Is there now room for debate?

Republication of a 26 March 2025 with an important post-script. All Wood House 76 Substack articles related to Jay Bhattacharya, Jeffrey Tucker, and the Great Barrington Declaration are now republished. I hope to write more in the future about the insights I gained by [re]analyzing these and other interactions with the Bhattacharya account and its informants & operators.

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As expected, Jay Bhattacharya has been confirmed to the position of National Institutes of Health director.

Bhattacharya believes there was a pandemic involving a spreading coronavirus and that we need to prepare for better responses to viral threats.

I don’t.

Moreover, as a U.S. taxpayer, I have a vested interest in opposing the use of agency funds to support the “Next Pandemic” perspective held by Bhattacharya and others. 

To mark the confirmation and reiterate the need for debate on whether a pandemic occurred, I revisit a series of exchanges that took place six weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

22 September 2024

On 22 September 2024, Bhattacharya said:

In the next pandemic caused by a pathogen with the epidemiological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, governments everywhere will impose a policy of lockdown until mandatory vaccination. Until repudiated by the public, it is the new normal.

To which Martin Neil replied:

There wasn’t a pandemic by any reasonable interpretation of the word. The PCR tests were clearly unreliable & fraudulent and the misattrubution of deaths from other causes to covid generated faked elevated mortality. It was iatrogenic. Withdrawn antibiotics, opiods, ventilators.

…and Jonathan Engler said:

@DrJBhattacharya the reason this is indeed “the new normal” is the failure to talk about the iatrogenic nature of the staged event. It is only by dismantling the narrative as a whole that people will resist this becoming the new normal.

Bhattacharya replied to Engler:

Jonathan, I believe there was considerable iatrogenic harm, considering just lockdowns and ignoring all else. 2 But I also think it is naive to think that it is possible to avoid future lockdowns by ‘dismantling the narrative as a whole, whatever that means.

Purity requirements mean nothing of value will be accomplished. Better to focus on building a broad anti lockdown coalition who may or may not agree on many other matters, but does agree that lockdowns should be excised from the toolkit of the public health establishment.

Bhattacharya had blocked my @Wood_House76 account months earlier, so I posted a screenshot of his tweet and said:

There was no pandemic.

Pandemics are biologically & epidemiologically impossible.

Until the last “pandemic” is exposed as the fraudulent & staged event that it was, the More-Powerful will wield “Next Pandemic” against the Less-Powerful.

I also replied on my then-new account and said,

Hi @DrJBhattacharya

You blocked my other account – which I am moving on from soon – but I will respond with the new one.

Is it not a “purity requirement” to say (in effect) that people need to focus on lockdowns and not on whether or not a pandemic occurred and whether pandemics are possible?

“Next pandemic” carries with it many assumptions that must be scientifically challenged. In what ways does saying it shouldn’t be a focus of scientific & public debate empower the perpetrators who brought us “the last pandemic”?

I was quickly blocked.

Martin Neil also replied to Bhattacharya’s reaction to Jonathan Engler, saying,

I’m not at all sure how you arrive at the conclusion it is niave

Minimising aspects of the covid event in the unqualified hope that this strategy will win the public over, may backfire once they cotton on to the full horror

Is this information to be managed? And if so, by whom?

Bhattacharya told Neil he was misconstruing his point and linked a response to Leo Biddle

Biddle had said,

I can’t see how it’s a purity test or naive to tell the truth. I see it more as the duty of every honest individual.

Ephemeral appeals to tactics or politics that are never strategically articulated make poor substitutes for simply the truth, revolutionary I know.

Bhattacharya replied,

I also believe in simply telling the truth. And what happens when you disagree with me about what the truth is? Sorry, this is naive thinking, not revolutionary.

Coalition building around a common goal is not synonymous with lying, and purity tests are a guaranteed way to accomplish nothing of value.

Biddle, reacting:

I fear it may be your naivety not mine, good Dr, if you believe telling the truth in a mass-mediated perceptual architecture built from lies is not a revolutionary act.

Certainly great efforts have been made to suppress those that do, those that don’t, not so much…

There was no further engagement from Bhattacharya.

Responding to Leo Biddle, I said:

For me, the issue in this thread is that Jay made assertions about a pandemic occurring and what caused that pandemic, and when a couple of people challenged those assertions, he accused one of issuing a purity test.

I fail to see how saying, “I disagree with you – there was no pandemic” or “actually, I don’t think it’s enough to rally the public to make lockdowns illegal” is a purity test.

He went on to say that “seeking agreement on essentials is not minimizing anything.” Yet he doesn’t want to discuss or debate what those essentials are/should be and didn’t seek to understand what [Jonathan Engler] meant by “dismantling the narrative as a whole.”

What has changed?

My main point in an article I wrote about the interaction at the time stands: I believe Jay Bhattacharya’s position on the COVID pandemic is incorrect and misguided, and that substantive and necessary scientific debate among those who dissent from the government’s COVID narrative is still being avoided because people are afraid or loathe to publicly challenge him and other high-profile individuals who are anti-mandate/anti-lockdown allies.

Criticisms of issuing “purity tests” or “in-fighting” — and fears over losing cross-promotions and other opportunities and relationships — continue to stymie robust public dialogue over key issues and questions underlying the COVID-19 event and pandemics in general.

Neither Jay Bhattacharya nor his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors Martin Kuldorff and Sunetra Gupta have revisited their October 2020 assertions and assumptions. Readers who need a sense of why the authors need to do so can review the following articles here, here, here, and here.

I and many others believe there was no pandemic. Jay Bhattacharya believes there was.

The difference is significant.

With his position secured, will the NIH Director now make room for debate? 

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Post-Script, 16 June 2026

Publicly available sources I’ve reviewed do not establish where Jay Bhattacharya was physically located on 22 September 2024, but, as noted in a post-script here, some of the account’s engagement occurred during what would have been the very early morning in California. That timing is consistent with several possibilities, including that Bhattacharya was awake and posting from California, that he was elsewhere, or that someone else had access to or operated the account.

I note that the Bhattacharya account used single quotation marks when responding to Jonathan Engler — i.e., ‘dismantling the pandemic narrative as a whole’ — which is a British convention and atypical for an American, unless one is routinely writing with colleagues from the UK or another country where single quotation marks are the norm.

At the time of the September 2024 exchange captured above, and for many months afterward, I was not fully aware of, and did not grasp the implications of, the timing of Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff having been named to the PANDA Science Board on 6 October 2020. The press release, which I located in fall 2025, appears below.

My participation in PANDA spanned approximately March 2023 through February 2024. I was repeatedly told that Bhattacharya had been “on” the PANDA Board for a time, and about disputes there involving the COVID shot but did not realize that the formation of that board occurred concurrently with the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration and the meeting between “the GBD3” and U.S. HHS Secretary Alex Azar. It was not until I was writing a series of related articles in fall 2025 (here, here, here, here, here, here) that I understood the sequence of events.