Jay Bhattacharya is the new director of the National Institutes of Health. He says,
As NIH Director, I will build on the agency’s long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine by fostering gold-standard research and innovation to address the chronic disease crisis.
Sure. Sounds great. How does he plan to accomplish that?
Effective pandemic preparedness.
Step 1: Fire all the people currently responsible for pandemic preparedness. They likely caused the pandemic, locked you down, kept your kids out of school, demolished economies, and want more power to do it again.
There is no step 2.
There may be more steps needed, but they will need to be devised by people not captured by pharma or the pandemic industrial complex.
NO STEP 2. Just fire everyone.
Well. He’s a bit of a nutter, isn’t he?
@ ^ Rich Woods : Yes.
A bit being a massive understatement.
As the ole Far Side cartoon went .. Step (?) … then a miracle occurs.
Or, you know, in reality does not and people just die en masse.
As a lot of them did from covid still in denial inTrump’s first term and have now.. totally forgotten somehow? Hermann Caine even? Who was he?
We are already right now in the midst of a pandemic.
Fortunately, almost all the victims so far are…chickens.
A lot of chickens dead. So far it is 148 million.
The Avian H5N1 bird flu pandemic has seriously impacted our food supply.
Eggs are still running $8.00 a dozen here on the coast.
So how is the Trump’s administration plan to end the bird flu pandemic and save our food supply going right now?
It isn’t going any where.
They don’t have a plan to end the Avian H5N1 pandemic.
It’s up to the states and the industry itself to come up with a solution.
If we have another human pandemic, what is the current GOP plans to fight it and end it.
Easy question.
They don’t have any plans or any idea what to do.
It will be up to everyone else to figure it out.
Pandemic.. industrial complex .. ?
Hmm.. so even they are using the military Industrial complex as an (alluded to) slur – kinda. Whilst. supporting it as the biggest bullies on block and empowering iwuith their “Might make right!” dictatorship colonialist invade Greenland / Panama / etc.. mentality. Ohh-kaaaaay..
@3 raven : yeah but then there’s also the measles outbreaks including literal dead babies because of that.
See : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/21/health/measles-outbreak-spread-expected/index.html
It doesn’t seem to matter to them. “Pro-life” my fucking arse. Not even their own live swhen remeberiung them is inconvenient to them.
If there is another pandemic, will this reptile be held responsible?
Or elected President?
Apologies if being a threadhog here but :
Plus :
Source : https://leadstories.com/explainer/2025/02/texas-child-dies-after-measles-infection-key-facts-about-2025-outbreak.html
In addition to :
Source : https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/right-wing-shock-jock-and-anti-vaxxer-dies-of-covid-19-1.4642747
Also :
Source : https://newsone.com/playlist/famous-anti-vaxxers-who-have-died-from-covid-19/
From whence listed :
Herman Cain (Dóh! I misremebered his spelling before..), Caleb Wallace, Tod Tucker, Marc “Mr Anti-Vax” Bernier, Kelly Ernby, ad nauseam..
@ 4
Don’t these right wing creep supposedly LIKE making money? Don’t they like huge industries?
@ 6
Of course not. Americans won’t punish anyone who’ll allow them to act on their must selfish and stupid whims no matter who get’s hurt. Its commonly called “freedom” or “liberty” We, the sane, are the vanishing minority in this country.
Firing all your researchers and scientists, closing labs, and driving medical research away to other nations is no way to go through life, son.
And of course covid is still around too. Brother got hit with it Sat night and the rest of us in the house got hit Tues morning. First time I have ever tested positive for it and really makes me regret not getting the newest booster. At least I am still up to date on all the nastier things we had damn near eliminated.
Breath felt a bit warm after testing positive, but head felt fairly clear/lucid so did not take any Advil before going back to sleep. That was another mistake since delirium/fever dreams are not fun. Regular use of Advil and Albuterol inhaler, with Claritin-D as necessary, seems to be keeping it very annoying but not drowning in my own fluids (yet).
I guess step 2 would be “Wait till the pandemic gets too deadly to ignore or minimize, then look for a new set of ‘experts’ to deal with it, and find no one available EXCEPT Big-Pharma people, both because they’ll jump at a chance to dominate and profit from a state response, and because you’ve demonized all the civil servants and can’t bear to admit you were wrong and hire them back.”
“They likely caused the pandemic…” Some of those getting fired should sue Jay, the Trump administration, and the GOP for this libel.
And I’m sick of Trump’s revenge political agenda. A classic example of kill the messenger.
Wait, so his plan for “pandemic preparedness” is to just… not?
First they will blame Obama. Then Hillary. Then Kamala Harris.
Blame Woke.
Blame DEI.
Blame Migrants crossing the Mexican border.
Then they will claim that the new SARS Covid-26 virus doesn’t really exist, and besides it is a Chinese or Iranian bioweapon.
