By: Jeffrey A. Tucker June 10, 2025

The National Institutes of Health emerged from the Covid era as among the most disreputable of all the agencies, a partner with the CDC. It was the home of Anthony Fauci, plus his wife, who was in charge of ethics.

Pausing for derisive laughter…

Moving on, the agency has a $47 billion budget and shared patents with Pharma companies that themselves are on the rocks due to grim results of countless drugs, among them the magic Covid shot that proved ineffective and dangerous.

There is poetry in how the scholar called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous agency heads is now in charge. His name is Jayanta Bhattacharya, previously a quietly productive professor at Stanford University with specializations in medical services and economics. He joined the ranks of the dissidents of lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates, and was smeared the world over for it.

Fast forward five years and he is now charged with fixing up the agency that smeared him, and restoring trust. His actions in the first weeks and months have been an inspiration. He has been transparent, scrupulous, principled, and unbelievably hard-working. Yes, he has canceled contracts (among with routine torture of animals) and been part of reductions in employment (consistent with normal budgetary concerns).

By way of background, please understand that career civil servants have long been socialized with a habit backed by plenty of evidence. That habit is to ignore all political appointees. They are temporary, but the staff, which possess all institutional knowledge, persists over many elections. That’s the presumption because that’s how it has always been.

Until now. Until Jay got to NIH.

Changing anything within a government agency always risks blowback. Sure enough, a gaggle of disgruntled workers, a few hundred at most out of 18,000, maybe 1%, while ignoring all the people who are thrilled, turned in a declaration of protest. Called the Bethesda Declaration, in a protest-like homage to the Great Barrington Declaration, it is haughty, overwrought, packed with self-important plural pronouns, filled with inaccuracies, and driven by one single purpose: to keep getting paid.

The high-dudgeon gibberish was easy to dismiss when it was released at 8:00 am ET, June 9, 2025. Surely, it will have no traction at all. But then 8:01 am came and the mainstream media started an amplification campaign. It grew and grew to a dozen, then two dozen stories, almost all identical. This crescendoed until noon when the big guns came out, namely the New York Times.

For proof, have a look:

All within hours of release of the document in question, plus countless printings of all of them in every conceivable venue called the Mainstream Media. It’s hard to imagine what more blanket coverage would look like.

All of this was clearly coordinated, likely for weeks from the time that Jay took office. It was unfurled via the legacy media with the intention of creating shock and awe, amplifying the kvetching voices of a few at the expense of the obvious fury of the many that put Jay in that position to clean house.

Consider how the deck is stacked. All of this happened blitzkrieg-style within minutes and unfolding over hours, as those of us in the know watched with amazement at how the machinery runs in real time.

Brownstone fellow and science reporter Maryanne Demasi watched with the rest of us and scrambled to get a statement from HHS and Jay. This was midnight her time in Australia. By 2:00 am, she posted her story. For most of the day, she had the only balanced story available.

That’s when it struck me. The incumbent powers have the entire mainstream media in their pocket. They plot and scream and unleash media bombs at will, reliably anticipating that hundreds and thousands of venues will pick up their message in order to shape the public mind.

We are over here as several dozen observers. We work for this cause out of passion and dedication. We have Substacks, X accounts, some websites, and so on, but no strong connections to legacy media. We cannot place timed articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. We cannot blast a spin over thousands of local and regional newspapers.

We do what we can but we are outnumbered one million or more to one.

A few hours after Maryanne’s piece came out, NIH and HHS released a statement. It was picked up by a networked group dedicated to this issue. In the end, the truth-tellers rely entirely on Substack, X, and the podcasting network. But as we scramble, the other side blankets the world and NPR prepares its broadcasts.

People talk of the decline of mainstream news but it’s still enormously powerful and continues to shape major swaths of the public mind.

By mid-afternoon, the cause of getting contrary views out seemed hopeless. Then something remarkable happened. HHS head Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices on grounds that most had conflicts of interest, i.e. funded by the very companies they purportedly oversee.

A video of a 2018 meeting made the rounds. It’s a complete scandal.

What RFK did, fully within his powers, was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, the very same news outlets that had hoped to dominate the day with anti-Jay coverage had to pivot to hating on RFK. The Bethesda Declaration got lost in the static of other coverage.

It gets better. Late in the day, Jay dropped a remarkable 4.5-hour podcast on all aspects of science, the last five years, plus his outlook and reforms. You cannot fake your way through 4.5 hours. It is a tour de force and reveals the fullness of his mind and work.

The point: this is an uphill struggle. The forces allied against change are mighty. We have seen firsthand the way it operates. What we call “the state” is really a word for industrial interests, allied with captured agencies staffed by permanent employees, backed by shadowy military arms that operated under classified cover, working in tandem with a controlled media, and given scientific cover by academic shills.

How do you escape from such a thicket? We are finding out now.

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