It's Time to Redefine "Fringe"

Critics of the rumored nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health need to check the election returns

The Washington Post couldn’t get through an article about Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya without using the F-word. The sub-headline from Saturday read, “The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his “fringe” ideas on Covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.”

It couldn’t leave out the C-word, either:

[Bhattacharya’s] stances — and alliances — have also alienated him from many public health professionals, including on Bhattacharya’s own college campus…”We need to have an honest conversation about how a handful of prominent contrarian academics backed by corporate interests continue to tank evidence-backed policy, including COVID-19 protections,” Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who received her PhD in biology from Stanford this year, wrote last month…

If Donald Trump creates the position, I volunteer to be Secretary of Feeding People to Komodo Dragons. The first round of tossings into the lizard-pit will involve “experts” who still use grossly snobbish terms like “fringe” and “contrarian” to describe beliefs held by most of the population: