The NIH is launching a "Scientific Freedom Lectures" series, an initiative tied to its director, Jay Bhattacharya, who believes his pandemic views were censored. The inaugural speaker is not a scientist but former journalist Matthew Ridley, known for fringe views on COVID-19 lab origins and climate change.
Bhattacharya, a co-author of the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, has pursued legal action over alleged censorship and now advocates for major reform in the scientific community. The choice of speaker has raised questions about the series' intent, as it begins with a figure promoting disputed theories rather than a scientist whose work was demonstrably suppressed.
The main topics covered are the NIH's new lecture series on scientific freedom, Director Jay Bhattacharya's personal motivations and controversial pandemic stance, and the selection of a non-scientist with fringe views as the inaugural speaker.
On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it’s calling “Scientific Freedom Lectures,” with the first scheduled for March 20. The “freedom” theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.
The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.
Freedom for me
Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.
Bhattacharya suffered no professional consequences but felt his ideas were being suppressed. He took part in a lawsuit that accused the government of censoring him, but the Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that he was unable to tie any alleged incident of censorship to the government agencies he sued. Since then, he’s been animated by the idea that the scientific community needs major reform, going so far as to call for a second scientific revolution.
So “scientific freedom” is an idea that likely originated from the director himself. If one wanted the theme to resonate with the scientific community, however, it might be a good idea to launch the series with a respected scientist whose work was actually suppressed in some way. Bhattacharya hasn’t gone that route.
Instead, he’s chosen Matthew Ridley, a British hereditary peer and science journalist. While some of his early books on biology were highly praised, Ridley has mostly been known for his fringe ideas about climate change. While Ridley accepts that the greenhouse effect is real and we are warming the planet, he appears to be convinced that warming will be at the low extreme of the range expected by mainstream science (if he has detailed his reasons for believing this, we have been unable to find it). Instead, he argues that a boost in plant growth and lower cold-related deaths will make climate change a net win for humanity.
Meridiano
