Informed Dissent: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Anthony Fauci, Nicole Shanahan, and Bhattacharya’s Opposition to the WHO Pandemic Treaty

“Put yourself in Tony Fauci’s shoes.”

This was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s invitation to me when I spoke with him recently about his opposition to the new World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty. Our conversation spanned a range of topics, but we continually returned to Dr. Fauci and the “Pandora’s Box” of horrors – seven million dead – unleashed through his mismanagement of pandemic research. Bhattacharya is troubled by unelected entities like the WHO and Fauci assuming sovereignty over the American people, and he’s unsettled by the absence of humility from the public health establishment.

“The WHO seems to have learned none of the lessons from its catastrophic failure in managing the COVID-19 pandemic,” Bhattacharya said, while seated in his office in a gray jacket and a sapphire shirt. “It embraced anti-science ideas like lockdowns” and promoted policies that were “fundamentally authoritarian, and that did not serve to protect the public at large.”

Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, an institution that has been uncomfortable with Bhattacharya’s bold critiques of the government. But free speech matters to Bhattacharya, who was one of the censored voices unveiled by the Twitter files. Because of the social media shadow banning he suffered, Bhattacharya is a named plaintiff in one of the most important censorship cases of our generation, Missouri v. Murthy, which is against the Biden administration.

The WHO Treaty

At question is whether the US will ratify a treaty that gives WHO the power to prescribe mitigation policies to countries across the world, similar to those we saw during COVID, should another pandemic occur. In short, Bhattacharya wants to honor the Constitution and doesn’t want to see America repeat its COVID-era history of suppression, lockdowns, and censorship.

The WHO’s “new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics” is equivalent to “ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes,” Bhattacharya wrote in a recent article he co-authored with Kevin Bardosh. “Validating this treaty,” they write, “is a vote for the disastrous policies of the COVID years.”

Such strong language doesn’t mean that Bhattacharya reads Fauci as evil or thinks of the WHO as a demonic globalist institution. But Bhattacharya, who generally smiles when he talks, is challenging the gods of public health for a reason. The WHO’s new pandemic treaty seeks, in many ways, to codify Fauci’s pandemic protocols.

Bhattacharya is concerned that these policies are disastrous. He thinks America needs to press pause on this process and have a more thoughtful and democratic debate about health, pandemics, and the underlying values that govern our institutions.

“Read through the current draft of the treaty itself,” Bhattacharya and Bardosh write, “and you will find a whole section dedicated to ‘fighting misinformation.’ There is no section focused on preventing harm.” 

Furthermore, if one does read through the document, one discovers that the treaty’s instruments empower the WHO to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” and set policy for responding to such emergencies. This power is a serious breach of American sovereignty. But how does one humanize, or make sensible, this critical document, and the threat it presents to the American people?

The new WHO treaty is not just a referendum on pandemic policy. It’s a document about freedom, sovereignty, and how governments treat human beings in the future. How, as writers, do we humanize a faceless institution like the WHO? How do we make sensible the impact of public health policy? Bhattacharya believes the story of the pandemic is an important one that “might take Shakespeare,” to truly capture, but that we must try, because the stakes are high.  

“So,” he said to me, “put yourself in Tony Fauci’s shoes.”

No American ever cast a vote for Fauci or American membership in the WHO, but for many American citizens, Fauci is the only name and face they associate with the opaque world of pandemic policy. Therefore, perhaps we need to return to the story of the man CNN profiled as the WHO’s champion, Dr. Fauci. After all, the treaty’s emphasis on emergency powers, misinformation regulation, and mandates echo the authoritarian approach Fauci took during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Do we want to resurrect the COVID censorship regime?

Bhattacharya clearly does not. In telling Fauci’s story, Bhattacharya described America’s twenty-first century focus on biosecurity and pandemic prevention as a “second lease on life” for Dr. Fauci in light of the immunologist’s failure to “produce the HIV vaccine” in the twentieth century. Like so many public health professionals, Fauci seemed to possess “Jonas Salk syndrome,” the admirable ambition to be like the American virologist who developed the polio vaccine, says Bhattacharya. But he continues that “this is even better than Jonas Salk,” when talking about Fauci’s pre-COVID pandemic prevention research and its promise to save humanity.

