Global Health NOW, the website of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, in its recent newsletters expressed concern, initially at the delay and then the refusal of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States to publish a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which, according to the Washington Post, showed “Covid vaccine benefits”.
The blame for this sin of omission was laid at the feet of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK). However, while RFK has ultimate responsibility for the decision about the report, the person taking the decision was Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Acting Director of the CDC. Both the NIHR and the CDC come under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr Bhattacharya, appointed by RFK, arrived at his job at the NIH with a black mark against him for having been a signatory to, and one of the instigators of, the Great Barrington Declaration which was critical of the worldwide lockdown policy in the wake of COVID-19 in 2020. He has subsequently expressed concern about the COVID-19 vaccines. He is not popular with the Covid orthodox community, the one which continues to view lockdowns, face masks and the COVID-19 vaccines as having been both necessary and effective.
In a recent ‘fireside chat’ with US economist Emily Oster, published in UK Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop’s blog and linked in the Retraction Watch newsletter of April 27th 2026, Dr Bhattacharya is questioned about many things, including the decision not to publish the report referred to by the Washington Post.
Bishop prefaces her transcript of the chat with her own spin and presents the session as something of a slam dunk for Oster. But that is not conveyed in reading the transcript. Oster and Bhattacharya are respectful and polite, and Bhattacharya gave full and frank answers to her questions.
Bishop refers to how “Bhattacharya’s cosy demeanour fractured” when asked about policy changes at the NIH. He warned her against listening to “fake news” about the issue. But “Oster didn’t give up”, according to Bishop, while Bhattacharya seemed simply at pains to point out that there was no political agenda behind the decisions taken on research funding, rather, that there was a crisis in the replication of research which was being addressed.
Turning to the COVID-19 vaccine report, according to Bishop, Bhattacharya is evasive but the intrepid Oster “pushes him on this”. In fact, reading the transcript clearly shows that Bhattacharya gave an immediate answer regarding the design used on the report – a test-negative design – and Oster agreed saying, “I think this method is ridiculous” and repeats her criticism later, saying, “It is ridiculous, it’s not a great method.”
Oster does ask Bhattacharya why the CDC published an earlier report on the influenza vaccines using the same method, to which he replies, “That was cleared before I got in right, I didn’t see the thing cross my desk.” Clearly, either Bishop was listening to different chat from the one which she transcribed, or she had already decided what point she wanted to make, regardless of the actual content.
The report is ‘leaked’
Two days after Retraction Watch provided the link to Bishop’s blog, on April 29th 2026 it provided another link to the Inside Medicine Substack purporting to provide the full text of the blocked COVID-19 report. The post, written by Dr Jeremy Faust and titled, ‘Exclusive: Here’s the COVID-19 vaccine paper the CDC censored’ with the strapline, “RFK Jr. and the CDC’s top official, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, don’t want you to read this. That’s exactly why you should” extols the virtues of the report.
Provided to Inside Medicine by “someone close to the study”, the report titled ‘Interim effectiveness of 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccines’ contains data that “suggest” the recent vaccines were “53-55% effective against hospitalisations”. Described as “solid science”, Dr Faust claims that one of Jay Bhattacharya’s objections to the report was that it was not peer reviewed.
Normally, the lack of peer review would be a fair criticism but Dr Faust claims that obviating the peer review allows for a study “to be rapid when necessary” and – unbelievably – says that “nowhere was this advantage clearer than in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic”. Perhaps the most telling comment by Faust is that such reports are considered the “voice of CDC” and thus need “to be consistent with CDC recommendations”. In other words, they cannot take the risk of independent experts indicating that there may be flaws in such reports related to design, methods and interpretation.
Test-negative design
At the heart of Jay Bhattacharya’s objection to the report is the test-negative design of the COVID-19 vaccine study. Faust reckons, as if this alone were justification, that test-negative “studies are a part of the overall landscape for evaluating vaccines” and that “the science in this paper is pretty standard”. Quoting another source he says, “We want data so that we know when something’s working, and when something is not working.” All reasonable arguments provided the standard science is rigorous and that the results obtained are accurate.
Bhattacharya objections to the test-negative design are well justified. Test-negative is a design that looks rigorous, but which has serious limitations. It does not compare populations at risk, it compares already symptomatic, healthcare-seeking individuals who happen to be tested. Estimates of effectiveness are not obtained from any direct measure of risk.