Finally they will discover that bleach mixed with ivermectin and chloroquine cures the virus that doesn’t exist.
Waitwaitwait… you mean this is not a net joke? Onion style, like?
This dingus is actually really head of NIH, and he seriously wants to do that?
This is looking more and more like a collective death wish. Do Americans truly feel like it’s time to suicide and leave this valley of tears?
Come on, the announcement reads April 1:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/jay-bhattacharya-begins-tenure-18th-director-national-institutes-health
a joke, right? Riiiiiight????
Make America Healthy by letting Americans get sick and die.
Yes.
This guy was one of the authors of The Great Barrington declaration at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Their brilliant plan was to let the virus burn through the population until it builds up herd immunity.
This is the same plan that worked so well for the last 5 millennia as diseases like TB, measles, polio, and the Black Plague moved through the populations.
Herd immunity doesn’t happen that way. You have to immunize to get it.
He is an ignorant idiot which is why he was chosen to run NIH.
PS In Realityland, the Covid-19 vaccines saved the lives of an estimated 3.2 million Americans. One of which was very likely myself.
So, there are still over 450 people a week dying from covid19 (the tRUMP PLAGUE).
Monkey Pox can now easily be transmitted between people (couldn’t before)
There is now very little info about the bird flu.
And, that is probably another manifestation of the fact that the FDA, NIH and CDC not longer have any experienced people working there and the magat admin won’t release full or accurate info even if there were any info gathered. WTF.
More manifestations of the Death Spiral (the win in wisconsin, inspite of people having to climb over the rotting carcass of the dnc to vote, slowed progress down the death spiral a little)
@19 raven warned about the covid plan ‘let the virus burn through the population until it builds up herd immunity.’
I reply: Yes, that worked well. We have now achieved ‘full herd insanity’.
Signed by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University,
It was a stupid idea that was never going to work.
What we did was a whole lot better and saved 3.2 million American lives.
B people hire C people…
@ 18
They prefer to call it “Personal Responsibility.”
Well, this will negatively impact only the black and brown people! Right?
raven @ #3 asked…
They have plans. As I understand it, the plan is to let a pandemic run its course. They think that will build herd immunity, which it won’t, but may mean millions of people will die. I’m suppose they think that will mostly be old people who are living on Social Security, so not really worth saving. (Sorry grandma, but you gotta go.) They don’t seem to realize that diseases can hit any age. The 1918-1920 flu epidemic hit young people particularly hard.
That pandemic is a good example of what doing nothing can result in. When the epidemic hit at the end of WWI, world governments suppressed the news. The pandemic resulted in 50 to 100 million deaths. Some of those people might have lived if the news was widely available. While vaccines weren’t available, people could have taken other precautions.
raven@19:
Well, it’s possible to get herd immunity that way, but there are a couple of issues. First, a lot of people are likely to die in the process (and while the Great Barrington Declaration talked about ‘focused protection’ for ‘at-risk populations’ like the elderly, it was completely lacking in actual practical suggestions for how to do it, especially as most of the caretakers of the at-risk population would have been getting exposed). And second, it’s absolutely not going to work for RNA viruses like Covid-19 anyway, because they mutate too damn fast. Herd immunity without vaccinations would basically require something that doesn’t kill anybody and spreads to become endemic faster than it can mutate. (Measles actually does spread significantly faster than it mutates; but it also kills people, permanently debilitates many others, and can mess with the immune system leaving people vulnerable to other things they thought they were immune to already.)
As Orac has pointed out a number of times, the Great Barrington Declaration was fundamentally eugenicist, as it pretty much was based on ‘so some poor and old people will die, so what’ and made the barest minimum of efforts at pretending to care about the actual public health consequences. It was all about the economic consequences of lockdowns, and ignored even the economic consequences of hospitals overflowing and small businesses collapsing because everybody got sick.
StevoR #2
You made me look.
The “Step (?) … then a miracle occurs”, wasn’t The Far Side, it was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)
.
Nonono, chigau. Much, much earlier than that.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Then-a-Miracle-Occurs-Copyrighted-artwork-by-Sydney-Harris-Inc-All-materials-used-with_fig2_302632920
I checked with the useless bubble:
“Sydney J. Harris’s famous cartoon featuring the phrase “Then a miracle occurs” was published in the November-December 1977 issue of American Scientist. It humorously depicts a chalkboard with complex equations interrupted by the phrase, highlighting the gap between theoretical and practical understanding.”
At this point I’m hoping the virus itself will hold them responsible, because I have very little faith that human beings will.
They’re eugenicists. Their plan is “let it cull the sick and the weak”.
John Morales #29
Wow. I remember that cartoon.
Actually, I think remember remembering that cartoon.
also one of my earlier thoughts was that it involved the Wee Free Men.
No, that makes no sense, BB.
