From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Barry Weiss. A few years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor, a respected medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. He had published around 135 peer-reviewed papers. But then COVID hit, the lockdowns began, and Dr. J, as he is sometimes known, became infamous. He became a pariah in the medical community. The idea of herd immunity made headlines again recently when three scientists put out what they called the Great Barrington Declaration. Herd immunity was very elusive with COVID, and the Great Barrington Declaration was flawed both conceptually and in practice. Trump's top candidate endorsed herd immunity as the best way to address the COVID pandemic, just a fancy way of saying let's get everybody sick and see what happens. Along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether or not the lockdowns were a good idea, whether or not the tradeoffs were worthwhile. He and his colleagues did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration, and the ideas contained there, at least in the madness of that period, were considered so dangerous by our public health authorities and by big tech that Jay was not only smeared but censored. His work from Reddit to Twitter to Facebook to YouTube was suppressed. But here's the thing: the lockdowns were pretty disastrous. We're still dealing with their effects, effects like the loss of childhood learning, the cancer screenings that were skipped, the inability of those with special needs or disabilities to see the people who helped them, the separation of families, the people who died alone in hospitals, just to name a few of the consequences. And it's still unclear if those lockdowns were actually worth it. The powers that be tried to shut up Jay Bhattacharya, but he wouldn't. And after surviving that ordeal, he is now the new head of the National Institutes of Health. If you're someone that's skeptical of karma, this turn of events may lead you to believe in it. Jay is leading this massive federal agency, the crown jewel of American science. It is the largest public funder of medical research in the country, at a moment when public health authorities desperately need to rebuild trust. And here's another wrinkle: Jay has two bosses: President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop a COVID vaccine in his first term, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, who is also the most famous vaccine skeptic in America. Walking the line here will inevitably be tricky for Dr. J. How can he do it? How does someone who believes that vaccinating your kids for deadly diseases like polio and measles, which he does believe, also confront the idea that large swaths of Americans right now have a fear around vaccinating your kids? That's among the many things I ask him in this conversation. Jay has lived a remarkable life, and we talk about all of it. We talk about what it meant for him to become an American citizen. We talk about his conversion to Christianity as a teenager and how his faith not only allowed him to stick to his values but even to pray for Francis Collins, the old NIH director who called Jay's ideas dangerous and called him fringe. He says he's in favor of Biden pardoning Fauci, interestingly. He talks about wanting to create an open secrets to expose the scientists who take money from Big Pharma. We talk about the hutzpah, is a way to put it, that it took to fight the entire medical establishment and how he ultimately triumphed against his critics. Most importantly, we talk about how he wants to put the National Institutes of Health on the front line in the war against chronic illness in America. How can public health authorities make America healthy again? More than that, how can they regain the trust and the authority needed to advance public health once more? Today on Honestly, in his first interview, new NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Stay with us. Jay Bhattacharya, welcome to Honestly, and thank you so much for giving us your first interview as head of the NIH.
Thank you for having me on, Barry. It is an absolute honor to talk with you.
So to remind people of who you are, I think your name will be familiar to anyone that's been listening to the show or reading the Free Press. But big picture: five years ago, because of your heterodox view about the proper way to mitigate the spread of COVID, you were turned into an untouchable, a heretic really, a pariah in the scientific community. And this was because of a concerted effort on the part of some of the most prominent people in the world of public health, namely Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, who called you a fringe epidemiologist and called you dangerous. Now just a few days ago, you were confirmed to lead the NIH, the very institution that tried to turn you into an untouchable. So I want to start by asking, Jay Bhattacharya, do you believe in karma?
I believe in God, and he's really laughing at me. It's been quite the journey. I mean, if you'd asked me five years ago, did I even have as an ambition to be the head of the NIH, I would have laughed. I loved being a professor, I still think of myself as a teacher and researcher primarily. But to have the chance to lead this institute, which I believe is the most important biomedical institute in the world for the role it has played in the improvements in health we've seen over decades, it is such a great honor. And it does feel a little karmic, doesn't it?
