Admission of guilt by the American health bureaucracy regarding mistakes in coronavirus measures and reorientation towards ‘autoimmunity’
Personnel changes within the US health authorities have resulted in new priorities. Jay Bhattacharya has been director of the National Institutes of Health since 2025, the super-agency that conducts its own research and funds much of the research in the US through large programmes. In addition, Anthony Fauci was replaced by Jeffery Taubenberger as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after a brief interim period.
The coronavirus measures were wrong and have damaged the reputation of the NIH and science
In an editorial in Nature Medicine describing the new direction of this institute, Bhattacharya, Taubenberger and their co-author Powers now clearly distance themselves from basically everything that constituted pandemic management in the US and, as a result, almost the entire world [1].
The authors write:
“… many of the recommended policies, including lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, wearing masks and vaccine mandates, lacked robust confirmatory evidence and remain the subject of debate about their overall benefits and unintended consequences. Where enforced, vaccine mandates contributed to decreased public confidence in routine voluntary immunizations. We recognize that much of the American public lost trust in the NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NIH; of which the NIAID is a part), and in the greater scientific community. As current leaders of the NIH and the NIAID, we acknowledge this breach of trust…”
Let us pause for a moment to consider these words. They describe nothing less than the acknowledgement that the core elements of the so-called ‘pandemic response’, i.e. the political response to the pandemic, were devoid of scientific basis.