Jessica Hockett, PhD

In this post, I document a Twitter/X exchange between current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and me in April 2023.

This was not the first or last public difference of opinion we had that year but it is the one that marked my perspective on certain things as fundamentally different from his, involved a reaction and accusation I did not expect, and ended up constituting a “break” from a number of real-life and e-friends/associates.

I approached Bhattacharya’s account with a question about the position he expressed in a September 2020 study because another user had asked him about it but could not get a response. I had more followers and more “visibility” than the inquiring user, and was surprised by some of the statements in the study, so I asked Bhattacharya about it. Several days before this interaction, Bhattacharya and I had some “back and forth” about the temporary disappearance of positive flu tests in 2020/21.

The statements under discussion were from Peirlinck, M., Linka, K., Sahli Costabal, F., Bhattacharya, J., Bendavid, E., Ioannidis, J. P. A., & Kuhl, E. (2020). Visualizing the invisible: The effect of asymptomatic transmission on the outbreak dynamics of COVID-19. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 372, 113410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2020.113410.

The last sentence of the paper reads, “Our study suggests that, until vaccination and treatment become available, increasing population awareness, encouraging increased hygiene, mandating the use of face masks, restricting travel, and promoting physical distancing could be the most successful strategies to manage the impact of COVID-19 on both our economy and our health care system.”

The study itself is rooted in a number of flawed or unwarranted assumptions; Bhattacharya did back away from aspects regarding asymptomatic transmission in a 24 July 2021 expert report.

My focus at the time was on the mask mandate aspect because it was what the other user was trying to ask Bhattacharya about.

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Jessica Hockett to Jay Bhattacharya, 29 April 2023:

Respectfully, you published a study in 2020 that commended mask mandates. You were one of many authors on the study.

Can you address this? (You may have already, and I missed it.)

Jay Bhattacharya to Jessica Hockett:

It’s out of context. The paper is not about masks or contact tracing or anything else like that. It’s an application of the results from the seroprevalence data to an SEIR model with an asymptomatic component. It’s an interesting early mathematical exercise which showed that models that did not account for the relatively easy spread of the disease (like the Ferguson model) was deeply wrong.

You can find my early views on lockdowns here from an interview in April 2020: x.com/drjbhattachary…

And here in April 2020 arguing for focused protection: x.com/drjbhattachary…

And a March 2020 article calling into question the high CFR estimate circulated by the WHO here: x.com/drjbhattachary…

And my views on contact tracing from an article penned in July 2020, published in Sept 2020: inference-review.com/article/on-the…

I didn’t have much to say about masks in early 2020 because I thought they were a less important topic than lockdowns and school closures, but in a policy roundtable with Gov. De Santis in Sep. 2020, I offered my skepticism that mask mandates are useful.

I’ve spoken and written hundreds of thousands of words in public these last three years. Mischaracterizing my thinking and the time line of my thinking on covid policy by taking a line and imputing an uncharitable spin on it is easy to do if you want to do it.

Seems unfair to me, but you are welcome to do it if you want. More broadly speaking, I don’t understand the desire for establishing purity, as defined, it seems to me, as undeviating support for ideas that you have on the same timeline you had them. I think it better to find allies who help in common causes and critics who push us to learn more.

Be well!

Technical note: I removed and archived my Twitter/X accounts in November 2025. The html views of the archive does not capture all text if the text extends beyond a certain number of characters. For the rest of the conversation with Bhattacharya on my end, I provide the full text from the response, retrieved through other files in the downloaded archive, followed by the image of the portion available in the html view.

Jessica Hockett to Jay Bhattacharya:

Thank you for responding.

It’s not “out of context,” as far as I can tell. Mandated masks (vs. people choosing to wear masks) were one of several actions offered by the authors as potentially useful for handling covid-19.

I don’t see where I mischaracterized your thinking or put an uncharitable spin on what was said. The statement about mandated masks is clear, and you were an author on the study. I respectfully asked you to address it. (I had seen others make the same inquiry of you repeatedly on twitter, without being able to get a response. Largely a function of having many followers and not seeing the inquiries, I’m sure.)

I agree you have been consistent in your view that mask mandates are less of a big deal than “lockdowns.” You proffered that view on a Zoom call which I attended in ~Oct 2020. I disagreed then as well, believing that you were failing to grasp the role masks would play in prolonging the pretense of a pandemic, and the impact on mental health, among other things.