So I also read somewhere that your full name isn't Jay, your full name is Jant Bhattacharya. Although my cousins, they say I don't know how to pronounce either my first name or my last name. But what does Jant mean? Doesn't it also mean something fitting for this story? I mean, it means one who will be victorious, or one who... it's like Nike in Greek or something. Oh interesting. So we're going to talk about the NIH and your plans, what you want to do there, a little bit later in the conversation. I want to start by just quickly reviewing your story to jog people's memory, and perhaps for those who don't remember this at all, because a lot of stuff that happened in COVID has been quickly forgotten or memory-holed. So four and a half years ago, you were a respected scientist at Stanford, you had published something like 135 peer-reviewed papers, you were known as an expert in health economics, got a PhD in economics, you went to medical school. Okay, now fast forward to October 2020, you and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, you all came together to sort of question the consensus about the wisdom of lockdowns, and you did this in a statement that was known as the Great Barrington Declaration. I just want to read a paragraph to remind people of what it said: 'Current lockdown policies, and this is in October of 2020 that you're writing this, are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results, to name a few, include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health, leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and the younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school, you wrote, is a grave injustice.' And I'll add just one more line: 'Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.' Now four days after you all put out this statement, the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH at the time, writes an email to Anthony Fauci, who was then the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And in that email, which people can go and Google and find, he called you a fringe, your group of you fringe epidemiologists, and suggested that what was necessary was a quick and devastating takedown of the premises of the Great Barrington Declaration. And then after this private email, which has since come to light, a few days later Francis Collins gives an interview to The Washington Post in which he says of your statement, 'This is not mainstream science, it's dangerous.' Try and go back four and a half years, and I know a lot has happened since then. Why did Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci respond the way that they did? I want you to steelman their approach. Why did they do this? Why were the stakes so high? Why did you guys need to be discredited as dangerous?
Right, so four and a half years ago, October 2020, the first wave of COVID was already behind us, and many of the lockdowns that had been implemented in March of 2020 played themselves out through the summer, and many places had started to open up. There were plans to reopen schools, many places did reopen schools, although a lot, many, many also didn't, like in California for instance, my kids were out of school for two years. The public health community, and I and Martin and Sunetra, all everyone saw that the lockdowns had not succeeded in getting rid of the virus. That was very, very obvious, that the virus was here to stay, that there was no technology we had then or now to actually eradicate the virus. And so we, but we also saw, Martin, Sunetra, and I, that there was a desire to reinstitute the lockdowns in the fall, where the idea that lockdowns were the way to manage a respiratory virus like COVID had sort of established itself in the lead among the leaders of the scientific community, including Francis Collins, including Tony Fauci, and others. But we also saw a couple things. One is, you read that statement that we wrote in the Great Barrington Declaration, there was evidence all around us already by then of the tremendous damage done to the poor, the working class, to children from the lockdowns. There were estimates put out by the UN that almost 100 million people would face starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns. And yet the scientific community, the leaders of the scientific community, decided that their policy idea of lockdowns were so necessary, so right, so just in order to eliminate the virus or to protect people from the virus, that they did not want any dissent. So when Martin, Sunetra, and I wrote this, we were professors at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard. It was a threat to their policy, it was a threat to their authority. When we put it out, almost a million people signed it almost overnight. I mean within a few days, we had hundreds of thousands of people signing, including tens of thousands of scientists, epidemiologists, a Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt at Stanford signed it. And so it was very clearly a mainstream position.
Jay, why were Fauci, Collins, and sort of the rest of the American public health establishment, what made them at the time so convinced that lockdowns were the way to go?
Well, I think the first thing is that these decisions about lockdown, especially in March of 2020, were made in the midst of a panic, a panic not by people who are supposed to keep their calm in the middle of a crisis. And there were debates in the 2010s and earlier about how to manage respiratory virus pandemics, and lockdowns were one position but not necessarily the main position that people had taken. The plans that were in place to manage previous pandemics didn't feature lockdowns like we had. Respiratory virus pandemics, for instance, the avian flu, the swine flu in 2009, probably the most recent one before 2020, and others that didn't involve lockdowns, because there were a lot of scientists who pointed to the damage they would do again to the poor, to children, working class. And so I think for a lot of folks, Barry, that were in the leadership of the scientific community, they decided that this was such a new and dangerous disease that it was worth doing this extraordinary thing, and it was worth ignoring the damage they knew would happen to the poor, the working class, and so on, because that's the only way to get a hold of it in March of 2020.
