A “Biosafety” Organization Partnering With Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Guard Against Viruses Is Like A Zebra Teaming Up With A Lion To Promote Vegetarianism

If you wanted to start a global campaign for vegetarian lions, you probably wouldn’t make your first call to the savanna’s most efficient carnivore. Yet in the world of pandemic politics, something very similar has happened: a group that brands itself as a champion of biosafety has teamed up with one of the most prominent advocates of letting a deadly virus spread widely through the population.

This strange alliance between the biosafety nonprofit Biosafety Now and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is what inspired the deliciously sharp metaphor in Science-Based Medicine: a “biosafety” organization partnering with Bhattacharya to guard against viruses is like a zebra teaming up with a lion to promote vegetarianism. The joke lands because it captures a serious point: it’s hard to take your supposed mission seriously when you hand the microphone to someone whose pandemic strategy was essentially “we want them infected.”

To understand why this partnership is so controversial, we have to look at three things: what biosafety really means, what Dr. Bhattacharya actually advocated during COVID-19, and why trying to erase those pandemic memories is dangerous for public health.

Who Is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Really?

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician and health economist long affiliated with Stanford. Before the pandemic, he was best known for work on health policy and the economics of medical care. During COVID-19, however, he became a public figure for very different reasons: he argued that lockdowns were a disastrous overreaction and that the world should pursue “focused protection” instead.

In October 2020, Bhattacharya joined two other academics to launch the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that proposed letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked among people considered “low risk,” while attempting to shield the vulnerable. This was framed as the “most compassionate approach” and a path to herd immunity within a few months.

Mainstream public health experts and organizations strongly disagreed. The World Health Organization and many national public health bodies warned that intentionally allowing widespread infection is both scientifically shaky and ethically unacceptable. They pointed out that:

• We did not (and still do not fully) understand long-term consequences of COVID-19, including long COVID and organ damage in people who initially have “mild” illness.
• Large portions of the population have risk factorsage, chronic disease, pregnancy, immune compromisethat make “focused protection” logistically impossible at scale.
• Health systems are easily overwhelmed when transmission is allowed to rip through younger populations, inevitably spilling into older and more vulnerable groups.

Professional societies representing tens of thousands of physicians condemned the herd-immunity-by-infection idea as “dangerous,” “unethical,” and “not grounded in science.” At the same time, epidemiologists and frontline clinicians watched hospitals fill and morgues overflow in waves that aligned far more with high community transmission than with neat theoretical models of “mild infections” in the young.

Despite this, Bhattacharya repeatedly minimized the risk of COVID-19 for most people, arguing that the media and public health agencies were exaggerating the threat. He promoted the idea that the pandemic was nearly overthen said it again, and again, and again, even as new variants and waves kept arriving.

What Is Biosafety Now Supposed To Do?

Biosafety Now describes itself as a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the risks of laboratory work with dangerous pathogens. Its stated mission is to push for fewer high-containment labs, tighter oversight of risky experiments (especially so-called gain-of-function research), and stronger safeguards to prevent lab leaks.

On paper, that’s a perfectly reasonable agenda. Biosafety is a real and important field. It covers mundane but crucial things like:

• How labs physically contain viruses and bacteria (think biosafety levels, sealed rooms, air-handling systems, and protective equipment).
• How research proposals are vetted so we don’t accidentally create more dangerous pathogens than nature already provides.
• How accidents are reported and investigated, and how lessons learned are fed back into safer practices worldwide.

Legitimate biosafety organizations work with epidemiologists, virologists, public health agencies, and regulators to reduce the odds that a lab accident becomes the spark for a new outbreak. It’s a technical, unglamorous job that depends on trust, accuracy, and a shared respect for evidence.

So far, so good. But then comes the twist: Biosafety Now invited Dr. Bhattacharya onto its board, celebrated him as a biosafety leader, and elevated his voice in debates about how to prevent “the next pandemic.” That’s where the zebra–lion metaphor kicks in.

When “Biosafety” Meets “We Want Them Infected”

The core problem is straightforward: a group allegedly devoted to protecting the public from catastrophic biological risks has chosen as one of its public faces someone whose pandemic playbook depended on spreading a dangerous virus widely in the name of natural herd immunity.

