Welcome to the program, now the great Jay Bhattacharya. He's the director of the National Institutes of Health, former interim CDC director. The guy has done it all and he was right about COVID quite famously, which is why the Biden administration spent so much time trying to censor him. As always, Jay, great to have you back on the show, sir.
Thank you. Nice to be back, Vince.
Okay, let me start with what I was just talking about, this data that shows that the COVID jab in the first trimester apparently had devastating effects on unborn children, and yet this data somehow was entirely kept from us. And Anthony Fauci and all these other people, they knew about it, they were talking amongst themselves about it, but they refused to acknowledge it to the public. What do you make of this?
I think it was irresponsible of them, just full stop. I think that when you have a new product like that, the COVID vaccine was in, I think those texts were January 2021. And you're an official who has worked very hard to get those products on the market, even if you aren't, you're a top sort of public health person whose advice everyone is looking to, you have an obligation to share your honest thoughts about potential harms to people that might take the thing. Instead what they did is they were reflecting the scientific debate that was happening at the time around the COVID vaccine for kids and for pregnant women privately, but publicly they exuded a confidence that they did not deserve to have regarding its safety for those populations. For me, when I was looking at it back then, I was thinking, you know, COVID is a really damaging disease for older people, really high rates of death, and the balance for me made sense for older people, that if you can prevent death, maybe there's some side effects but they might be worth it to prevent death from COVID for old people. And for young people and for pregnant women, we should have been far more careful. In fact, I articulated that and got all kinds of grief for it in 2021. But then it went beyond that, Vince. They also went all in on mandates. They pushed very hard that every single person should be vaccinated with a COVID vaccine, irresponsibly, when we now know privately they harbored doubts regarding the safety of those products, or at least the balance of risks and harms of those products for pregnant women and potentially even for children. It was just irresponsible of them not to reflect that in their public utterance.
Well, and I would say not just irresponsible but downright tyrannical. I mean, if you are having a real robust scientific debate amongst yourselves, but not acknowledging to the public on which you are imposing all of these impositions like COVID jabs and losing jobs and destroying lives and killing unborn children, I mean, this is tyrannical behavior. And it worries me that this was considered kind of normal inside of the government, that you would have a debate like this but then not acknowledge it to the people who are supposed to be in charge, which is the voting public.
Vince, it was even worse. The Biden administration, what they did is they systematically went out into social media and to advertisers of shows like yours and they would say if you amplify these doubts, we're going to censor you. We're going to destroy your company. So I was banned, I was shadowbanned on Twitter, basically blacklisted on Twitter the day I joined, I believe, based on the pressure of the Biden administration going to the old Twitter before Elon, saying look, if you don't shadowban these ideas, not me specifically but these ideas, we're going to destroy you as a company. The Biden administration went to Facebook and literally forced them to suppress private messaging groups regarding vaccine injury to the COVID vaccine. Again, with threatening their company if they didn't comply. That kind of censorship, I can't even imagine what was going through their heads. They must have thought that they were so morally justified in pushing the COVID vaccine for everybody that it was worth violating the First Amendment. And if we'd had the First Amendment, the public could have seen that robust scientific debate you're talking about. The result would have been so much different, so much better. Because I think when we allow the public to see how we scientists are arguing with each other, that gives a more honest reflection of what the reality is than the 'I am the top guru of all science and you must listen to me.'
How deeply embedded, when you arrived at NIH, how deeply embedded was this worldview would you say, this idea that like, 'Hey, we are the science and the public better listen to us.' What have you found and what have you had to deal with?
You know, that's been the heartbreaking thing because I don't believe most scientists are like that, Vince. Most scientists want an honest conversation about the data. I mean, we go into science because we don't know the answers to all the questions. We discover the answers in the context of learning from looking at data, arguing with other scientists about how to interpret it, asking for new experiments. That process is what brings people into science to begin with. And the vast majority of people at NIH are like that. It was the leadership of some parts of the NIH that embraced this sort of almost authoritarian view of what science should be. This top-down, 'I am the science and I know best and therefore you should listen to me,' that is actually antithetical to science. Most people at the NIH are not like that, Vince, and to me that's been one of the... I mean, I already knew that to some extent because I have so many good colleagues in the NIH before I became director of it. It's a really great place that has resulted in countless advances that have benefited the lives of millions and basically billions of people, and it will continue to do that.
