States Should Establish Committees to Challenge CDC Guidance: Stanford Professor

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, in Hartford, Conn., on Feb. 17, 2023. (Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times)

All 50 states should establish expert groups to provide alternatives to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a Stanford University professor says.

“Every state should have their own second opinion of CDC policy and decision making,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program. The interview will premiere on Saturday, February 25 at 7:30pm ET.

Bhattacharya is one of the members of the Public Health Integrity Committee in Florida, formed in late 2022 by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Overseen by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the committee of experts “will be able to assess recommendations and guidance related to public health and health care, but particularly being able to offer critical assessments of things that bureaucracies like the FDA, CDC, and NIH are doing,” DeSantis said during a roundtable with committee members.

The CDC has issued recommendations on masking, social distancing, and vaccination during the pandemic that have been widely followed, leading to school closures and vaccine mandates. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the COVID-19 vaccines and have not altered the authorizations despite the vaccines performing worse against newer variants and the risk-benefit calculus, especially among children, growing more uncertain, according to some outside experts. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has sought to suppress scientific ideas, including the advocation of focused protection of the elderly instead of locking down healthy people.

“The goal of the committee is essentially just to provide a second opinion when the CDC gets something wrong,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times. “Sometimes they‘ll get the things right, we’ll say it. ... But the the ultimate aim is to say, ‘look, the CDC says x, here’s our scientific view of it.”

Bhattacharya co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, a major challenge to the restrictions imposed and promoted by the federal government, and many state governments, during the pandemic. He’s joined on the committee by others, including co-author Martin Kulldorff; Dr. Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist whose study contradicted a CDC study on masking; and Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room doctor and scientist who helped lead a reanalysis of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials that concluded the vaccinated were at higher risk of serious adverse events.

DeSantis expressed optimism that other states would form similar commissions, but that has so far not been the case.

Bhattacharya said that other states should follow Florida’s lead.

“It’s not like the CDC is some miraculous power that knows best and can distinguish true from false. Let’s have a lot of voices, let’s have those commissions all over the country, all over the world. Let’s set up a institutional structure where you are allowed to contradict the CDC when they get it wrong,” Bhattacharya said.

Critics of the CDC have noted that the agency spread misinformation about vaccines and natural immunity, and have often failed to correct the false statements. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, signed a memorandum that was crafted in response to the Great Barrington Declaration, that said in part that transmission of COVID-19 could be mitigated through the use of masks and isolation, and recently suggested lockdowns might be implemented again in the future.

The agency also hid from the public that it detected hundreds of safety signals for the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, at his home in California on April 17, 2021. (Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times)

Clashes

Florida officials and the CDC have clashed multiple times, most recently over the explosion of adverse event reports following vaccination in the state.

Ladapo revealed a 1,700 percent increase in reports following COVID-19 vaccination, compared with a 400 percent increase in overall vaccine administration.

“Florida saw a 1,700% increase in adverse event reports after COVID-19 vaccinations. Does that sound safe and effective? I didn’t think so either. That’s why we released this health alert,” Ladapo said.

The CDC told the South Florida Sun-Sentinal that Ladapo’s statement was misleading.

An agency spokesperson pointed out that anyone can submit a report to the system, which the CDC co-manages, and that some of the reported events may not be related to vaccination.

The CDC did not mention that it verifies a number of the reports and that the system is described by officials as “an early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S. licensed vaccines.” It helped the CDC determine that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines cause heart inflammation, and that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine causes a severe condition called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia.

Ladapo urged people not to be confused by the CDC, noting that many of the reports are historically lodged by health care providers, who can be penalized if they don’t provide accurate information.

“Why are so many doctors and public health officials bending over backwards to defend the indefensible?” Ladapo said.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks in Washington on June 16, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Rebuild Public Trust

Another goal of the Florida panel is restoring trust in public health, which, according to polls, has dropped during the pandemic.

“I think the public health works best when we reason with people. We don’t force people to do things. We tell people here’s what the evidence says, here’s where it’s strong, here’s where it’s weak,” Bhattacharya said. “So I want to be able to connect with people without getting deep into the weeds of technical stuff, but also being true to the technical stuff. Right? That kind of public health communication, when it’s effective is really, really powerful, persuasive in a way that that that doesn’t sort of run roughshod over your autonomy.”

Some officials, including Walensky, in 2021 infamously said that people who were vaccinated would not get sick and would not transmit the virus, even though the trials did not show 100 percent efficacy and did not, according to the FDA, provide sufficient evidence to determine efficacy against transmission.

The proper way to communicate is to present evidence from scientific studies and other data, Bhattacharya said. “I think that will be much more effective in the long run than where you make some pronouncement, ’the vaccine, if you get the vaccine the COVID vaccine, you will not get COVID, you will not pass COVID on—it turns out to be false,” he said. “Now all of a sudden, who’s going to believe the person who said that?”