Now, President Trump's second term has heralded division and uncertainty for many in the medical research community with cuts to research funding and scrutiny of the health secretary's approach to vaccine policy. When Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was appointed as director of the National Institutes of Health, he pledged to address what he calls the American chronic disease crisis and he tells Walter Isaacson how he plans to do so and the challenges ahead. Thank you, Chris John and
Jay Bhattacharya, welcome to the show.
You're a trained physician. You spent your life studying things like population and chronic diseases. Why did you want to take over the National Institutes of Health, which is basically a science medical research institute?
You know, one of the things that I studied as a I had a PhD in economics as well as an MD. One of the things I studied in my former life was science policy and I had found a number of things about the way that science worked that made it maybe less productive than it ought to be. So when I got the opportunity to be the NIH director, maybe we can talk about some of these ideas, but the idea that science is facing a replicability crisis, that the science that's published often when independent teams look at it don't find the same answer. Science, although it's incredibly productive and has produced incredible results over the past century, decades, millennia, in some ways the investments we make have not translated over to actually improving population health in ways that it maybe ought to. So to me, that's the main reason to take it, to make science really work better and translate into improved health for the population at large.
Back in November you wrote an opinion piece endorsing RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. And you referred to a rot, I think was the word that had accumulated at the NIH, the place you now lead. And you wrote, 'The National Institutes of Health, whose annual budget is $45 billion, orchestrated under the leadership of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, a massive suppression of scientific debate and research.' Uh, what in your opinion was suppressed and is it as bad as you said back then?
I mean, I think I probably would be a little kinder in writing it now than I did, but I do still stand by the idea. Let me apologize.
I have had an opportunity to meet one-on-one with Francis Collins and we've forgiven each other for whatever has happened. I mean, he famously wrote an email to Tony Fauci in October 2020 right after I'd written this document called the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 calling for opening schools, lifting lockdowns, but protecting older people better. He called me, a Stanford professor, and my colleagues who wrote it, a Harvard professor and Oxford professor, he called us fringe epidemiologists and he called for a devastating takedown of the premises of the declaration, which then led to death threats and all this kind of nasty stuff. That was an abuse of power. That was an attempt to essentially end the debate about the lockdowns from above. And I've forgiven him and I don't want to dwell on it.
But that led then to a whole host of dominoes falling where you couldn't have a conversation on social media about the lockdowns or subsequently about the vaccine mandates and a whole host of other things without getting suppressed. Scientists would call me and tell me that they agreed with me but they were afraid to speak out because they were afraid that their heads would get chopped off. It made it difficult to have a scientific debate.
Well, let me unpack what you just said. Now that you've talked to him and you both forgiven each other, why did it become so divisive and do you think people like Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, made mistakes or do you think they were intentionally for some ulterior motive trying to mislead people?
I don't think that my philosophy about interacting with people is I assume the best about people whenever I meet them. But I can say that they made mistakes, and those mistakes were consequential. Going back to even before the pandemic, approving in my view a research line aimed at potentially preventing they were saying to prevent pandemics, but that many people believe may have caused the pandemic, this sort of dangerous gain of function research that people talk about. You're talking about the Wuhan lab in China. They supported that research even though many members of the scientific community were saying that it's not wise to do this research. It's like Enrico Fermi when he put the nuclear reaction that launched the nuclear age in the squash court at the University of Chicago, he did a calculation asking what's the probability that this nuclear reaction I've caused is going to spread around the world unstoppably, and he found that it was zero. They supported an agenda aimed at predicting what pandemics would happen but carrying the risk of causing a pandemic, and they said that the risk was worth it.
During the pandemic, Tony Fauci worked very hard, I think in many ways I think in good faith. I don't know him personally so it's hard for me to say about his motives, but what he came across as is conveying certainty about things that he should never have had certainty about: the school closures, the risk of COVID to children, underplaying the evidence of the harms of the lockdown, and then later with the vaccine overconfidence about the ability of the vaccine to stop you from getting and spreading COVID. All of that led to policies that harmed children, harmed the working class, harmed the poor at scale.
But the key thing there to me is that we needed to have a discussion, a debate, an honest conversation with each other about this. And that was denied to the American people and the world at large. There were many scientists that agreed with me that kept their heads down because they didn't want their careers destroyed and damaged. I would love to see a return to a science where we respect each other's opinions even though we disagree. We may bring evidence to it, we can discuss whether the evidence is right. That's the kind of scientific community I grew up in and I love to, as the head of the NIH, help the scientific community get back to that.
