There is news that Jay Bhattacharya may be appointed to run NIH. Bhattacharya has a history with that agency:
“Bhattacharya teaches medicine, economics, and health policy at Stanford University; he became a national voice in 2020 as one of the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration. The open letter- signed by thousands of health professionals- called for an end to mass lockdowns and focused efforts on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the rest of society get back to living. The statement was met with harsh criticism from leading health officials at the time, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who privately described the authors as “fringe” and was urging a quick rebuke of their message, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.”
The suppression of Bhattacharya went even further with revelations that the Biden Administration coordinated with social media to censor him.
There have been times when, upon the fall of a regime, there is a scramble to control that regime’s archives. After all, while a regime may lie to you, it won’t lie to itself regarding certain things. In 1944 Parisians knew their liberation was on hand when they saw the Gestapo burning its papers.
Not only does the opening of archives reveal corruption, it also leads to a reconsideration of history. Journalism (especially these days) is often merely the reporting of what other people have said or is pure conjecture, while historians who later go through primary source material have a much better grip on what went on. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s led to a re-evaluation of many parts of Soviet history as well as past US-Soviet relations. Next time you want to evaluate a historian’s work, take a look at their bibliography and see if they did any original research, or if they are merely replicating the methodology of journalists by quoting other historians or engaging in conjecture.