This isn’t some ancient, obscure position dug up from dusty archives. During the first years of COVID-19, a significant faction inside and around government tried to normalize the idea that infecting large numbers of younger people was a good strategy. Internal emails and investigations revealed phrases like “we want them infected” being used to describe this approach. The idea was that letting the virus rip through “low-risk” populations would eventually protect everyone else.

There were at least three huge problems with this logic:

1. The “Low-Risk” Group Wasn’t Actually Low-Risk

Risk from COVID-19 increases sharply with age, but that doesn’t mean younger adults and children are immune to severe disease, long-term complications, or death. When millions of people are infected, even a “small” individual risk translates into a large number of real human tragedies.

We also learned that many people who looked “healthy” on paper had unrecognized vulnerabilities or developed long COVID, which can be profoundly disabling. Treating them as expendable fuel for herd immunity was not compassionate; it was reckless.

2. Focused Protection Was Logistically Impossible

“Just protect the vulnerable” sounds simple until you try to do it in a world where families are multigenerational, essential workers live in crowded housing, and many older adults rely on younger caregivers. Once you allow uncontrolled transmission in one group, the virus has endless routes into every other group.

Public health leaders compared this to trying to keep smoke out of a single room in a burning house. Without controlling the fire, sealing off one corner is wishful thinking, not strategy.

3. Real-World Outcomes Debunked the Fantasy

States and countries that adopted “light-touch” policies or were advised by herd immunity enthusiasts did not escape the worst of COVID-19. Instead, they often experienced devastating waves with high death rates, overwhelmed hospitals, and long-term health burdens. The theory that generous infection among the young would gently protect the old simply did not match the observed reality.

Against that backdrop, putting a lead advocate of this failed strategy on the board of a biosafety nonprofit looks less like a quirky choice and more like a category error. Biosafety is supposed to prevent catastrophic spread of pathogens, not romanticize the idea.

The Amnesia Project: Why Some People Want Us To Forget

One of the most striking themes in the Science-Based Medicine critique is the call to remember. Certain commentators and organizations are working very hard to convince the public that COVID-19 responses were a hysterical overreaction, that herd immunity by mass infection wasn’t really what they meant, and that critics are being unfair by quoting their own words back at them.

This is where the partnership with Biosafety Now becomes especially troubling. A credible biosafety movement should be obsessed with learning from past failures: laboratory accidents, public health mistakes, communication breakdowns, and yes, the deadly consequences of misinformation. Instead, having Bhattacharya as a marquee figure effectively sends this message:

“We don’t think it matters that our board member advocated a strategy that public health experts widely condemned as dangerous, and that played out in real-time suffering and excess deaths. Let’s just move on.”

That’s not biosafety. That’s reputation laundering.

If we allow pandemic history to be rewritten so that bad ideas magically become “brave dissent,” we guarantee that the next crisis will start from a worse place. Viruses don’t care about talking points, and they certainly don’t care whose brand needs polishing.

What Real Biosafety Leadership Looks Like

None of this means that questions about lab safety, gain-of-function research, or the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are illegitimate. They are absolutely valid topics of scientific and public interest. But the people leading those conversations should meet at least a few basic criteria:

• A track record of respecting evidence, even when it’s inconvenient.
• Honesty about past mistakes, not a pattern of doubling down or demanding amnesia.
• Understanding of real-world public health, including how policies affect hospitals, vulnerable communities, and essential workers.
• Commitment to vaccines and proven mitigation tools, rather than romanticizing “natural infection” as a solution.

Plenty of scientists, physicians, and public health experts fit that description. Many of them spent the pandemic working in ICUs, running vaccine trials, designing smarter mitigation policies, or improving communication with skeptical communities. Those are the people you want on your biosafety board if your goal is to build trust and reduce risk.

By contrast, elevating someone whose signature policy idea revolved around infecting large swaths of the populationwhile repeatedly downplaying the harmsends the opposite message. It tells the public that ideological alignment on a pet issue (for example, emphasizing a lab-leak hypothesis) is more important than demonstrated commitment to protecting people in actual pandemics.

Why the Zebra–Lion Metaphor Matters

The metaphor of a zebra teaming up with a lion to promote vegetarianism is funny because it’s absurd. But it also captures a deeper truth about credibility. If the zebra is serious about plant-based living, its choice of partner had better reflect that. Otherwise, it’s not a movementit’s a marketing gimmick.

