Dear Professor Macedo,
I recently saw an interview where, under duress, you expressed dismay that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had cancelled research into mRNA vaccines. I totally agree, though this is just one of many ways Dr. Bhattacharya has shown he is utterly unfit to lead the NIH. It would take many pages to cover it all. I am curious if you approve of any of his actions as NIH director.
This matters because you vouched for Dr. Bhattacharya to lead the NIH. In an article titled, Restoring Trust in Public Health you and Francis Lee wrote:
If the country had had more scientific leaders like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—and more who were willing to listen to him—our policymaking could have been based more on evidence and less on hubris. During the pandemic democracy’s “truth-seeking” institutions were infected by politics, partisanship, and dogmatism. What we need now is a strong dose of fresh thinking and institutional reform from experts prepared to challenge the reigning consensus and renew our commitment to the basic values of science and liberalism.
I disagreed. In a previous article, A Review of “In Covid’s Wake”: According to Laptop Class Professors, the Heroes of the Pandemic Were Laptop Class Professors, I reviewed a chapter of your book, where you glorified Dr. Bhattacharya and other bumbling MAHA doctors- we are rookies– who are currently in positions of great power.
I found your work lacking in many ways, and I was not alone. The podcast If Books Could Kill provided a devastating takedown, and the Pandemic Accountability Index wrote an article titled Princeton’s Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee Are Dishonest Frauds that said:
Comically enough, the authors are transparent about their ignorance, as two “political scientists” who never treated a COVID-19 patient, nor studied the virus and it’s impacts in a laboratory setting.
They’re right. In one interview you said:
I wanted to write a book on the current political moment and the highly polarized politics that we are involved in now. Specifically, about how progressives were not paying sufficient attention to conservative concerns on certain issues in a way that was undermining the strength of progressive arguments and positions. I was planning to focus on abortion, immigration, and COVID. Of the three, COVID—and COVID policy—happened to be the subject I knew the least about.
Not only did you write about the subject you “knew the least about,” but in a pandemic where 1.2 million Americans died and millions more were injured, your main concern was that progressives were not paying sufficient attention to conservative concerns. Even though an estimated 232,000 people died because they were tricked about vaccines, you felt that famous disinformation doctors and advocates of herd immunity via mass infection didn’t get enough attention. You were upset that the forces who are currently politicizing science, purging and censoring scientists, had their feelings hurt by dastardly “progressives”.
My main criticisms of your book chapter were that you censored Dr. Bhattacharya’s deluge of obvious disinformation- no, the flu did not kill more children than COVID– and that you treated his pandemic proposals as genuine accomplishments.
Dr. Bhattacharya marketed himself a superhero who could have bent the virus to his will. He would have opened schools and protected the vulnerable, however he was thwarted by his predecessor at the NIH and YouTube. If it weren’t for those malicious, all-powerful villains, Dr. Bhattacharya and friends would have swooped in and saved the day.
And you believed him. It’s incredible.
I previously described this willful gullibility in an article titled The Opinion Class: Practicing Focused Protection from Reality, in which I argued that sheltered pundits like yourself existed in a fantasy world completely divorced from what actually happened on the ground when the virus was allowed to spread unchecked. It’s not clear to me that you interviewed any frontline doctors or school administrators- you know, the people who actually had to deal with the virus- in writing your book.
However, by treating Dr. Bhattacharya’s would have statements as actual accomplishments, you erased the virus and treated mitigation measures as an avoidable choice. This shows you misunderstood both COVID and Dr. Bhattacharya’s critics. It’s not that Dr. Bhattacharya uniquely wanted vulnerable people to be protected and schools to be open while his detractors objected to these laudable goals. Rather, when Dr. Bhattacharya claimed he would have accomplished those wonderful deeds, his detractors knew these were empty boasts, meant to spread doubt and rage about people with real-world responsibility.
