Leana Wen’s Belated Recognition of Covid Dissidents Rings Hollow

Leana Wen’s latest piece in The Washington Post is a remarkable exercise in revisionist history. In it, Wen strikes a surprisingly conciliatory tone toward Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, two of the most prominent critics of the mainstream Covid-19 response. During the pandemic, Wen was one of the loudest voices championing the very policies that Bhattacharya and Makary opposed — mass lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates. Now that Bhattacharya and Makary have been nominated to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Trump administration, Wen is suddenly ready to acknowledge that they had valid points all along.

This about-face raises serious questions about Wen’s intellectual consistency — and her role in reinforcing the medical and media consensus that aggressively sidelined and demonized voices like Bhattacharya and Makary. While it’s encouraging to see her finally admit that they were “right to emphasize infection-induced immunity” and that “a narrow focus on virus control failed to account for collateral damage,” this concession comes years too late and after tremendous damage was done.

During the pandemic, Wen was not a mere observer of public health policy — she was an active enforcer of the very orthodoxy that Bhattacharya and Makary sought to challenge. Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, argued in October 2020 that blanket lockdowns and school closures would cause more harm than good, particularly for vulnerable populations like children and the working class. Makary was an early proponent of recognizing natural immunity and warned that the single-minded focus on vaccination was ignoring key aspects of viral spread and population immunity.

Bhattacharya and Makary were accused of being “Covid deniers” and anti-science radicals. Media outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic painted them as fringe figures whose recommendations would lead to mass death and societal collapse. While she has changed her tune now, Wen never stood up for or supported Bhattacharya, Makary, or other Covid dissidents’ views which landed them in hot water. Her claim now that they were "unfairly ostracized" is an astonishing admission — because she went along with the mainstream consensus during the pandemic.

Wen was one of the strongest voices calling for vaccine mandates. In July 2021, she told NPR, “I don't think that people should have the choice to infect others with a potentially fatal and contagious disease.” In September 2021, Wen suggested on CNN that unvaccinated individuals should face severe restrictions, stating, “We need to start looking at the choice to remain unvaccinated as the choice to go out and drive drunk.” This was the exact opposite stance Bhattacharya and Makary took during the pandemic which made them routinely demonized.

Wen also supported strict lockdown measures throughout 2020 and into 2021. In December 2020, she told CNN that “hunkering down” over the holidays was necessary to save lives and criticized efforts to lift restrictions too soon. On the vaccines, she also spread misinformation, downplaying the risks and making misleading blanket recommendations to the whole population. In a July 22 CNN interview after the Covid vaccines were authorized for ages 5 and under, Wen said “I feel so relieved that my kids are now able to get the same level of exceptional protection that everyone 5 and over can” while encouraging all parents to vaccinate their young ones despite any robust evidence of benefit.

Yet, in a recent interview with The Bulwark, Wen takes a very different tone, highlighting there were real issues and concerns about the Covid vaccine which were not addressed at the time. “People were concerned about the impact of the vaccines on their menstrual periods. Well as it turns out, there have been studies that have shown that there may be some changes to the menstrual period in the short term,” she stated. She went on: “It’s also true that … you do get some degree of pretty good immunity after having infection.”

The consequences of ignoring Bhattacharya and Makary’s insights were not theoretical — they were real, measurable, and catastrophic. The school closures that Bhattacharya warned about contributed to the largest decline in educational attainment in modern American history, disproportionately affecting low-income and minority students (an issue the Left failed to champion). The psychological toll of lockdowns and isolation drove a spike in depression, substance abuse, and suicide — effects that public health authorities failed to meaningfully track or address.

Moreover, the refusal to acknowledge natural immunity as Makary controversially did led to misguided vaccination mandates that cost people their jobs and livelihoods, even as evidence mounted that infection-induced immunity was highly protective.

Bhattacharya and Makary weren’t just intellectually right — they were morally right. They argued not just from data but from a principled understanding that public health policy must balance the immediate threat of a virus with the broader and more complex threats to mental health, social cohesion, and economic stability. That Wen is only now willing to acknowledge this — after supporting policies that left a trail of human wreckage — is galling.

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Scientific progress depends on challenging conventional wisdom — not years after the fact, but in real time. Bhattacharya and Makary had the courage to speak out when it was deeply unpopular and professionally risky to do so. Wen’s belated recognition of their insights is welcome, but it comes after the damage has been done. The lives disrupted, the businesses shuttered, and the mental health crisis unleashed by prolonged lockdowns cannot be undone by a half-hearted mea culpa in The Washington Post.

If Wen is serious about atoning for her role in promoting misguided Covid policies, she should go beyond polite recognition. She should apologize for helping to fuel the environment of censorship and personal attacks that Bhattacharya and Makary endured. She should reckon with the cost of the public health community’s mistakes — and work to ensure that medical dissent is valued rather than silenced in the future.

Because in the end, Bhattacharya and Makary weren’t just right about Covid. They were right about the need for open debate and intellectual humility — principles that Leana Wen and her allies discarded when they mattered most.

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