Similarly, a biosafety organization that claims to care about preventing catastrophic outbreaks cannot credibly put front and center someone whose public career has been defined by minimizing a catastrophic outbreak and promoting policies that made it worse. You don’t build trust in science by rewarding the people who publicly undermined it during a crisis.

Remembering who said what during COVID-19 isn’t about petty scorekeeping. It’s about honoring the people who died, the clinicians who burned out in overwhelmed hospitals, and the families who now live with long-term disability. It’s about learning which ideas helped and which ideas hurt, so we don’t repeat the same deadly mistakes when the next virus comes along.

Real biosafety means valuing truth over convenience, memory over amnesia, and human lives over clever slogans. If that makes some self-styled contrarians uncomfortable, that’s a sign we’re finally moving in the right direction.

Experiences and Lessons From the Front Lines of the COVID Debate

To see why these arguments aren’t just theoretical, it helps to zoom in on what the last pandemic actually looked like for the people living through itand how rhetoric about “natural herd immunity” collided with reality.

Consider a typical internal medicine ward in a large American city during the Delta wave. The hospital’s COVID unit had quietly shrunk in early summer as cases dipped and some commentators triumphantly announced that the pandemic was essentially over. Nurses were finally taking long-postponed vacations; residents were rotating back to their usual mix of heart failure, diabetes, and strokes.

Then the admissions board started to change. A trickle of unvaccinated patients in their 40s and 50s turned into a relentless stream. Oxygen requirements climbed. The ICU began to overflow. The respiratory therapists who had just begun to feel human again went back to pulling double shifts. No one on those night teams was asking for more “natural infection” to speed the virus on its way; they were begging for fewer bodies to intubate.

Many of those patientsor their familiescould recite talking points they’d heard from television or online experts. COVID was “mild for the young.” The pandemic was “on the way out.” Vaccines were “riskier than the disease.” They had believed those words strongly enough to roll the dice with their health. At 2 a.m., while a team squeezed an ambu bag and adjusted ventilator settings, those talking points looked less like abstract policy debates and more like the last things someone heard before their life spun out of control.

Outside the hospital, public health workers were fighting a different but related battle. They were trying to convince communities already wary of government to accept vaccines, masking, and ventilation upgrades. Every time a prominent figure framed vaccines as optional or downplayed the risk of infection, it made those conversations harder. A single viral clip of a charismatic doctor brushing off precautions could undo weeks of careful trust-building by local clinicians and community leaders.

School administrators lived in the crossfire. They were told, correctly, that children needed in-person education and stability. But they were also responsible for teachers with cancer histories, cafeteria workers with diabetes, and grandparents who lived in multigenerational homes. Turning schools into engines of infection while hand-waving about “focused protection” for the vulnerable wasn’t a real plan for themit was a nightmare. They had to improvise layered, imperfect strategies: masking, testing, ventilation, hybrid schedules, and rapid course corrections when outbreaks exploded.

Even in the research world, where debates about lab leaks and gain-of-function research naturally belong, there were consequences to the way the conversation unfolded. Many virologists and biosafety professionals were eager to discuss lab safety in good faith. But when those discussions were paired with open admiration for doctors who had advocated mass infection, the message to front-line clinicians was clear: some people cared more about scoring points against their rivals than about acknowledging the suffering they had helped amplify.

All of these experiences share a common theme: public health is lived in crowded emergency rooms, classrooms, crowded buses, and kitchen tablesnot just in op-eds, podcasts, and conference panels. When influential voices gamble with other people’s risk by romanticizing “natural infection” or rewriting history, the cost is paid in real human time, exhaustion, and grief.

That’s why the zebra-and-lion metaphor stings. To the people who actually lived the consequences of COVID-19not as a culture-war talking point, but as an everyday emergencythe idea of a biosafety group elevating one of the architects of herd-immunity-by-infection doesn’t feel edgy or provocative. It feels like yet another reminder that those most harmed by bad ideas are the ones most easily forgotten.

If there is one positive lesson to carry forward, it’s this: real biosafety and real pandemic preparedness start by taking those lived experiences seriously. Any organization that truly wants to “guard against viruses” will center the people who tried to save lives when the virus was already loosenot the people who spent their time telling the world it wasn’t such a big deal.