Anybody who is not beholden to corporate media knows that Jay Bhattacharya is an excellent pick for NIH. He rigorously followed the evidence throughout COVID, yet was unfairly disparaged as a "fringe epidemiologist" by Fauci's team, who were Big Pharma toadies who were wrong about almost everything they proclaimed, causing great damage to millions of Americans in the process. We need a fresh start like never before. No better place to root out industry corruption than Jay Bhattacharya as head of NIH.

From a May 2023 interview:

JB: I don't know the specific number, but the magnitude of the protective effect of the lockdowns, if it's not zero, it's very, very close to zero. And for a very simple reason, you can see why it's right. The lockdowns, if they were to benefit anybody, it benefited members of the laptop class who actually had the wherewithal to stay home, stay safe while the rest of the population served them. Our societies are deeply unequal. It's a very small fraction of the world population that actually could stay home and stay safe. And so, when the lockdowns happened, a very large number of people essentially were left on the outside. They had to work to feed their families, to take care of their elderly parents or whatnot, and that meant that the lockdowns had no chance of actually working. The people that conceived the lockdowns have an extent of naivety about how societies work that it just boggles the mind. And then, you asked me, again, about the harms from the lockdowns." ...

They're tremendous, and we're still just beginning to count them, right? So domestically, for instance, I think there's now a broad consensus that the lockdowns harmed our children. In many places, including California, children did not see the inside of a physical classroom for nearly a full year and a half. The consequences of that play themselves out with deep learning losses. By the way, it's concentrated on minorities and poor populations who didn't have the wherewithal to replace the lost in-classroom learning, but it plays itself out over a long period of time. The social science literature from before the pandemic documented in detail about how valuable investments in education are for the health of children. If you deprive children of education for even short periods of time, it turns out it leads to a lifetime of lower income, worse health, even shorter lifespans. One estimate from early in the pandemic, published by the editor of "JAMA Pediatrics," found that just the spring lockdowns in the United States alone cost our children 5 1/2 million life years in expectation. That's yet to come, but it's coming. The toll on skipped cancer screenings, again, starting to see it, but the full extent of it is yet to come. In the poorer parts of the world, the consequences have been absolutely devastating, something like 100 million people thrown into dire poverty, $2 or less of income. ...

The estimates from the World Food Program is that 100 million people were put into dire food insecurity, near starvation. We haven't yet begun to count the deaths from that yet, but it's gonna be in the millions. And the children in poor countries... I'll just take Uganda as a good example of this. They don't have Zoom schools. They just had no school for two years, unless, again, if they were in the laptop class, a relatively small number. 4 1/2 million Ugandan kids never came back to school after two years out of school, and it turns out many of them, especially the little girls, were sold into sexual slavery or are married off as child brides. Many little boys were put into child labor. Their families were so poor that they faced this terrible choice between starving their kids or prostituting them. We're in a situation where the harms of the lockdowns have become and are becoming clearer and clearer every day, and the benefits, in terms of protecting people from COVID, it's becoming clearer that they did none of that.