So in March of 2020, it's very easy to sympathize with why they went for lockdowns. But by October of 2020, so many of the harms were already clear, and they were still insisting on it. How much did the example of China and what China was able to do with lockdowns, how much do you think that that example and the information, real or not, coming out of China, how much do you think that impacted in retrospect the American public health communities, or let's just say the people in authority, how much did it impact their approach?
It had an enormous impact. There was an email from Cliff Lane, a man named Cliff Lane who was Tony Fauci's aide. He went on the UN mission to China in I think February 2020, where they went to China to see if the early Chinese lockdown in January 2020 of Wuhan had actually worked. They came back, Cliff Lane sent an email to Maria Van Kerkhove, who was a WHO epidemiologist, one of them, saying that what China did worked and that it was really important for the public health community essentially to... what he specifically wrote was that 'China did work, we have a lot of hard decisions to make, it's going to involve more than just the people in this room,' meaning the people who'd gone on this UN mission. They came back from that trip to China in February 2020 convinced that the January 2020 lockdown in China had worked at great cost, but that the world needed to copy that, and that's exactly what happened.
In your scientific and academic career, had you ever been made into a pariah? In other words, if you look back to scientific history and you think about Galileo or lots of people when they come up with innovative scientific ideas, often they are... for them that is not a thing that's unique. Had you ever experienced that before the Great Barrington Declaration?
Well, I mean, I tried to say things that were different and unique and cause trouble. Part of the fun of being a scientist is to cause trouble in that specific way. But nothing on this scale. I was a part of a scientific community, I had my debates with people, but that was not anything like this. And I should say one thing really quickly: the point of view that you read about the Great Barrington Declaration, that was, I mean to me, that is not novel. What Galileo said was novel, it was really, really new. What we were saying was what the conventional wisdom was in public health in January 2020. We were just saying what seemed to me utterly obvious. But the leaders of the scientific community received it as a kind of heresy and, as you said earlier, treated me as an untouchable as a result of it.
So it wasn't just Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, right? They sort of set the tone, and what followed in your life was pretty astonishing when you looked back on it. And I feel this way about so many things that happened in the years of 2020, 2021 in lots of areas of American life. But here's some of what happened to you: some of your colleagues at Stanford wrote letters, and this is your language, basically disowning you. You told the Wall Street Journal that you couldn't sleep for months, you lost 30 pounds. And if you look back, we were just talking before we came on, I looked at a video interview you did from back then, you look like a different person in many ways, not just the weight but just the look on your face. You received death threats. People that had previously been friendly to you, colleagues of yours, crossed the street to avoid you. How did that... now it's such a strange thing how much the world has changed, but going back to that time, how did it impact you personally to experience that?
Well, it's just... I never had... I thought I was tough, I thought I had thick skin. I realized I didn't have thick skin in 2020. Especially that there were death threats, which I just basically had to ignore because I felt an obligation to keep advocating for the scientific ideas I had, the policy ideas I had. There were attacks in the press on my wife, on my family, and I just felt helpless to protect them. I couldn't sleep. It was a very, very difficult time. At one point in July 2020, I had this, I don't know what to call it, this experience where I just decided that whatever ambitions I had for myself, I needed to just let them go, that I needed to just do the things I was really put on this earth to do, which is just talk about my scientific ideas and how to manage this pandemic. Because I was not speaking for myself, I was speaking for the people who didn't have a voice: all the children that had suffered, the people that killed themselves from the depression and anxiety caused by the lockdowns themselves, the poor, the working class. They didn't have a voice in these policies, and they weren't protected from the virus, they were actually exposed to the virus at a time when everyone thought it was a death sentence. So I just decided I was going to let go whatever ambitions I had for my own career, and then the anxiety lifted after that. I felt like I crossed a Rubicon, I told my friends at the time. And I knew that the fever would eventually break, and I'm glad it has.
