I know that at least some of my American readers had concerned about the leadership that we got during the Covid pandemic. Different people had concerns about mask mandates, vaccination mandates, pharmaceutical company liability, church closures, loss of employment for dissenters, etc. Let’s take a look at what the House of Representatives found, then see Trump’s nominee for NIH.

First, this article from Christian Post:

Several allegations made during the early stages of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic that were dismissed as conspiracy theories might have been factually accurate, contends a new report from congressional Republicans.

Released by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Committee On Oversight and Accountability’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward” report covers the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting both successes and failures.

The report presents several findings focusing on the origins of the virus, the management of public health measures and the long-term consequences of the pandemic response.

Here are the 5 points:

1. NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan
2. Health officials falsely characterized lab leak theory as a ‘conspiracy theory’
3. China, US agencies, scientists ‘sought to cover up’ pandemic facts
4. Pandemic-era school closures had long-term adverse impacts
5. Lockdowns in US cities were ‘worse than the disease’

I think the ones that are the most important going forward are numbers 4 and 5.

School closure effects:

The subcommittee emphasized that the long-term educational, social, and mental health impacts on students must be considered in any future response to public health crises.

The report is also critical of the American Federation of Teachers’ influence on the Biden administration and transition team in 2021.

“AFT is not a scientific organization — it does not employ epidemiologists or immunologists. Instead, it is a political union — committed to activism on behalf of its 1.7 million members — that donated $2.4 million dollars to Democrat candidates during the 2020 election cycle,” the report reads. “The extent of the AFT’s political influence is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration reached out to AFT for advice on school reopening rather than the AFT reaching out to the Biden administration.”

“While AFT … [has] attempted to rewrite history by arguing that they were always trying to reopen the schools, this simply is not true,” the report concludes. “AFT continually pushed for school closures throughout the pandemic. Restricting in-person schooling was always the default — not the alternative — mitigation measure underlying AFT’s positions.”

Lockdowns in US Cities:

The report contends that the strict “stay-at-home” orders imposed by states and local governments to curb the spread of the virus often did more harm than good and points to the widespread economic, psychological and social consequences of these measures.

The fallout from so-called “stay at home” health mandates in California and other states led to outcomes such as increased unemployment, mental health issues and educational disruption, and was disproportionately high compared to the health benefits, according to the panel.

You might recall that Sweden didn’t look their schools down, and they suffered no learning loss during the pandemic.

OK, so with the election of Trump, we are going to get the best possible pick to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Christian Post had that story, as well:

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health has drawn strong reactions as he has advocated for overhauling the agency.

Bhattacharya, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, first emerged on the national stage as a prominent critic of lockdowns implemented to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The president-elect expressed confidence in Bhattacharya’s ability to lead the $50 billion agency and “restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research” and “Make America Healthy Again.”

They have 6 points in their article:

1. Emerged as a prominent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci
2. Censored by Twitter
3. Would ‘restructure’ the NIH
4. Published by several reputable academic journals
5. Operates a Substack titled ‘Science From The Fringe’
6. Founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom

Let’s take a look at #1 and #3.

Criticism of Fauci:

In 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored The Great Barrington Declaration. Signed by hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens, doctors and medical and public health scientists, the document warned that the lockdown policies implemented to stop the spread of the coronavirus were “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

Examples of the negative consequences of the COVID-19 lockdowns listed include “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health,” predicting “greater excess mortality in years to come” as a result with “the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.” The document also condemned “keeping students out of school” during the pandemic as a “grave injustice.”

[…]The declaration seemingly drew the ire of then-NIH Director Francis Collins, who privately called the document “fringe” and called for a published “take down.”

[…]Bhattacharya’s positions on lockdowns put him on a collision course with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency of NIH, who emerged as the strongest advocate for stringent COVID-19 lockdowns.

In 2023, when Fauci proclaimed that he had such strong “personal ethics” that his Catholic faith was something he did not “really need to do,” Bhattacharya responded by saying, “Hard to say which is worse — his theology or his science.”

He has plans to restructure the corrupt NIH:

Bhattacharya emerged as a top candidate to lead the NIH earlier this month after meeting with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and discussed ideas on how to overhaul the NIH, sources close to the matter told The Washington Post.

The professor has long called for changes at NIH and said in an interview earlier this year he lost “almost all confidence” in the American public health establishment.

[…]”I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time,” Bhattacharya told The Post in a January 2024 interview.

I say that the NIH is corrupt in part because of their past actions on DEI, which Desert Rose and I talked about in episode #44 of the Knight and Rose Show. And if you don’t recall why the current leader of the NIH is corrupt, you can read my previous post about it.

Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA.  Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.

I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly from over at Evolution News. Günter writes an article about fossils every Friday (he calls it “Fossil Friday”).

Here’s last Friday’s article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.

He writes:

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.

Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.

Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:

• The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
• The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
• The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
• The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
• The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
• The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
• Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
• The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
• The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.

Günter concludes:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

And I found a nice lecture that he gave on the topic:

The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. I blogged on it so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.