A “gaggle of disgruntled” NIH employees recently pushed back against changes at the agency by issuing the “Bethesda Declaration,” in a “protest-like homage to the Great Barrington Declaration.” The declaration might have gone unnoticed – until mainstream media united to make it headline news.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) emerged from the Covid-19 era as among the most disreputable of all the agencies, a partner with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the home of Dr 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 the grim results of countless drugs, among them the magic Covid-19 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 Dr Jay Bhattacharya, previously a quietly productive professor at Stanford University with specialisations 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 hardworking. Yes, he has cancelled contracts (including 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 socialised with a habit backed by plenty of evidence. That habit is to ignore all political appointees. They are temporary, but the staff, who possess all institutional knowledge, persist over many elections. That’s the presumption because that’s how it has always been. Until now. Until Bhattacharya 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 per cent, 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 a.m. EST on June 9. Surely it will have no traction at all. But then 8:01am 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: Stat News, ABC, Ars Technica, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Reuters, Splinter, Boston Globe, AP, CNN, and UPI/Yahoo

All within hours of the 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 Bhattacharya 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 Bhattacharya in that position to clean house.

Consider how the deck is stacked. All of this happened blitzkrieg-style within minutes and unfolded 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 the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Bhattacharya. This was midnight her time in Australia. By 2:00am, 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 The 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 Demasi’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 Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices on the 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 Jr 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-Bhattacharya coverage had to pivot to hating on RFK Jr. The Bethesda Declaration got lost in the static of other coverage.

It gets better. Late in the day, Bhattacharya 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.

• A Tell Media report / By Jeffrey A. Tucker