
RFK Jr.’s recent revision of the CDC page on vaccines and autism triggered protests from dozens of major medical and scientific organizations. The edit was a blatant distortion of evidence and the outrage was fully justified. At this point, this level of reality denial from Kennedy, Trump, and the broader misinformation ecosystem is expected.
What is far more alarming is the disregard for science coming from the person responsible for scientific integrity at HHS: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Last week, while the country reacted to Kennedy’s rewrite of vaccine reality, Bhattacharya continued his own campaign to rewrite pandemic history. He did this by retweeting misleading content from an unreliable source. A closer look at that source, and at Bhattacharya’s long-standing relationship with it, raises serious concerns for science-based public health.
His COVID “Fact Check” Fails the Laugh Test
Reliable data from Oxford University’s Our World in Data show that Sweden’s cumulative excess mortality from 2020 to 2023 was about 5 percent. Yes, the United Kingdom was higher, but the comparison is meaningless without context. The UK had more than fifteen times the number of direct flights from China and roughly ten times the population density of Sweden. The early importation risk and transmission risk were dramatically higher in the UK.
A valid comparison is with Sweden’s Nordic neighbors Finland and Norway, both of which have similar population structure and density. Against that backdrop, Sweden performed far worse. Bhattacharya likes to point out that excess mortality was ultimately similar, but that is inevitable. Medical and public health interventions only delay death. The fact that the peak in deaths came much earlier in Sweden reflects the failure of its early response to COVID.
What Is Mortality Watch and Why Does Bhattacharya Promote It
Who created the bogus chart?
The graph comes from Mortality Watch, a website created by an anonymous software engineer known only as “Ben.” He has no background in epidemiology or virology and provides no transparent description of his methods. Despite this, he regularly attacks subject matter experts on vaccines, transmissibility, and viral genomics on his blog USMortality.
Mortality Watch routinely promotes scientifically baseless claims about vaccines, mortality, genomic validation, and government data. This is the source the NIH Director elevated.
One of Ben’s key posts, Government Interventions Linked to Higher Excess Mortality - Vaccines Show No Positive Effect on All Cause Mortality, is a case study in bad epidemiology. It draws sweeping conclusions based on:
Selective and inappropriate baseline mortality rates
Ecological fallacy
Reverse causation
Cherry picked country comparisons
Failure to adjust for infection rates or age structure
Ignoring wave timing and variant dynamics
Misuse of all-cause mortality
Any trained epidemiologist would reject this instantly. But like most of the Dunning Kruger carnival on X, the analysis survives because it flatters a preferred narrative.
Under normal circumstances, Mortality Watch would vanish into the noise.
These are not normal circumstances, because Jay Bhattacharya is a fan.
Why Is the NIH Director Using an Anonymous Software Engineer as a Source
Bhattacharya has been promoting Mortality Watch since at least 2023. That might be unremarkable if he were a private citizen. But as NIH Director, he leads the world’s largest biomedical research institution and has instant access to world class epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and virologists.
Choosing to rely instead on an anti-vax software engineer speaks for itself.
Bhattacharya’s need to vindicate the Great Barrington Declaration helps explain why he amplifies fringe analyses. The Declaration rested on his flawed infection fatality rate estimate that understated COVID’s lethality and justified its deeply flawed strategy.
Did NPIs Save Lives. Yes. And The Evidence Is Very Clear.
Bhattacharya posted the Sweden chart in response to the UK COVID Inquiry, which concluded that delaying lockdowns likely cost thousands of lives. Bhattacharya insists the opposite. In posting that graph, he implies NPIs caused excess mortality.
This claim is not supported by credible science.
According to an estimate from the Journal of Public Health Policy’s Paper of the Year, NPIs in the United States prevented 850,000 COVID deaths. Deaths from other causes may have increased from delayed care or overwhelmed healthcare facilities, but there is no evidence to suggest a rise in excess mortality due to interventions alone. In fact, New Zealand, with some of the world’s most restrictive COVID policies, experienced almost no excess mortality.
What we see in the Our World in Data figure is an earlier rise in excess deaths in Sweden. NPIs do not prevent deaths. They delay premature death. Scandinavian data show that Finland and Norway eventually converge toward Sweden because ultimate mortality always reaches 100 percent. COVID primarily killed older people and those with underlying disease, shifting deaths earlier rather than preventing them entirely.
If NPIs had no effect, influenza would not have nearly disappeared for two full seasons. That disappearance is one of the strongest natural experiments in modern public health.
The UK COVID Inquiry concluded that thousands of deaths could have been prevented by earlier NPIs. Bhattacharya claims the opposite, relying on Mortality Watch instead of epidemiologists.
The Stakes Are Enormous
The NIH Director does not need to agree with every scientist in his agency. He does need to rely on credible science, not on anonymous online hobbyists with pseudoscientific models.
Science at HHS is not drifting. Under RFK Jr it is deteriorating from the top down.
From his first day, Kennedy has filled leadership roles based on ideology rather than expertise. No decision reflects that more clearly than placing Jay Bhattacharya in charge of the NIH. When the person responsible for the gold standard of biomedical science promotes misinformation to protect his ego, the damage becomes systemic.
And the cost will not be theoretical. It will be measured in lives.
Interesting that these ostensible critics of “big pharma” are so critical of non pharmaceutical interventions while simultaneously advocating unproven pharmaceutical ones. Have they *any* identifiable underlying constellation of beliefs guiding them to their conclusions?
One can easily diagnose a case of Kruger-Dunning by the fact that those patients (such as Mr Kennedy, Jay et al.) are entirely immune to their own logical fallacies.