The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pending Congressional approval. We believe he will provide strong, reforming leadership for the NIH—which is in strong need of reform. NIH, like the other federal agencies whose powers are informed by scientific research, does not operate according to the best scientific principles of transparency and reproducibility. We strongly urge Dr. Bhattacharya to make a priority of bringing best scientific practices to the NIH.
Dr. Bhattacharya of course has suffered from personally from the consequences of NIH’s malfeasance. NIH failed badly during the COVID-19 pandemic. First it succumbed to the irreproducibility crisis of modern science, fueled above all by pervasive politicized groupthink and by scientists’ shift to conducting research by means of culpably negligent statistical procedures, produces masses of false positive research results. NIH endorsed a false interpretation of the dynamics of COVID-19, and worked actively to suppress all alternate accounts. NIH compounded this mistake by basing active and illiberal policy on an erroneous understanding of public health science. Most consequentially, NIH was at least complicit in 1) the imposition of draconian, unnecessary, and harmful “lockdowns” of much of the nation; and 2) a policy of mass censorship to suppress alternate scientific interpretations. Dr. Bhattacharya, a noted advocate of such alternate interpretations, suffered censorship of his views on social media, and other public venues of communication, with at least a wink-and-a-nod by NIH bureaucrats. The suppression of his individual liberty also damaged the public welfare, by strengthening and preserving misguided and counterproductive public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Bhattacharya is uniquely well qualified to lead the NIH because it has victimized him as it has few others. He also is well qualified for that position because of his conduct while victimized. He has displayed extraordinary dignity, modesty, and courage. His determination to live up to the highest standards of his field, and to elevate them further, provides a record of character fully as exemplary as his professional qualifications. Dr. Bhattacharya has demonstrated the courage of his convictions—and he has been correct in his judgment. He will be an exemplary leader to bring back NIH from the misguided path it has trod since the COVID-19 pandemic.
But NIH’s missteps during the COVID-19 pandemic merely illustrate the larger results of the irreproducibility crisis—a crisis which has affected not only the disciplines under the remit of the NIH but also virtually all of the sciences and social sciences. As noted above, pervasive politicized groupthink and culpably negligent statistical procedures have created the irreproducibility crisis. Activist bureaucrats, moreover, actively commission these false positive research results in a host of scientific and social scientific disciplines to justify the mass production of illiberal, radical regulations throughout the federal science regulatory agencies. Scientific procedures ought to restrain arbitrary, ideological policymaking, but the corruptions of politicized groupthink and misused statistics instead facilitate it.
The federal government, moreover, is the largest single funder of scientific research in the world, and federal funds not only distort American regulatory policy but also subsidize the wholesale production of irreproducible research in American universities.
NAS has documented precisely how the irreproducibility crisis has distorted government policy in four separate research reports. Our first report, PM2.5 Regulation (2021), focused on irreproducible research in the field of environmental epidemiology, which informs the EPA policies and regulations. The next three reports investigated the distorting effects on government policy of irreproducible research in nutritional epidemiology, which informs the Food and Drug Administration’s policies and regulations; mathematical modeling and public health policy, which informed the debacles of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health in their COVID-19 pandemic response; and implicit bias theory, which informs a wide variety of state and local laws. The first report provides particularly strong justification for why the EPA should reform its scientific procedures, but the four reports collectively provide evidence that the federal government’s use of scientific research has been so systematically distorted that it should engage forthwith in systematic reform.
Therefore we urge Dr. Bhattacharya to institute reforms of NIH that embody the suggestions we made in our Model Science Policy Code. We wrote these as 10 statutes, to apply to every federal agency, but individual agencies can adopt their principles voluntarily. Seven of our ten model bills reform different aspects of federal policy that weaponize the irreproducibility crisis of modern science to justify illiberal regulatory policy. Three of these bills reform regulatory policy: Reproducible Policy Act, Mathematical Modeling Reform Act, and Weight of Evidence Act. Another four reform grants policy: Reproducible Grants Act, Replication Studies Funding Act, Negative Research Act, and Research Integrity Act. Three further bills reform the three other crises of federal science policy: Indirect Costs Act, Science Depoliticization Act, and Science National Interest Act. These three crises are each important, but each can be addressed by relatively simple legislation. All of these statutes can be transformed easily into NIH regulations.