In the withheld study, among those hospitalised, 6% of cases (who tested positive for COVID-19) were vaccinated compared with 12% of controls (who tested negative for COVID-19 despite having symptoms). From this modest difference, the authors infer a halving of risk. But this is a relative comparison within a selected group, not an absolute reduction in the real-world likelihood of hospitalisation. The study population is already shaped by prior infection, prior vaccination and other variables, especially health-seeking behaviour.
The test-negative design presumes comparable healthcare-seeking behaviour, yet vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals demonstrably differ in when and why they test. Behaviour, exposure and the ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect are conceded by the authors of the report but none of these effects is accounted for. The outcome of “Covid hospitalisation” is ambiguous; it may reflect admission with an incidental positive test rather than disease severe enough to warrant admission.
All the study shows is that, among people who felt ill enough to be tested and entered the healthcare system, the odds of having been vaccinated differed between those testing positive and negative for COVID-19. This may provide a useful starting point for further investigation, but it tells us little about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. It would be useful to know how many of the other studies that were used to prop up the continued rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines used the test-negative design.
Professor Roger Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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Professor Watson, the title of this article is misleading. At first glance it asks the reader to believe Professor Jay Battacharya, refused to accept or print in the gov’ts medical newsletter a Harvard study allegedly showing those who were vaccinated prevented hospitalisation when diagnosed with covid. The reason Dr. Battacharya refused publication was due to the study’s methodology, which was poor.
Dr. Battacharya’s Great Barrington paper has nothing to do with The Harvard study. I query why you chose to include this. There are hundreds of examples of Dr. Battacharya’s interviews and papers regarding covid and the mRNA vaxxes.
Americans who know their medicine, are grateful to RFK, for choosing a man with integrity, intelligence and a moral compass. Who is regarded in the medical community as a scholar, researcher and professor of Medicine at Stanford University. A man who stood up to the likes of fauci, Birx, Vallance, whitty and other gov’ts medical advisors, to question their advice. Along with Martin Kuldorf and Sunetra Gupta they stood out as an outstanding example of what medicine really means,
Perhaps you will consider this the next time you write a paper about the director of the CDC, Dr. Jay Battacharya.
Hear, hear. So true!
6% of ill people who were vaccinated tested positive for COVID, and 12% of ill people who were unvaccinated tested negative?
Erm, what? How does that prove anything one way or another?
I don’t understand…
Richard Feynman observed this in the 1960s and it has only got worse since.
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”
The Science™
In real terms…a sloppy study and misleading results.
If you want to convince me that “covid vaccines” were “safe and effective”, show me all cause mortality by age band and “vaccination” status, controlling where possible for your starting state of health (tricky, you’d need to use proxies probably). If that looks promising I’d also like to see some kind of “health index” split between “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated”, which should show up any negative or positive health effects of these “vaccines”.
My guess – “covid” probably existed, some with a predisposition died from it, many of whom may have been kept alive by the right treatment protocols. Others died from neglect etc – government policies. All the other “covid deaths” were just made up nonsense. I doubt the “vaccines” made any positive difference, and they seem to have had negative health effects for a significant minority. That’s where the evidence seems to point.
Let us not forget the 28 day temporal relationship between test and death, whatever the cause.
I’ve also read that the treatment protocols themselves contributed to the deaths, particularly early on.
Useful word: iatrogenic=caused by the treatment
Nobody died “from COVID”. Some people died because pneumonia as complication of COVID. Pneumonia is a possible complication for all respiratory infection and usually harmless — the NHS advice for pneumonia is “rest and drink a lot of fluid”. People who die from pneumonia are usually just pushed over the edge by it because they were already very old and very frail.
The single example I still like best: A friend of my mother in her seventies was hospitalized twice because of pneumonia in 2020 or 2021 (during the COVID heyday, don’t remember the exact year). One of these pneumonias was ascribed to COVID, the other just happened for an unknown reason nobody cared about. The life-changing even for her in this year was that she married her partner in between the two pneumonias so that he wouldn’t again be prohibited from visiting her in hospital.
Medically, all of COVID was in exercise in selective presentation of everyday events (“Some people died!”) in the most sensational framing the pandemistas could come up with. At the level of measures, a huge bit of it was committed teetotalers like the Welsh first minister or Devi from Scottland using this wonderful opportunity to… Read more »
I largely agree though from what I have read I think it’s quite plausible that there was a novel disease that cause immune system overload in a small number of susceptible individuals, at the start – the “Wuhan variant”.