One of the things that I think typified that era, and we're just sort of starting to begin to have enough distance from it to look back on it, was a kind of phenomenon. I know for me personally, it sort of changed my view of human nature. I had been raised in a very idealistic way to believe that people do the courageous thing, that people stand up for what's good and what's right. It was probably my parents trying to indoctrinate me to do that, by convincing me that that's what people do, that's what it means to be a good human being. And all of a sudden, in so many areas of life, whether it was people's inability to make a distinction between peaceful protests and violent rioting, whether it was the excesses of DEI and the demonization of people based on their immutable characteristics or the veneration of them based on their immutable characteristics, a lot of people saw these, or lockdowns, a lot of people saw this stuff and knew privately that it wasn't right or had their hesitations about it, but were terrified to say so publicly, frankly because of what happened to people like you. Where did you find the strength to let go, as you're describing it, of your ambitions and cross the Rubicon? How did you do it?
I mean, I'm a Christian. That has played a vital role in my life ever since I became a Christian when I was 18. I never thought about my work as really for myself, but I didn't realize I still had these... you know, I think any academic can probably understand what I'm saying. There's a desire to be right about things, to publish your papers, influence people's ideas, and that kind of ambition, I think it consumes the minds of so many, basically everybody really. And letting go of that ambition, and saying okay, what is my purpose? Am I really doing this for myself, or am I doing this for the people I study? I felt the obligation I had to the people I studied for a living. That was what I wrote papers on, those 135 papers were aimed at improving the health of others. I had a greater obligation to them than I had to myself, and so I had to let that go. It was a conviction. If you want to say it is from God, I had to say I had a choice. And actually it was explicit: the medical school of Stanford gave me a choice. They told me I could go back to being the old professor I was, respected, writing all these papers and having a fancy position, but the condition for that is I have to stop talking. And I just decided I couldn't make that choice. I couldn't make that bargain. To do that would betray the people that I studied for a living, the vulnerable people. It was more important for me to serve them in any way I could, even if it meant sacrificing my career.
Jay, for people that are listeners to this show and aren't Christian, give us a little bit more on why being a Christian gave you the strength to do this. Like what is it about Christianity? You were raised Hindu, you became an American citizen at 17, family from India. What specifically about Christianity allowed you to have the strength to do this, if you could share a little bit more? Because I think it's a critically important part of your story. And as we've talked about in the past, when I look back often to the sort of public dissonance of the past five years in American life, and it'll be interesting to see how they respond to the other kind of liberalism maybe that we'll talk about later in this conversation that's rising from a different part of the culture at the moment, the thing that a lot of them have in common is religiosity. So can you just say a little bit more about how being Christian gave you the strength to do what you did?
Sure. This is one of those things where it's deeply personal. I mean, other Christians and other people who have different faiths have different ways they manage this, but I'll just tell you how I became a Christian very briefly. I mean, not to brag, but I was a really good student as a kid. I was good at math, science, very competitive, did all kinds of things, I was a debate, high school debate. I just wanted to be good at all these things. And it was my identity. It was like I was going to be good. And when I say it was my identity, what I mean is that it gave me a sense of meaning and purpose. I would say, okay, because I'm good at these things, that's what makes me valuable. When I was a teenager, that's the way I thought, unconsciously. I didn't really, if you'd asked me as a teenager what my identity was, I would have looked like a cross-eyed, I didn't know what that meant, but that's really honestly what it was. And the experience of becoming a Christian at 18 was, I had this, it came, the only place it could come from is God, because otherwise it wouldn't have come into my own head, this sense of deep shame that I was judging others based on that. The sense of moral worth that I imputed to others was based on: are they good at math? Are they good at science? Are they good at debate? Are they smart? And I had this sense of deep shame that that was just a wrong thing to think about people, a wrong way to interact with people, a wrong way to be with people. That people's moral worth derives from the fact that they are created by God, and that I'm put on this earth to love other people, even my enemies. And so that part of me that revered, that had this pride in my intellect, died when I became a Christian, at least I thought it died, till 2020. And then when amazing people, people I admired forever, people like Francis Collins, started attacking me, they were attacking a version of me that had died when I was 18. All these people by saying you're not smart, essentially. Yeah, exactly. They're telling me I'm a fringe epidemiologist, I don't know what I'm talking about. And they were the sort of the version of me that I was at 18 would have just shrunk and said, oh my God, what's gone on? I need to rethink my entire, go back and align with what they're saying because obviously I'm not smart anymore or whatever. That version of me died when I was 18. They were destroying a version of me that had already gone, was well in the past. And it was that Christian experience of conversion, where you have to die to yourself, the parts of you that disconnect you from God really have to go. That was what went when I became a Christian, and that is what really saved me during the pandemic.
