Another COVID Contrarian Working For the NIH Director

Kevin Bardosh, who argued COVID boosters do more harm than good for young people, has been working in Jay Bhattacharya’s office for months.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya has another public health contrarian working for his agency, Important Context has learned.

Kevin Bardosh, an applied medical anthropologist and ally of Bhattacharya’s—with a history of skepticism toward mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and promoting fringe views about the pandemic—has been working as a senior science strategist in the NIH’s Office of the Director since May, according to his LinkedIn profile. The Department of Health and Human Services employee directory shows that he has a .gov email address and is working as a “non-government” contractor in the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which oversees the NIH Common Fund and coordinates trans-NIH initiatives and research.

Important Context previously reported that several prominent proponents of the scientifically disfavored COVID-19 lab leak narrative—Bryce Nickels, Alex Washburn, and Ed Hammond—were working in the DPCPSI as contractors. Hammond is the only one with a job description: functional SME (subject matter expert). All three men had connections with a fringe nonprofit, Biosafety Now, with which Bhattacharya was previously involved.

Bardosh was also affiliated with a pandemic group which formerly listed the NIH director on its team roster. Prior to joining the NIH in May 2023, the anthropologist was a director and head of research at a UK-based charity called Collateral Global. The group featured Bhattacharya on its scientific advisory and editorial boards.

Collateral Global was co-founded in November 2020 by entrepreneur Alex Caccia, who had been involved in the drafting of the Great Barrington Declaration the previous month. The document, co-authored by Bhattacharya and two of his allies—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard Medical School, and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—outlined a COVID herd immunity strategy reliant on swift reopening and mass infection of the healthy population. Caccia was also reportedly Gupta’s partner.

Since its inception, Collateral Global has worked to expose the supposed harms of government efforts to mitigate COVID. On Bardosh’s watch, the group was one of two funders of a controversial pandemic policy conference that Bhattacharya organized at Stanford University last October. The other funder, George Tidmarsh, now works at the Food and Drug Administration as the head of CDER and acting head of CBER.

The event, held on the anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration, took significant public criticism for featuring a number of fringe voices, including anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. Bardosh himself participated in the event on a panel called “Pandemic Policy from a Global Perspective,” which also featured Gupta.

Like his boss and fellow Collateral Global alum, Bhattacharya, Bardosh has staked out contrarian public health positions, emphasizing the harms of mitigation measures while downplaying those of the virus. In an op-ed for the UK-based tabloid The Daily Mail about the findings of that country’s COVID inquiry, he decried “the wrong-headed belief that it is the Government's job to avoid any and all untimely deaths during an outbreak and that we can in some way 'stop' pandemics in their tracks,” asserting that “neither is possible nor realistic.”

In the piece, Bardosh touted Sweden’s “far more relaxed, voluntary-based response to the pandemic,” highlighting the country’s low percentage of overall excess deaths. Sweden’s numbers have long been a popular talking point among pandemic contrarians, but the reality is more nuanced for a number of reasons. Notably, for example, the country abandoned its laissez-faire approach after several months due to a shockingly high death toll. The Swedish king and prime minister even admitted that the policy was a failure,

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s former state epidemiologist, who oversaw the lax COVID response, participated in a panel discussion at the 2024 Stanford pandemic policy conference.

The contrarian Bardosh fits in well at Donald Trump’s HHS, which is headed by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr.—and just this week announced that it was winding down mRNA vaccine development activities.

In July 2023, Bardosh—then a professor at the University of Washington—testified before the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as an expert to argue against vaccine mandates and attack the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, government, and “the liberal class.” Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, today the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, had testified as a GOP experts at the subcommittee’s first hearing months earlier about the supposed lessons of the pandemic, criticizing the U.S. response from the perspective that the country ought to have done less.

In his opening remarks, Bardosh pointed to two papers he’d authored the previous year. The first focused on the “unintended consequences” of COVID vaccine mandates. The other, which received a subsequent published rebuttal, argued that college mandates were unethical because COVID boosters were a net clinical harm to young adults ages 18-29. Bardosh’s co-authors on that second paper included notable mRNA skeptics—Makary, Tracy Beth Høeg, who is now his special assistant at the FDA, and Vinay Prasad, the agency’s former chief medical and science officer and head of its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who was ousted last week.

Bardosh went on to call COVID vaccine mandates “an affront to the God-given order of freedom on which American freedom is based,” “scientifically inconsistent,” “illogical,” and “an insult to our American foundation of freedom.”

“May I remind everyone here about the higher law, inspired by God, in which this country divines liberty: We consider a deprivation of bodily autonomy to be fundamentally humiliating and associated with a form of mental and physical enslavement,” he said. “Inherent to human nature is the desire to have self-determination over one’s own body and mind. Notice that many Americans chose to suffer the deprivations of losing their material income rather than to be subjected to the humiliations of the forced medical treatment that would have denied their own medical privacy, physical agency, and psychological freedom.”

In a piece for UnHerd from January 2024, Bardosh—like many on the political right—indicated his support for a “reckoning” for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who had been called to testify before Congress about his actions during the pandemic.

Bardosh took issue with Fauci’s support for COVID mitigation measures, including vaccine mandates, and allegedly working to suppress dissent against those policies through smears of scientists like Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors. Bhattacharya himself has made similar claims of having been censored, and even brought a lawsuit against key government officials over the matter. After working its way through right-wing federal judges, however, the case was tossed by the Supreme Court.

In the piece, Bardosh also suggested Fauci had funded “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Supporters of the unproven lab leak narrative of COVID’s origins, who include Bhattacharya, insist that such research created the SARS-CoV-2 virus and caused the pandemic. Scientific evidence has consistently pointed toward natural origins.

That April, Bardosh and Bhattacharya wrote an editorial ripping the World Health Organization’s stalled pandemic treaty for “validating” lockdowns and other mitigation measures and infringing on national sovereignty and free speech. The document—an effort to create a framework for sharing medical technologies like vaccines to address global disparities between nations, had come under fire from business-aligned right-wing groups. Collateral Global featured the piece on its website in a section called “in the press.”

Shortly after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order to pull the nation out of the WHO.

Kevin Bardosh did not respond to our press inquiry.