The Vindication of Dr. Bhattacharya and Team Reality

Jay Bhattacharya and Jeffrey Tucker were some of the first people I reached out to when I when I felt completely alone, helpless, and despondent. This feels like a turning point.

depressing dark nursing home with old person in a mask looking despondent

I remember in early 2020 when it first started… pretty sure it was not soon after my state started issuing the COVID “stay at home” orders (which later became known ubiquitously as “lockdowns.”)

One of our residents, lets call him Mr. Smith, had a very cantankerous wife, who was then in the process of having a meltdown in our first floor lobby. “Why can’t I go back upstairs to visit my husband? I was just there!” I remember our nurse manager down there in the lobby, along with our medical director, patiently explaining it was because of “the virus” and that visits were no more. No, you couldn’t just go back up the elevator to see your husband. There was too much danger, it was all around us. He could not see his wife, or kids. Or anyone. He was to stay upstairs, cared only by masked, face shielded nurses and doctors.

This all felt very bad to me, but I was in shock, resigned to what was going on (not really sure *what* was going on), and I went along with it. Mrs. Smith went home, eventually our nursing home locked down under a sea of masks, inhumane window visits, mask mandates, and bans on visitations. In the case of the Smith couple, sadly, Mrs. Smith became unable to return to see her husband when we nominally reopened many, many months later, apparently too impaired and sick to make the trip back out. Like her husband, she was older, but I always have to wonder whether the many months of COVID broke her spirit and hastened her decline.

Like I said, it went on like this. At first we didn’t have masks, then we were drowning in them. We covered and muffled our faces with masks, and then muffled and distorted our faces further with face shields, which made it extremely challenging for our residents with hearing problems to understand us (which is a very large chunk of our residents) notwithstanding our residents with dementia (which is most of them). We even stopped them from dining together. I was convinced we were making our residents more confused and miserable than ever.

After banning vistors for weeks, which made us all feel like sadistic jailers (we were told we were saving their lives, though) we instituted the sick joke of a practice of “window visits” and the digital version of “Facetime visits” on a couple of iPads we were issued for our nursing home residents to see their families.

Masking in Hospitals and Nursing Homes as a Major Causative Agent for “Confusion” in the Elderly

This was almost worse than banning visits entirely - watching so many of our residents with dementia expressing confusion, some crying when they realized they couldn’t touch their family members. I suppose it made our managers feel better that at least we had a “system” whereby “visits” could still take place.

I remember when vaccines first became available at our nursing home - somewhere around early 2021. “Finally,” I said to myself, “we can go back to normal,” because this is what we were told - the lockdowns, the social distancing, the pseudoscientific “it couldn’t hurt” slavish obsession with masking, this was all supposed to be a bridge to get us to when vaccination was widely available - and so it was here!

Rug pull!

Ah, but it wasn’t meant to be. Although we eventually relented on the visitation bans for family and friends, for many, many months afterwards visitations were policed within a ridiculous and dehumanizing framework of rules, like only two at a time, only for two hours, had to preschedule a week beforehand with staff, and etc. (all designed to maximize “social distancing”). The vax mandates as well. Temperature checks. All manner of bullshit.

It became quite clear that my being told that we were just holding out until vaccination became available was in fact a cruel ruse, and what was happening was a fundamental change to what I had been told as a geriatrics professional working in long-term care for the last however many years I had been practice - no, this was a sea change.

Home as prison

All that talk of a “homelike environment” for our residents? That’s a hoax. No one living in my nursing home would run their homes like this. None of them asked for this, but they were forced to accept it.

Prior to 2020 I was not political.

Politically aware? Sure. But prior to 2020 I was basically a functioning, libertarian-leaning political nihilist. The world I work in, that of a large medical bureaucracy, fed by a steady supply of credentialed professionals from various higher education systems, I had long accepted it’s basic character - blandly managerialist, clunky, with some cringey progressive utopianist value systems built into it that I was mostly able to ignore in the service of simply doing my job.

But after COVID and 2020 the zeitgeist amongst the managerialists morphed into something rabid, politicized, inhumane, evil. My residents were suffering under it. It became mixed in with hatred of populists, Trump, “racists,” and “racism,” it was unmoored from nuance or rationality. It was hurting my residents. It was laying waste to my job.

The sense of moral injury was becoming suffocating. Something had to change.

GeroDoc

I initially started “Life in Long Term Care Land” in May of 2022, and my Twitter account shortly after that. The focus has been on all of the things that The Great Coronapanic has been deeply hostile to - quality of life and purpose in life, human connection, basic facts about the lives of nursing home patients and people with dementia and what matters to them.

I was just looking through my email box just now to find when I had signed it - it looks like it was in December of 2021 when I had been searching, searching for something that echoed in an intellectually and logically consistent manner what I had been increasingly seeing and feeling about the lockdowns. I found it - “The Great Barrington Declaration,” and without thinking much of it aside from "thank goodness these people were out there,” I signed it.

The three people who authored it, it’s principals, were three highly credentialed, very highly regarded experts in their fields - Martin Kuldorff, a Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician who has taught for many years at Harvard, Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease biologist at Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya, who I had never heard of before, he was (and is) an MD-PhD professor of health policy at Stanford Medical School, having worked there for many years and having written influential textbooks on health policy.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

I eventually reached out to Jay Bhattacharya (along with the great Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute fame - formerly at the AEIR).

One thing led to another, and now, two years later, I have run into Jay several times, he has read several of my Substack articles on masking, lockdowns, window visits, and the cruel treatment that our residents had been forced to endure, and he is now the nominee of the incoming Trump administration for the National Institutes of Health. I am anonymous, but not to him. He knows.

A couple of years ago now and counting, Jay (and Mr. Tucker) were the first that I reached out to when I felt maximally alone and despondent.

Since then Jay proven himself as far more morally and intellectually courageous than I could ever hope to be. His concept of “focused protection” and spurning lockdownism, and him holding to his principles in the face of withering and cowardly personal attacks, state-sponsored censorship and propaganda, has been an inspiration to all of us and has really been a rally point for so many. He’s been the glue that’s held so many of us together.

I’ve always appreciated that Jay is always been extremely down to earth, never has talked down to any of us in the “Team Reality” circle of friends and fans of his who principally gather on dissident platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Substack. He’s made us feel like his peers.

He’s made us feel like his fight has been ours.

This is why when I heard about Jay being nominated to lead the National Institutes of Health - the den of thieves, where so much of the rot all seems to have started - I knew something had changed in the world.

Perhaps for once, the good guys can win.