These ten initiatives articulate reforms that should be enacted simply because they are good policy. Of course the NIH should require best existing practices to ensure reproducibility in scientific research the government funds, or uses to inform policy. Of course universities should not be allowed to overcharge the NIH systematically. Of course NIH science grants should not be used to impose identity-group discrimination and DEI ideology on universities. Of course the NIH should work to prevent foreign intellectual espionage in our universities. Yet we forward these initiatives now not just because they are good policy, but because they are necessary. NIH policy in particular, as American science policy in general, has gone dreadfully wrong. These initiatives are the minimum necessary to right the NIH’s course.
We also urge Dr. Bhattacharya to institute reforms of NIH that embody the suggestions we made specifically in our third Shifting Sands report, The Confounded Errors of Public Health Policy Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. The NIH should do the following:
We hope Dr. Bhattacharya will consider such reforms for the NIH. Ultimately, the NIH should use the best scientific procedures, no matter the policy results, to assure that all health policy is based upon transparent, reproducible research.
- Liberty Commission: NIH should convene an expert commission, drawing upon noted defenders of civil liberties such as Greg Lukianoff and Glenn Greenwald, as well as epidemiological experts in different agencies and professions, to delimit the areas of private life which may be subject to public health interventions. This commission also should draft rules articulating the principles it has drafted as detailed guidelines limiting what public health interventions, or research regarding health interventions, any federal government may fund, conduct, or allow.
- Define Scope of Public Health Interventions: We recommend that this commission’s rules explicitly limit the scope of public health interventions to physical health, narrowly and carefully defined, and explicitly define any aspect of concepts such as mental health, environmental health, and social health, which warrant the intervention of public health authorities in matters that properly should be decided freely by individuals or their elected policymakers.
- Define Scope Narrowly: We recommend that this commission’s rules explicitly and narrowly limit how public health interventions may change individual and collective behavior, and that all such public health interventions be required to receive explicit sanction from both houses of Congress. Above all, we recommend that public health interventions should not aim to alter public judgment of a public policy; public judgment should determine public health policy, not vice versa.
- COVID-19 Commission. NIH should commission a full-scale report on the origins and nature of COVID-19, as well as of public health policy errors committed during the response to COVID-19. Errors to be investigated should include every instance of politicization of COVID-19 public health policy, and censorship of discussion of COVID-19 policy, as well as the role of public and private entities (e.g., social media companies) in forwarding politicization and censorship.168 This commission should be empowered to subpoena data from all relevant government agencies and private entities and to publicize it. It should also present concrete suggestions for reforms to prevent the recurrence of policy errors, politicization, and censorship.
While we would wish that such a commission include articulate defenders of what the government did correctly, it should include large numbers of professional critics of government policy, such as John Ioannidis and Martin Kulldorf. This commission, moreover, should be directed not to require a consensus report, but to welcome divisions of opinion, with majority and minority reports. The public should welcome, and be accustomed to, the idea that experts disagree.
- Computer Science Commission. Public health modeling naturally aligns with the use of computer science algorithms; social media censorship of COVID-19 policy discourse depended on both. Public health modeling is well suited to provide a plausible justification for using computer science algorithms to limit public debate—and, with all its flaws, may provide useful techniques for censorship that abrogates Americans’ First Amendment rights. When public health defines the transmission of ideas as a communicable disease that threatens public health, it has a broad arsenal of tools to inhibit such transmission. NIH also should establish a commission to provide guidelines for federal funding, conduct, and regulation of the use of computer science algorithms, particularly as they are used by the federal government and by social media companies. This commission, moreover, should provide guidelines to ensure that artificial-intelligence programming is not similarly subverted to inhibit liberty.
We hope Dr. Bhattacharya will consider such reforms for the NIH. Ultimately, the NIH should use the best scientific procedures, no matter the policy results, to assure that all health policy is based upon transparent, reproducible research.
Photo by Taleed Brown - American Institute for Economic Researchhttps://www.aier.org/article/aier-hosts-top-epidemiologists-authors-of-the-great-barrington-declaration/ (jpg), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94954797. Adjustments made in Adobe Express.