A little German firm called BioNTech and its home state did quite well too.
Every time there’s a wave of colds or a seasonal outbreak of influenza, that’s a novel disease. That’s why there’s a novel influenza vaccine every year.
That said, in September 2019, I developed an extremely weird (to me) condition, namely, I lost the ability to walk upright with confidence because I couldn’t reliably keep my balance anymore. This freaked me out completely and caused severe panic attacks, especially on light and highly reflective floors. It took until the 3rd week of October for this to be mostly over. As I learnt later, this is a condition called vertigo and caused by an infection in the inner ear which impairs the function of the balance-keeping organ that’s located there. This was followed by the worst flu I ever had in November I informally christened “the flu from hell” because it completely floored my for to whole days I mostly spent with sitting in an easy chair with my eyes closed. Because of this, I concur with the novel virus notion except that it had reached the UK by early fall 2019 and not spring 2020. However, that this hit me pretty badly doesn’t mean the same happened to everyone or even… Read more »
Indeed. As someone who had a temporarily severe autoimmune disorder, I took an interest in this aspect of “covid”. Anecdotally someone I met a few times lost her husband to “covid” – he was in his 50s, bit overweight but otherwise in reasonable health. He may have had other issues no-one had previously spotted, or he may have been unlucky.
But without the World’s Biggest Ever Publicity Campaign, no-one would have noticed bar a few medical professionals and researchers.
I’ve no idea if have had “covid” – I have been ill a few times since “covid” but no real idea what it was beyond the usual mishmash of stuff. I’m a hypochondriac so I have to try not to overthink things. Our first post-lockdown holiday (other than a brief, heavenly sojourn in lockdown-free Stockholm) was to the Dominican Republic. I felt like crap on the flight over and for the first few days there. The only thing I could face with any enthusiasm was Sambuca. To this day, I have a great affection for Sambuca and attribute it with mysterious medicinal powers.
“Pneumonia” was the consequence of the administration of morphine and Midazolam behind closed doors in hospitals and care homes.
I believe it was the other way around. People developed pneumonia as a secondary bacterial infection post flu like illness. Instead of being given an antibiotic early on, the medical community let the secondary bacterial infection linger. Once hospitalised the frail elderly and other immune compromised, were then given MS and midazolam, further depressing their respiratory system. And that I am afraid was that.
That’s one of the theories for the unusual lethality of the so-called Spanish flu in the USA which wasn’t unusually lethal anywhere else. But it’s really not necessary (or possible) to know the real reason for that. Beginning with 1918, a wave of flu hysteria swept through the USA which led to all kinds of more-or-less bizarre supposed public health measures and the outcome was a lot of dead people. It would take until 1920 before the hysteria subsided again, presumably, because the majority of people who had remained sane weren’t willing to take it anymore.
To this date, the descendants of these hysterics keep publishing highly dubious pamphletes, eg, containing “estimates” of “flu deaths in India” (and other British colonies) to justify their actions. In reality, the Spanish flu was just COVID 1918.
This makes no sense whatsoever because that’s an inflammation of the lungs which can occur as complication of a respiratory infection when the infecting agents manage to enter the lungs and replicate there. The usual recognizable symptoms are lengthy coughing fits which reoccur in short intervals as that’s one of the mechanism the body employs to get the infecting agents out of the lungs again. Pneumonia is usually harmless. Sedating people in order to connect them to positive pressure ventilators for show isn’t.
This is all pretty dense stuff, from which any number of narratives can be constructed.
What I know is this: the authorities in every country went out of their way to make sure there were no separate data sets of jabbed and not jabbed as soon as their jabs started failing.
Their intent was to make sure there was no reliable data to draw comparisons between the jabbed and unjabbed.
That’s all I need to know.
Quite. There were 28 different vaccines/’vaccines’ developed and without the usual long developement time there was minimal usefull baseline data. Add in the fact that of the 233 nations that took any of these only 29 took only one vaccine. Of those the 7 countries ng took the Pfizer/BNT including Monaco and 18 countries took the Oxford/AZ including the Falklands. The US took 4 different types (hilighted below) and it was pushed by Gates and Blair that they were all good and you could mix. Not a chance in hell of getting good data except from excess deaths.
Correct