One of the things that also happened during this period, so it was the public health establishment attacking you, it was your colleagues at Stanford and people in your life disavowing you or distancing themselves from you. And then, as we found out, part of this was because of Free Press reporting in the Twitter files, but then other things as well. There was also big tech suppression of your ideas. On Twitter, your name was sort of on a trends blacklist as we discovered, which suppressed the visibility of your posts. At YouTube, you had done a conversation with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, it was suppressed because you were talking about how the evidence for masking children was weak. Google, Reddit, Facebook, they all censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. And as we later found out, we know that this censoring was done in no small part at the urging of the Biden administration. And Jay, you wrote a piece for us. If something transformed in you when you became a Christian as a teenager, you wrote about how this experience sort of transformed your idea of the strength of American values or of American institutions. And I want to just read a little part of this piece and have you reflect on it. 'When I was 19,' and this is you, 'I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment, and it was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech at the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.' And then you go on to say this: 'My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I've been robbed of that conviction. I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young. Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we the people who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, you wrote, we will lose them.' Did this experience, if a part of you died and was born again in becoming a Christian, did you experience something similar when it came to your faith in America or in the American civic religion during the COVID pandemic and the reactions to your work?
Well first, Barry, I should thank you for your reporting on the Twitter trends blacklist. I still remember, I will never forget the day when you texted me, you said, 'Jay, look what I found in the Twitter files.' And I think I had taken America for granted. I took for granted that America would always have this commitment to free speech, to this kind of diversity of ideas at its heart, and that the government would never act in a way that would aim at suppressing basic free speech rights in the way that it did during the pandemic. And it did it because, I mean, the hard part to really take in is that the people that did it didn't do it because they hated me. They actually did it because they thought they were doing good. They thought that by suppressing and silencing dissident voices who didn't agree with masking toddlers or something, that they were protecting people, and that that protection warranted a violation of free speech rights, that free speech was too dangerous to have during a pandemic. I had taken it for granted that the government would never do that. But when people take on this sort of aura of moral superiority, like 'I'm on a mission to protect people,' so many of the guardrails that actually protect us just go by the wayside. And I thought America was immune to that, and I was wrong. I do think though that the American idea is too powerful to ever let go. And it's been heartening to see so many people of all different political parties, by the way, not just people who share my political beliefs, recover that idea that we have to be able to speak to each other, the government should not be involved in deciding which scientific position is right and which scientific position is wrong, and destroying the lives and ability to speak of the people who disagree with the government scientists. That's something that I take to heart very deeply, especially as I become the director of the NIH. That's going to be really important for me to make sure that people who disagree with me continue to have a voice. That's the only way science advances.
I want to talk about your leadership and what your plans are at the NIH in a second. Just two more questions sort of about the past, well the past taking us into the future. You know, five years since the Great Barrington Declaration, your stance on lockdowns has been vindicated in so many different ways. We're seeing how detrimental it was for kids in the US. Johns Hopkins released a study showing that lockdowns did little if anything to actually save lives during the pandemic. And I think a lot of people who suffered, there was a very powerful piece in National Review a few weeks ago by a writer whose son had special needs, talking about him having to do physical therapy over Zoom with a mask, and how he will never be able to get over it. And more to the point, there's been no reckoning, there's been no public apology. I wanted to ask you: A) Has anyone apologized to you for what happened to you back then, either personally in your life or some of the big characters we've been talking about? And B) Do you think that there will ever be some kind of public apology?
