By most accounts, President-elect Donald Trump bungled the federal response to COVID-19, publicly downplaying concern about a virus that he privately admitted was “deadly stuff.”

“It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear,” Trump said in Feb. 2020, at the same time he was admitting to journalist Bob Woodward that the virus was spreading fast and was more lethal than “even your strenuous flus.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya, Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health and oversee some $47 billion in research funding, agreed with Trump at the time; the public version, at least.

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In a March 2020 essay he co-authored with a fellow Stanford University scientist, Bhattacharaya, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argued that COVID-19 was far less deadly than people feared. Although today The New York Times describes him as a doctor who “opposed lockdowns,” he inadvertently made the case for them in The Wall Street Journal — only to then try and knock that case down.

“If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified,” Bhattacharaya wrote. “But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise — and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too........

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