He looks out the window at the Palo Alto sun. "I regret that we stopped talking to each other. We built a firewall between 'safe' science and 'dangerous' science. That firewall is still standing. And the next virus is coming."
He was the Stanford doctor who took on the Fauci orthodoxy, predicted the lockdowns would fail, and championed herd immunity. Now, as the NIH looms, does he want to burn the temple or save it? jaya bhattacharya
"We didn't have the infrastructure," he admits. "We needed to build field hospitals for the old, free housing, hazard pay for caregivers. The government chose mandates over logistics." He looks out the window at the Palo Alto sun
At that moment, most of America is applauding healthcare workers from balconies. Anthony Fauci is on 60 Minutes. And Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, is about to commit academic heresy. That firewall is still standing
Alongside Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, he drafted a radical alternative to the "Zero COVID" orthodoxy. The plan was simple in theory, explosive in practice: let the healthy, low-risk population live normally to build natural immunity, while focusing protection on the elderly and vulnerable.