Yeah, I've had many people apologize privately to me, and some people apologize publicly. But it's not really about me, Barry. I think the key thing you highlighted, the key thing is how do we make plans for the next time there's a pandemic, because it's not the last pandemic we're ever going to face. And so we have to honestly look at what worked and what didn't work. We still have not had that conversation. The private apologies are nice because I can reconcile. I mean, one of the Christian practices is forgiveness, and I've had more practice with that than I ever thought I'd have in my life the last few years. And it's led to reconciliations, been great privately. Publicly, what has to happen is we need to make plans for how we manage a pandemic like the one we had. And I want to make sure that people understand it's not about vengeance or retribution. I don't desire any of that. What I desire is that when we make those plans, the people that were not heard in the response to this pandemic, the children, the working class, the poor of the world, that they have a voice in this so that their well-being is taken into account. The reason why the lockdowns failed is because we live in a deeply unequal society. Vast classes of people do not have the luxury to lock down the way that fancy professors from Stanford maybe would have had. And I did my best to not lock down, but when the society around you says to lock down, you look over your shoulder when you go to work because what if someone stops you in the street, especially if you're not white, you may have that thought in your head. The entire society in March 2020 tells you to lock down, I still need to go to work, I feel this obligation to go to work. I actually ended up avoiding driving and rode my bike to avoid being stopped by the police. And there were people who were really... I mean, maybe it was paranoid, but in March 2020, I was hearing people had been stopped going to the grocery store. So I just... and that never ended up happening to me.
But like I just had a thought in my head: a lot of people must have had some thought like that. When the vaccine mandates came, so many people felt like pariahs because they had to carry around passports, vaccine passports, saying that they were clean. The people who didn't weren't allowed to participate in normal civic life; they were made to feel as if they were other. The entirety of the lockdown strategy, the reason it failed, is because it's such a deeply classist policy. It failed because it asked large classes of people to do the impossible, to essentially end their participation in civic life and in their family life in ways that are not human. So the key thing then is that we need to have this reckoning mainly so that we have a real human response in the next pandemic, rather than the inhuman one we had in 2020.
Before we get to the NIH, just one or two more questions about reconciliation. People like Francis Collins, you know, said your ideas were dangerous, called you a fringe epidemiologist. Have you spoken with Francis Collins at all since he made those comments?
I did. I had the honor of meeting him briefly in the summer of 2024, and he apologized privately about the 'fringe epidemiology' comment. I think it was a really nice moment. I've admired the man for my entire career, as a Christian and a scientist. He was very outspoken about his faith in ways that I found a lot of encouragement in when I was a young scientist. The fact that he was on the other side of this debate is fine; I'm on the other side of lots of people in debates. But that he would use his position, really abuse his position, to try to destroy people who disagreed with him — that really hurt. It was a really nice moment when he apologized for the 'fringe epidemiology' comment privately. I still think he disagrees with me about lockdowns, which is fair enough, but I think he was wrong about them. I would like to see, and I hope, that from him he would start to try to publicly engage in that same spirit that we had when we met privately.
How did you respond when he apologized?
I've been praying for him ever since I found out that he'd written that email, even before when I saw the press. I told him that I've been praying for him, and I still will pray for him. I think that reconciliation is really possible. I believe it very firmly. Even people disagree with each other fundamentally, even hate each other — I've never hated him and never will. So I'm just going to keep praying for that kind of grace.
That you are able to approach this subject with is one that I think eludes many people, maybe millions of people in this country who feel so betrayed by what happened, who feel like their children... I mean, we don't need to go through all of the examples. Every single person listening to this knows someone in their life who was harmed, either by COVID itself or by the measures that were taken to mitigate COVID. What is your advice to people looking to move on, who still believe that what was done was profoundly wrong but are not going to get a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission on COVID? What do you say to those people?