So was the staff horrified by the leadership then? In other words, like you said, there's a lot of good people there. You say Stockholm syndrome.
It's like Stockholm syndrome. What you have is people who understand what the leadership is asking of them. And so it's hard to speak up in that context, right? You could get fired, your career as a scientist could be over. I mean, the former head of the NIH actually wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown of me, my colleagues from Harvard and Oxford at the time. When we argued against lockdowns, under that kind of abusive leadership, you're going to get people who just clam up, silent, when in fact they have scientific doubts. I think that's the problem. It was to my mind, it was that leadership that took on this sort of godlike capacity to make decisions for millions of other people rather than letting the scientific process play out. Most scientists want the scientific process to play out because that's how we learn. That's how we get to truth.
So speaking of the scientific process, I saw that recently the Trump administration has banished this very dangerous gain of function research, the federal funding for gain of function research in order to make viruses more deadly and infectious to humans. And correct me if I'm wrong, Jay, but there's never been a time that we've truly established that this gain of function research has resulted in a net benefit for humanity. It's always been like crazy lab leaks and peril and death. And at some point you're like, well, let's stop doing that. It's actually the definition of insanity for us to keep doing this. So the Trump administration is ending this. What can you tell me about that?
Yeah. So I've helped with this process and now we have a policy that will make sure that we don't ever fund this dangerous kind of work again. In 2010 or 2011, there was a big debate going on in the scientific community whether we should be allowing scientists to make viruses more dangerous. The argument in favor, which was favored by Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, then the former head of the NIH, said that look, the knowledge we gain from this will be worth it even if there is a risk of lab leak. In fact, there was an op-ed in the Washington Post with that literal sentence or very close to that sentence in it. And the argument was that we could predict which virus is going to make the leap and then we can develop vaccines and countermeasures in advance. I agree with you, there's no evidence that there's a single bit of human benefit that has come from this research. The analogy I'd give is to the beginning of the nuclear age. Enrico Fermi, brilliant physicist, launched the nuclear age in 1942 by doing an experiment where he started the first nuclear chain reaction on a squash court in the University of Chicago. He's a brilliant mathematician and physicist. He was worried that if he started this nuclear chain reaction, maybe he couldn't stop it. It would set fire to the world. And so he did a calculation: what is the probability of a catastrophic explosion coming out of this nuclear reaction he started? And he calculated a probability of zero, and then he did the experiment. Under the new Trump regulation, what happens is every scientist that's going to do a biological experiment is going to be required to do that calculation: are you taking a risk that will risk the well-being of the entire world? Can you cause a pandemic with what you're doing? And if that risk is more than zero, we will not fund that research.
That's a big deal. Thank you for doing that. Long overdue. But by the way, wasn't Anthony Fauci's involvement in funding gain of function in Wuhan, wasn't he like using some sort of creative definition for gain of function in order to justify how he was getting away with this?
Yeah. So you can see this in the exchange that Tony Fauci has with Rand Paul in some of those famous Senate hearings. What the game that Tony Fauci is playing is that he and others had worked on a regulatory process to say, look, if you're working on a list of dangerous viruses, Ebola or something like that, and you're making them more dangerous, then you are doing dangerous gain of function. But what if you're working on a virus that comes out of a bat cave in China, no one's ever heard of, that's not on any list, and you make that one more dangerous? Well, that's not dangerous gain of function because it's not on the list. The new idea of how we regulate this is we ask you to assess, we ask the scientists and we ask the institutions where they work to assess the risk of the experiment causing catastrophic harm, whether it comes from a list or not. That is something that scientists who are working in this area are fully capable of doing, and there's going to be an independent body that will oversee it and look and say, well, look, you got that calculation wrong. There actually is a risk, we're not going to allow you to fund it.
Right? So it doesn't matter what you call it. It's about how much is this a risk to humanity.
