Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor of medicine and economics who President Donald Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health, became prominent during the Covid pandemic as a contrarian. He was a fierce foe of the restrictive measures advocated by public health officials for combatting the deadly virus.
As one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank, he recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection instead of fighting the disease with lockdowns, masking, and other countermeasures—a position widely opposed by medical experts as dangerous. And at the outset of Covid, he lowballed the severity of the pandemic, saying it was “likely” that the outbreak would be of a “limited scale” and cause 20,000 to 40,000 deaths, not the million or more predicted by public health officials. (Covid deaths have so far totaled 1.2 million.)
During the Covid crisis, Bhattacharya’s controversial and much-criticized views became well-known. Not as public was his role advising a group in South Africa that has claimed there was no Covid pandemic and that has pushed the conspiracy theory that Covid and climate change are “fabricated global crises” orchestrated to implement “centralized control.”
Weeks into the Covid pandemic, a South African named Nick Hudson, who describes himself as an actuary, private equity investor, and amateur ornithologist, created an outfit called PANDA (short for Pandemics Data and Analytics) to advance the notion that the global reaction to Covid—lockdowns and mandates—was “overwrought and damaging.”
In June 2020, when South African government advisers estimated that Covid could result in 40,000 fatalities in that country, Hudson, through PANDA, released an open letter calling that figure “outlandish”—that is, far too high. He told a South African publication that this estimate “would put us in line with the very worst experiences in the world. That makes no sense.” He added, “We have a younger population, which is associated with a lighter [disease] experience.” He insisted a reasonable forecast would not top 10,000 deaths.
But Hudson had been wrong before. In May 2020, he contended that because no nation “we have noticed” had seen “peak daily deaths” occur outside the range of 30-to-50 days from first death, “poor and middle-income nations would not have significant epidemics.” By the next month—after that 30-to-50-day window had passed—South Africa was still registering record-setting deaths. And greater peaks of daily deaths would continue to occur.
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