Dr. Bhattacharya Should Model the Virtues He Seeks

I have just read your endorsement of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH). While I agree with much of the editorial, I would like to express some concerns, commenting as a long-time teacher of philosophy of science, a private citizen who is eager for the scientific enterprise to thrive, and a long-time supporter of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

I, too, am hopeful that Dr. Bhattacharya will prove to be a fine NIH director and will spearhead numerous initiatives to improve the quality of research in the U.S. There is much work to be done on this score, far more than the public is generally aware of; it is a major challenge to create institutional arrangements that consistently promote scientific work of sufficient care and rigor that induces our massively-complicated world to cough up its secrets.

But the NAS editorial in favor of Dr. Bhattacharya is simplistic, in a way that promotes the kind of tribal, us-vs.-them, black-and-white politicizing thinking that it rightly decries as subversive of truth-seeking and sound governance.

Rather than view Dr. Bhattacharya fairly as an accomplished scientist who has promising ideas about how to improve the NIH and whose background should be enhanced not only by his battles against COVID-19 groupthink but also by his own very imperfect struggles to get the science right, the endorsement adopts the now-commonplace portrait of him as having been unjustly vilified despite being right all along on COVID-19.  To say that he “has demonstrated the courage of his convictions—and he has been correct in his judgment” is to imply that his early high-profile position on the dangers posed by the virus was ultimately vindicated.

But it was not—not by a longshot.

That early work was presented to a large audience via a March 2020 co-authored Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say.” It asserted that the fatality rate from COVID-19 infection would likely turn out to be orders of magnitude lower than the early consensus estimates. The science, suggested the authors, should lead us to expect a “20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic” rather than “one that kills two million.”  Therefore, they argued, the nation’s public health response is excessive and overblown; we can and should avoid vaccination for all but the most vulnerable groups, allowing natural immunity to protect the rest.  (For a summary, see “What We Know About Trump’s Pick to Lead the NIH”).

It turned out, though, that more than 1.2 million Americans died during the pandemic—and had the vaccine not worked, over 2 million would have died.

So, Dr. Bhattacharya’s pronouncement proved to grossly underestimate the grave threat posed by the COVID-19 virus.  (Unless he would claim that it was the public health measures themselves that caused the death toll to be so high, a case that no one, to my knowledge, has made.)

Other experts were rightly worried about this underestimation from the outset.  Dr. Bhattacharya’s original research was—and still is—thought by some leading statistically sophisticated researchers to have been highly substandard, perhaps irresponsibly so.  It received rather severe public criticism from others in the scientific community.  (See, e.g., “Every Time Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Talks About COVID, He Proves He Was Totally Wrong About COVID,” “Feud over Stanford coronavirus study: ‘The authors owe us all an apology,'” and “Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence,” and “Assessing Evidence vs. Truth in the Coronavirus Pandemic”).

Yet the narrative that has taken hold—with no apparent corrective efforts by Dr. Bhattacharya—tells only of a fiercely independent thinker who saw the truth when others did not, who pressed his case undaunted in the face of unreasonable, politically motivated opposition, and who is now finally obtaining his just credit and reward.

Such a narrative is, first of all, not only false but unnecessary: there is no need for Dr. Bhattacharya to be a flawless, perfect scientist so long as he is supremely qualified for the NIH job. Worse, the narrative’s distortions further the dangerous politicization and delegitimization of science, encouraging the public to see it inaccurately as just another arena where biased players fight for power through work animated primarily by political agendas.

Were Dr. Bhattacharya and his supporters to have openly conceded his errors instead of directing attention away from them, the case for him as NIH Director would not be undermined. He still brings many assets to the table, such as economic training that has led him to call for greater funding for projects with high risks of failure but potential for huge gains—a kind of portfolio diversification in NIH’s investments.  (See “The Man Who Fought Fauci—and Won”).

Under the conditions of uncertainty, time pressure, and high stakes that all researchers and officials were facing in early 2020, it’s no shame for him to have taken a well-intended contrarian stand that provoked productive controversy, even if that stand was shown to be false and built upon a methodologically questionable foundation. If Dr. Bhattacharya had acknowledged that his early theorizing and forecasting turned out to be way off the mark in some important ways—while insightful in others—he would have been displaying the intellectual honesty and humility we expect from first-rate scientists.

Moreover, if Dr. Bhattacharya ascends to the NIH directorship, he will need to function as a leader, no longer merely a researcher.

Top-notch leaders are not only aware of their errors and limitations but even acknowledge these openly to encourage such openness in others—openness that is crucial to the scientific enterprise. Scientists’ allegiances must be to the truth, not instead to their reputations. Spilling the beans about their own miscues—and science is too difficult to do without committing any of these—is essential to maximizing the collective good that the scientific community can create.  Dr. Bhattacharya needs to lead on this from the front.

He will be leading not the Republican Institutes of Health, or the MAGA Institutes of Health, but the National Institutes of Health.  He may be understandably scarred by the disappointing and disillusioning reception given to his COVID-19 recommendations. But if he is to lead effectively, he must ensure that these painful experiences elevate rather than debase him. He must tame his ego, subordinate any desire for personal retribution to an unprejudiced commitment to the success of all scientists, and resist being seduced into partisanship by his new political allies—as he was, it seems, when he joined in their tendentious, context-ignoring mischaracterizations of Dr. Fauci’s suggestion on Face the Nation that some of his opponents were seeking to attack the enterprise of science and doing so by attacking him as its most representative public face. (Compare Dr. Bhattacharya’s “How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test” with “Transcript: Dr. Anthony Fauci on ‘Face the Nation,’ November 28, 2021.”)

Dr. Bhattacharya is evidently highly intelligent and accomplished. But keeping faith with the highest ideals and intellectual standards of independent truth-seekers will require that he resist multiple temptations: to silence those who disagree with him, to deploy unethical tactics against ideological adversaries, to read others’ motives uncharitably and demonize them, to shut down scientific and policy debates prematurely, to make policy decisions on partisan grounds instead of what serves the public interest—and to hide, or deny, his inevitable errors. He ought to start now by making a clean breast of his early COVID-19 misjudgments.

He and his supporters have conducted what has amounted to an effective public relations campaign distracting from these—a campaign in which, I argue, the NAS has become inadvertently (let’s hope) complicit. Had Dr. Bhattacharya been straightforwardly forthcoming on his role, the NAS could have given him a strong but clear-eyed endorsement without participating in the hagiographic celebration of him as an unblemished crusader for truth who vanquished the forces that sought, closed-mindedly and without legitimate scientific basis, to suppress his valid message. The entirely uncritical tone of the actual endorsement does not burnish the organization’s image (and self-image) of a public model of independent, non-partisan, non-ideological, intellectually virtuous critical thinking. Our country sorely needs such models. When a thoroughly one-sided piece gets published in the NAS’s name, it erodes its stature and makes it harder for supporters like me to hold it up unhesitatingly as a paragon to be emulated.

Please redouble your efforts to ensure that the organization fights assiduously to combat any signs of groupthink, self-righteousness, overconfidence, or partisanship in its ranks.

All viewpoints deserve your tough-minded, even-handed criticism.

Photo by Taleed Brown – American Institute for Economic Researchhttps://www.aier.org/article/aier-hosts-top-epidemiologists-authors-of-the-great-barrington-declaration/ (jpg), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94954797. Adjustments made in Adobe Express.