By treating Dr. Bhattacharya’s imagination as real, you portrayed him a wise, credible scientist, a man of extreme competence. However, we are all adults, and we can stop pretending. Had Dr. Bhattacharya been in charge in 2020, he would not have been more powerful than COVID. We do not need to speculate about any of this or discuss him in the conditional tense. As with his tenure at the NIH, we can examine his real-world track record. It turns out that Dr. Bhattacharya was not more powerful than COVID. When he helped run the show in Florida, schools closed and people died, “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” alike. He didn’t do a single thing he claims he would have done, not that any of that mattered to you.
Of course, anyone can fantasize about what they would have done, but it’s what they actually did that matters, and what Dr. Bhattacharya actually did is write editorials and make podcasts/YouTube videos to fool people like you. He met with right-wing politicians, testified in courts and before Congress. He was on Fox News many times. He spoke at the campaign events of Ron Desantis and Robert Kennedy Jr. He partnered with a pro-tobacco, child labor advocate to write the Great Barrington Declaration, which was simply one-page online petition, as Dr. Bhattacharya admits below. Dr. Bhattacharya was a content-creator, and it was no magnificent achievement for him to merely write that single page. He was also a political operative who stoked paranoid fears of a “biomedical security state” to elevate himself into power.
You helped him.
Moving forward, every time you present Dr. Bhattacharya’s imaginary pandemic, where he had superpowers and everything turned out just fine, your audience should contrast that fantasy with his actual performance at the NIH today. He can’t even handle a single meeting with disgruntled researchers in a professional, competent manner, and people understandably stormed out of his only town hall in protest. He is loathed and mocked by NIH staffers who rightly deride him “Podcast Jay.” As the NIH withers under his “leadership”, he is currently spending his time on Twitter, reliving his glory days, having spats about lockdowns from 2020.
But hey, maybe I am wrong about all this, Professor Macedo. Maybe Dr. Bhattacharya is doing a really great job at the NIH, and science and research are thriving in the U.S. today. Maybe scientists are finally free to speak their mind without fear of retribution. Maybe Dr. Bhattacharya was right that Kennedy is the savior of American science and medicine. Maybe they have restored trust in public health, and we are much better prepared to handle a pandemic than we were in 2020. Maybe you can convince me that the fictional version of Dr. Bhattacharya you praised regarding COVID matches his real-world performance at the NIH today.
However, if you can’t do that and you continue to portray Dr. Bhattacharya and other MAHA doctors as censored superheroes, we need to be crystal clear that all your doing is elevating MAGA/MAHA propagandists under the guise of being a caring “progressive”, which is all you’ve ever done.
Indeed, beyond his deadly incompetence in Florida and his malevolence at the NIH, Dr. Bhattacharya is all in on Trump and Kennedy. Listen as he says that says Trump is “very pro-science” and that it is “ridiculous slander” to suggest otherwise. Listen as he expresses his deep admiration for Kennedy, portraying him as a benign soul whose only motive is to make children healthy.
This is who you glorified and praised. The next time you performatively lament the current state of science on some podcast, your listeners, as well as your students and Princeton colleagues, should know that you helped unleash this on the entire country.
Obviously, you alone are not to blame. From Bari Weiss and David Zweig to the Wall Street Journal, Sensible Medicine, Reason, and countless others, you were just a bit player in a larger misinformation media ecosystem that was devoted to rewriting the history of the pandemic and numbing people to the grave risks of We Want Them Infected doctors. Every credulous mainstream news outlet that allowed you to spin fairy tales about the fictional version Dr. Bhattacharya, also owns this sad moment. Thanks to all of you, we are stuck with the actual version of Dr. Bhattacharya and the entire MAGA/MAHA universe he represents.
We at SBM are content creators too. However, we used to our voice to desperately try to warn people about the forces you celebrated. Unlike podcasting pundits and Princeton political scientists, we also operate in the real world. If you want to be a guest on my podcast, I’ll be happy to teach you all about it. And in turn, I will listen quietly and respectfully while you teach me exactly why you were right about this “Excellent appointment!” I have so much to learn from you.