I was opposed to mandated masks from the day my mayor issued an illegal order in April 2020. No additional studies were needed beyond those that had already been done up to that time. 

I’ve always taken the view that, even if masks were 100% “effective,” it is unethical, unbiblical, & a serious violation of bodily autonomy and freedom of movement to mandate the covering of the human face as a condition of daily life.

I repeatedly asserted that mandated masks were the social & psychological training wheels for mandated vaccines and that they were the hill to die on. For you, they were not a hill.

It’s not about a purity test, or what people said in the past. It’s about identifying and clarifying points of agreement/disagreement. 

Who is helped (besides politicians) when so-called “Team Reality” pretends to agree on everything, or if people feel like they have to tow the party line? Leads to self-censorship, if nothing else.

So, my question is this: Are mask mandates fundamentally wrong, in your view, irrespective of efficacy? I have the same question for @TracyBethHoeg @VPrasadMDMPH and other MDs/Public Health Influencers on this platform. 

Opposing mask mandates b/c masks don’t work is different from opposing mask mandates, even if masks worked perfectly.

Separately, I said:

I associate lockdown with mask mandates, since mask mandate for me came in April 2020. You live in northern Cali, so I’m sure you recognize the role mask mandates played in blue states/metro areas.

“The pandemic” didn’t need Iowa City. It only needed to capture the states in which the largest cities reside. Not science. Social/political science & economics.

Jay Bhattacharya to Jessica Hockett:

This is a purity test and not a very productive one.

Each of us has only a limited budget for our attention. My judgment in 2020 was that the most effective use of my time and attention was on seroprevalence, lockdowns, school closures, contact tracing, & writing scientific papers. I spoke against masks because I didn’t think there was good scientific evidence that supported it, but I thought it was a low-priority fight relative to those others. I was involved as a pro-bono expert in several high-profile legal cases against lockdown policies and school closures.

In 2021, mask mandates became a more important front, as public health started to move on from lockdowns and school closures, so I served as a pro-bono expert in several legal cases against mask mandates in school settings.

I disagree that anything in the Bible or in my experience of the Christian faith compels one to oppose the mask mandates. I opposed them because the scientific evidence is weak that — especially as typically worn in the population — they stop transmission or protect individuals from this virus, and there is evidence of some harm, especially to kids with disabilities (such as those who are hard of hearing).

I am not against mandates per se in public health, though they almost always represent a failure of public health to earn the public’s trust. If great science showed masks actually worked to stop disease circulation, and public health was trustworthy, mask mandates would have been superfluous. If masks don’t work to stop circulation (and they don’t), then a mandate builds resentment against public health (as it has). But that doesn’t mean mandates are never warranted in public health — e.g. quarantining someone with active ebola. But that’s not the situation we faced during the pandemic.

Jessica Hockett to Jay Bhattacharya:

What’s unproductive is a judgement about my motives for asking you to clarify your position on mask mandates.

This isn’t about the past, or being perfect, etc. We see such mandates differently now, in 2023 — [and] have conflicting views on the relative importance of that conflict in broader questions about the role of public health.  

I’ve written elsewhere about my religious objections to mask mandates, which are rooted in the question of what the Bible says about who has authority over a person’s body. https://woodhouse76.com/2022/01/24/religious-objections-to-a-school-mask-mandate/

Govt and PH officials have successfully proven that they don’t need good scientific evidence for people to obey their orders. All they need is fear and a populace that doesn’t value or understand fundamental liberty principles.

We are born free, with inalienable God-given rights that are NOT derived or in need of being conferred by science, doctors, or public health officials.

This mess will happen again. Whatever the alleged emergency, we can be sure all manner of “This isn’t covid! It’s different! It’s worse!” will be made.

In these replies, I’ve raised the question of how/why mask mandates per se are fundamentally wrong, but I think the bigger point of contention is whether a viral pandemic occurred.

Without the truth about what actually happened in 2020, we are stuck with debates on presumptions that may be wholly & ridiculously incorrect.

Replying to another user, Bhattacharya said:

It’s more complicated. In March 2020, we had lockdowns without mask mandates. In March 2021, the mask mandates served the purpose of maintaining fear & lockdown policies, without actually protecting the population.

Bhattacharya did not respond to me again in the thread, as far as I can tell from searches via Grok.

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This post may be reassigned to a 30 April 2023 date in the future but will remain in the Jay Bhattacharya category here and under his name on this page:

Dissident Debates & Views