If the idea is to let is spread freely through the population, than most of the population will perforce become sick. Is it not obvious to you that any infected person is perforce sich?
You truly, seriously think they want almost all the population to die?
(And you know, the rich and powerful are mostly older people)
I believe the original “then a miracle occurs” reference was in a New Yorker cartoon.
https://avionod.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/then-a-miracle-happens.gif
The rich and powerful also are completely dependent on servants.
If the servants all get sick and die, who will wipe their bums?
jenorafeuer@27–
Unfortunately, the current strains will not generate herd immunity by themselves. One of the features of COVID19 is that people who survive an infection only have minor resistance to repeat infection with the same strain and marginal if any resistance to new strains. Herd-immunity-by-mass-infection is not just morally unjustifiable, it’s not going to work.
With vaccines, the predicted herd immunity rate is around 70% of the population, to be recalculated as future strains emerge and new vaccines develop. This is not achievable in a personality cult state with news sources in thrall to photogenic liars.
@ 32 Morales
They mean sick prior, Captain Hyperiteral, which was obvious to everyone else. It’s part of the ideology that those in power are there by virtue of their “superior genes” (so implicitly would be unbothered by a virus). It’s why Musk has as many children as possible ensuring they are all male (so that they can have as many children as possible) to spread his “superior genes”.
No they don’t want to wipe out the population, but believe only the inferior will die, and that’s a good thing.
@ ^
https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lemmyfssqc2p
Mmmhmm…
“Their plan is “let it cull the sick and the weak”.”
↓
‘Their plan is “let it cull the sick prior and the weak”.’
That’s your contention?
Heh. How quickly you forget!
Here: Republican official dies of Covid five days after mocking vaccines
See, this is the thing about biological weapons. Nobody in their right mind uses them, for a damn good reason.
Regardless of how sensible it is to use biological weapons, they have been used many times in history. That Wikipedia list does not include failed research attempts such as South Africa’s program to develop bioweapons that would only kill black people, a program that only ended when the apartheid regime was falling apart.
@ 32 Morales
(off topic)
Also, don’t think we are not all noticing you continue to engage in the utterly common, unremarkable, and accepted practice of abbreviating other commenters’ ‘nyms with whom you are familiar, you dishonest troll.
(/off topic)
@ ^ Silentbob : Also off-topic but I notice that you still haven’t answered a number of good questions here from me ( #57) & #59 Rob Grigjanis linked up thread here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/03/29/universities-need-to-fight-back/#comment-2260254
Is it too much to ask that you answer those please?
@39. chrislawson : “Regardless of how sensible it is to use biological weapons, they have been used many times in history. That Wikipedia list does not include failed research attempts..”
It also doesn;’t include the hypothetical but quite plausible case that Briatin’s First Fleet used smallpox as a biological weapon against the Indigenous Australians most specifically the Eora* / Yura / Dharug peoples. It wasn’t openly declared but it does look awfully suspicious.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-and-australias-first-pandemic-caused-by-smallpox/12099430
Plus scroll down and see here too :
https://www.u3aknox.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/AH4TheCollisionOfWorlds.pdf
Excerpt :
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eora
Not talking about that sort of biological warfare; talking about using it in theatre, e.g. the Ukraine war or the Palestinian genocide war. No isolated populations with no resistance to endemic diseases in those cases.
Same principle. Bacteria and viruses and toxins don’t care about ideology, only about biology.
I’m not an immunologist (I don’t even play one on TV), but surely “let’s allow the disease to run rampant through the population, until herd immunity naturally results” is exactly the same proposition as “let’s allow the disease to be maximally destructive to our population”? It’s not a proposal to help fight, or even mitigate, the disease, it’s literally a decision to allow the body count to go as high as it can. It’s the opposite of a public health intervention.
It amazes me how some people with medical training can fail to see this. Before we had vaccines, before we had antibiotics, before we had much of anything that could prevent or cure infectious diseases, we still had public health measures that worked – quarantine and isolation of the sick. Such human technologies prevented Venice from falling to the plague for hundreds of years, and countless other towns and cities too. And people like this are not just refusing to use the new, nigh-miraculous, technologies of vaccination, they’re refusing to use the ancient ones that were all we had before.
pilgham@18- It’s the eugenics playbook: make the nation healthy by letting the sick die off. I don’t often think about ableism when listing off the “-isms,” but it’s a big one. Charter schools play a similar game: get higher test scores by kicking out weaker students.
When is the edict against hand washing being released?
Jay loves slander, innuendo, and being a bad example. He would make Goebbels proud.
In my world, academics who slander and libel scientists and put the public at risk would be disciplined. Repeat transgressions would result in theor academic credentials being cancelled.
raven @ # 3: They don’t have a plan to end the Avian H5N1 pandemic.
Please try to keep up with the genius of our Dear Leader: all we need is the CONCEPT of a plan!