Jay Bhattacharya used a flawed study in 2020 to argue for reopening even as Covid gained force.

Today, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), testified before a Congressional committee.

The main takeaway: Bhattacharya does not seem interested in defending steep budget cuts to U.S. research. He said budgets are a negotiation between the president and Congress; he just implements them.

Bhattacharya also talked about some of the crises facing scientific research in the U.S., including the need for “gold standard” science and studies that hold up to further scrutiny.

Yet his own study on Covid prevalence in 2020 was filled with errors and conflicts of interest.

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Santiago Sanchez, a researcher who volunteered for the study, told me they conducted more than 3,300 tests, but fewer than two dozen turned positive.

Yet the ensuing preprint estimated that between 2.5% to 4% of people were infected – a rate significantly higher than the number of positive tests that Sanchez says he saw.

More from my article for the Guardian about Bhattacharya:

The research project was an attempt to see how many people had already gotten sick from Covid. If more people than previously known had already gotten sick and recovered, that would mean the virus wasn’t as severe as it seemed, and it might also mean there were enough people out there with immunity to help stop the virus from spreading, Sanchez hoped.

But as he saw negative result after negative result, Sanchez felt his optimism curdle.

That’s why he was puzzled when one of the senior researchers of the study, Jay Bhattacharya, stepped into the ballroom, saw the handful of positive tests alongside stacks of negative tests, and said, “there’s definitely signal here,” according to Sanchez’s recollection.

“That was my first sinking feeling, because I was like, ‘That is not how I am interpreting this experiment,’” Sanchez said.

–Trump pick for US health agency proposed ‘herd immunity’ during Covid, The Guardian

Bhattacharya then used this study to argue for reopening even as the Covid pandemic gained force.

He was one of three academics who, at the White House’s prompting, created the policy of “herd immunity,” which was then adopted as official policy.

I would be really wary of positioning Jay Bhattacharya as a onetime outsider, as I’ve seen some journalists do.

He was and is on the scientific fringes, but he has long been in the political mainstream.

Got tips or ideas for what I should cover next? Get in touch via email (melodyaschreiber@gmail.com) or Signal (melodyschreiber.06).

Top image: Rosmarie Voegtli