I mean, I still think, Barry, if you think back to 2020 and 2021, the government told us — public health officials especially — that we shouldn't interact with our family, that we should bury our parents or grandparents alone. Especially in 2021 when the vaccines came out, there was this sense of 'are you clean or unclean?' If you're vaccinated, you're clean; if you're not, you're unclean. That led to splitting of families — remember the Thanksgivings where people were uninvited because they were unvaccinated? The endpoint of that is a society that nobody wants to live in, no matter where you were in 2020 or 2021. That kind of reconciliation that we've been talking about is really the only way forward. It starts with saying, 'Okay, I'm not saying that what was done was wrong' — 2020 wasn't right. I firmly disagree with the policies that divided people into clean and unclean; they are deeply inhuman. But at the same time, these are people that are friends, family members, people that we respect, and they're still human. Our purpose isn't to destroy them. We have to find some way so that we can continue to learn from them, because they're going to be right on things that I'm wrong on at some point. If I keep that anger and bitterness inside, it's going to destroy me. I'm not going to be able to move forward with the kinds of things that I think are really important for society, for my personal life, for my family, and for the people I love. I have to let the anger go. It's going to be God that deals with whatever problems there are, but it won't be me wreaking vengeance. That's not my purpose. My purpose is to, especially now that I have this new job, to make the scientific establishment work toward improving the health of the American people. That's it. That's the main purpose I have now. And I need to do it with people that disagreed with me in 2020. That's fine. People disagree with me in 2021. A lot of them are smarter than me.
Many people on the right, and I think both of us know people like this, have made Fauci the sort of singular villain of the COVID story, almost more than the origins of the virus broadly. And you see this kind of stuff all the time. Broadly, has the response to Fauci been reasonable or unreasonable in your view?
Okay, so I think this is a complicated question. First, Tony Fauci, for reasons that are defensible maybe, although I would have disagreed with him in 2014, enabled the US government to continue to support research in China — the kind of gain-of-function research that may have caused the pandemic. He has that to think about. But at the same time, he became the face of the public health response in 2020, and he embraced that role. People had votive candles to him; they were like 'In Fauci We Trust.' It was such a shock test — some people regarded him as villainous, others as a saint. He became a caricature, not a person. Some of it was not his fault; people were looking for a guru figure to save them when they were scared of dying from this new virus. But he fully embraced that role. The consequence is that he's no longer Tony Fauci the scientist; he's a cultural figure beyond science. So the question is, what is one to do about that? From a personal perspective, I want to extend him the same grace that I want to extend everybody. I think he was deeply wrong in his scientific ideas in 2020, but I believe he was sincere in them and was trying to do what he viewed as best for the American people. I want to honor that. So let's depersonalize it. President Biden pardoned him, and I'm in favor of that. Let's have an honest discussion about the policies. Let's use the NIH resources to make Americans healthy again, if I can take the phrase from Bobby Kennedy. Rather than trying to destroy people, let's use the time we now have to learn the lessons of the past and build people up.
Okay, well Jay, you were just confirmed to run the NIH, and you are taking on this role at a really difficult time — maybe not as hard as the height of the COVID pandemic, but very hard. I'm not saying anything new to say that faith in public health and faith in science itself feels very broken, unlike any period I've ever experienced in my life. Before we get into the details of how you're planning to run the NIH and what exactly the NIH does, big picture, how can you start to rebuild the trust that has been so broken?
Well, first of all, you have to figure out why there is distrust. Right now there are two stories. Story one: people spread misinformation, a lot of people believe it, and all we have to do is reestablish our authority as scientists, suppress the people spreading misinformation, and people will trust us again. I reject that story. Story two: the public health establishment made tremendous mistakes with the mantle of authority during the pandemic. They said 'trust us' — don't send your kids to school, don't go to work, don't go to Thanksgiving with your friends, don't visit your family in the hospital, vaccinate to protect others, mask your toddlers — all these things that turned out not to be true or productive. As a result, large parts of the population have rationally decided that scientists are full of it, that public health is full of it. I very firmly believe the second story is true. I don't see how anyone can go back to that uncomplicated faith that scientists have your best interests at heart and know better than you how to live your life. It was very complicated during the pandemic; there was a new disease, we didn't know how to deal with it. But the problem is, when I was a third-year med student, you put on a white coat and patients expect you to have an answer. The temptation is to give an answer when you don't have any idea. The right thing to do is be honest and say you don't have an answer. That's what the public health authorities didn't do in 2020 and 2021. They donned the mantle of authority based on a scientific knowledge base that didn't give them the moral authority to do that. They trespassed in areas of life — should we suppress the speech rights of others? Scientists said yes. Should we separate people between vaccinated and unvaccinated with passports? That's a complicated policy question, not just a scientific one. They trespassed the normal authority they would have and did things far beyond what their scientific knowledge empowered them to do. As a result, so many people now distrust scientists. There are real consequences because if you have that distrust, a lot of the good that science does will not result in good for the people.