“You’ll predict which viruses and pathogens are going to make the leap. You will have countermeasures available very quickly as a result of that research. So you put yourself in Tony Fauci’s shoes. December, 2019. Maybe you hear the first word that this virus is spreading through Wuhan right near a lab where you have sent NIH money. The first thought in your head that must have popped up was, ‘Oh, my God! Did I open Pandora’s box?’”

Seven million deaths later and the term “Pandora’s box” doesn’t feel like hyperbole. Bhattacharya is a medical dissident, one of the scientific “Profiles in Courage” who dares to challenge the official narratives of the pandemic. Bhattacharya, who co-authored the famous Great Barrington Declaration in opposition to the COVID lockdowns, also now challenges the official position on the pandemic’s origin, which is to say, he finds the lab leak theory credible.

As a public-facing intellectual criticizing these positions, the orthodoxies of the WHO, and authority figures like Fauci, Bhattacharya is taking a chance. His pandemic reports have led to attacks from the administration at Stanford. He is risking his professional standing to tell this story of blowback, censorship, and tyranny.

For Bhattacharya, who thinks science should be “apolitical,” telling the true story of what happened during the COVID pandemic is a necessary risk and perhaps one way to prevent the next one.

Is he right? Is the official “wet market” story of the pandemic’s origin a lie? Bhattacharya is not alone in opposing the WHO treaty and he is not alone in espousing the lab leak theory. The FBI and the Department of Energy share his assessment of what happened at the Wuhan lab, as does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chandini Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity and Head of the Biosecurity Research Program at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales. Last month, MacIntyre published a study that “uses an established tool,” according to Newsweek, “to show that an unnatural origin is as plausible, if not more plausible, than a natural origin.” 

To be sure, there is an illusion of consensus around the COVID narrative and, therefore, a need for a more democratic conversation about how to prevent the next pandemic. Bhattacharya and the FBI may end up being vindicated in the annals of public health history. Tony Fauci may turn out to be a villain or not.

But what should be abundantly clear is that a multitude of credible voices have different interpretations about what happened during the pandemic. Without a bold conversation about COVID, how can the WHO produce an effective and ethical treaty to protect civil liberties, save lives, and prevent future pandemics?

Many are joining Bhattacharya in his call to oppose the treaty. Last week, the attorneys general from 22 states sent a letter to President Biden asking him not to sign the United States into the WHO agreement.

“Ultimately,” the AGs write, “the goal of these instruments isn’t to protect public health. It’s to cede authority to the WHO—specifically its Director General—to restrict our citizens’ rights to freedom of speech, privacy, movement (especially to travel across borders) and informed consent . . . Accordingly, we will resist any attempt to enable the WHO to directly or indirectly set public policy for our citizens.”

At the center of this debate, then, is the core principle of the Enlightenment and the foundational principle of the American Constitution: free speech.

Nicole Shanahan

Bhattacharya recently spoke at the announcement for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s vice-presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, and shortly thereafter hosted Shanahan on his podcast, “Illusion of Consensus.” Bhattacharya and Shanahan share concerns about scientific integrity and the corruption of American health care.

It was quite noteworthy to hear Shanahan speaking of her desire to fund science for the sake of information alone. She donated $100 million to research infertility not to patent a new drug or corner the market for a new procedure, but merely to learn more about the critical topic of fertility in women. Shanahan stated that thanks to her funding, ovarian science advanced further in just three years than it had in the prior 50 years.

Watching a philanthropist who funds science for knowledge talk with a doctor who performs his craft for the very same reason is quite inspiring, to say the least. This approach is precisely how science can and does save lives.

Inevitably, their conversation went to the importance of free speech.

“Free speech is not just a civil right,” Bhattacharya stated in his conversation with Shanahan. “It’s a necessary condition for health.”

Bhattacharya’s expansive vision of health and liberty – medical freedom – challenges the current consensus of treating science as a heralded monolith, a single luminous body to worship and obey. How does one engage a public that worships science but is largely illiterate when it comes to the real facts and debates that shape the field? How does one demystify the priests of public health – the sacred white coats like Fauci? 

For Bhattacharya, part of the answer is empathy and free speech. The rest is a more democratized story about science and medicine more broadly, and pandemics specifically. Patients questioning doctors and independent doctors questioning public health elites is not a problem for true science and health. It’s part of the solution.

So, take the doctor’s advice if you dare: Put yourself in Tony Fauci’s shoes. What would you do differently if given a second chance? And now put yourself in Joe Biden’s shoes. Should you cede American sovereignty to the WHO?