Well, it's like the scientists and the experts, or at least many of them, broke our trust by going too far, by weighing in on things beyond their purview, trying to pretend they knew all the answers when they didn't, not having humility. But I don't think any of us wants to live in a world, Jay, in which there are no scientific experts, no authorities, no gatekeepers. I think that is the most knotty and complicated thing about the moment we're in. I don't think it's a better world where people are getting their medical advice from random people on YouTube that tell you that waving a crystal in front of your face will cure your cancer. But you're right that there's not a quick way of reversing the trust that's been broken. So now people are about to look to you in a major way. What are some of the messages broadly that you want to give to people about why gatekeepers or experts are worth having again? Do you see what I mean? I again don't think we want to live in a Wild West world where there is no authority whatsoever, but there's not a quick way, not a switch we can flip to get it back overnight. So what are the messages that you are going to be giving to regain the trust from people?
I think this might be the most important initiative I had in my mind when I was asked to be the NIH director: how do you reestablish that trust? I think you go back to basics about what science really is. If I write a paper and publish it in a fancy journal at a fancy university, that doesn't mean it's true, even if it's peer-reviewed, because peer review doesn't mean they checked my work or redid the experiment. The scientific result starts to be true when you independently try to answer the same question and find the same answer. The idea of replication is at the heart of truth in science. So rather than having authority that can be abused as the measure of truth — am I at a fancy university, am I the head of the NIH? — instead, it's whether the scientific work is replicated. When people are talking about it, they can look and see all these papers that find the same result. We can have a scientific authority more rooted in scientific reality if we make replication the heart of scientific truth. I have some concrete plans on how to make that happen at the NIH. That is the answer to your question. You're not going to regain the authority we once had by saying 'trust us, we were wrong then but we're now right.' That will never work. What will work is: 'Look, here are the changes we've made so that the advice we're giving you is more rooted in reality than before. We've changed how we do things.' That's how I think we rebuild the trust.
Okay, let's talk about the NIH itself. I think a lot of people know the NIH is important but actually don't know what it does. I know it has a budget of around $50 billion, I know that it's like 27 different agencies, and I don't even understand how that works. But broadly, what is the job of the NIH? What is this job you're about to step into?
It has a very simple mission that I think literally everybody agrees with. The mission of the NIH is to support and conduct science that advances the health and longevity of the American people, and by extension the people of the whole world. That's it. That's a very simple, compelling mission. Is it doing that right now? Unfortunately, it sort of failed. Since 2012, US life expectancy has flatlined. Between 2012 and 2019, there was no increase in American life expectancy, and of course it collapsed during the pandemic. Only last year it came back to pre-pandemic levels. The most basic thing is that advancing life expectancy is not actually succeeding. There are complicated reasons beyond science, but at the very least, if the mission statement is to be taken seriously, it has not accomplished that for at least a decade or more. Everywhere you look, you see challenges to American health that the NIH has not effectively addressed: rising obesity, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, chronic disease, cancer is still a leading cause of death despite major advances in biological sciences. But let me defend the agency I'm about to lead. There have been tremendous advances in biological sciences — our understanding of the human genome, the pathogenesis of cancer, advances in treatments for countless conditions. The NIH and the American people should be proud of those. Those need to continue, and we need to do even better because those advances need to translate into better health for the people. The questions that your listeners have about how to eat, what exercise is good, should I take this drug, will it solve my chronic problem — all these questions are in the purview of the NIH, and the NIH needs to answer those questions that are uppermost in the minds and bodies of the American people.
