Posted on 06/29/2025 6:36:17 AM PDT by george76
Dr. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya appeared this week at Aspen Ideas: Health, addressing his previously controversial stance on COVID-19, as well as his plans as the new National Institutes of Health director.
Bhattacharya was sworn in as the 18th director of the NIH on April 1. President Trump nominated him for the position in late November, and the U.S. Senate confirmed his position on March 25.
The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with Bhattacharya referring to it as “the crown jewel of American biomedical sciences.” In his conversation Tuesday evening with Stefanie Ilgenfritz, coverage chief for health and science at The Wall Street Journal, Bhattacharya explained his vision for the future of NIH and talked about his previous controversial stance on COVID-19 lockdowns. There were no federally mandated lockdowns; the Trump administration left those decisions to local and state jurisdictions.
Bhattacharya first gained national attention in 2020 when he helped to write the Great Barrington Declaration — a COVID-19 response plan that prioritized protecting the populations that are most vulnerable to the virus and advising against restriction of activity for healthy populations. It was made out of concern for damaging the physical and mental health of individuals, and 877,246 medical and public health scientists signed the declaration, as well as 16,176 medical practitioners.
The conversation in Aspen began with Ilgenfritz wasting no time in asking Bhattacharya about the pandemic and the declaration. She acknowledged the harm done to children and education systems from the lockdowns, but cited public health officials who believed that without the lockdowns, more people would die and the health care system would be overwhelmed.
Ilgenfritz asked Bhattacharya if those arguments had any merit.
“Yeah, no merit at all,” he said in response.
He cited a report from the United Nations in April 2020 that nearly 130 million people would struggle with starvation as a result of economic dislocations caused by lockdowns. He also cited a JAMA study, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association, that found by the summer of 2020, the shutdown of schools during the pandemic had already cost American school children collectively over 5.5 million years of life expectancy.
Responding to Bhattacharya’s proposal in the Great Barrington Declaration that herd immunity would protect individuals who are healthy, the American Public Health Association released a statement warning of the declaration’s alleged danger and lack of scientific grounding.
“The evidence was really clear. The lockdowns have failed to protect anybody from getting COVID and would cause some tremendous collateral (damage),” Bhattacharya said during the conversation.
Ilgenfritz then raised the question of whether Bhattacharya has any humility with his position on COVID-19 and lockdowns.
“The question is, was there a lot of uncertainty at the time? Yes,” he said. “I mean, if you write something and say, look, we should have chosen a different policy than what many other people were saying, then what you’re calling for is a debate, a discussion. Instead what we got was devastating takedowns. And as a result, American schoolkids are two years behind in schooling or more.
“We damaged our society on the false premise that we’re protecting people from COVID, older people from COVID, we failed at that,” he said.
He later claimed free speech was a pressing issue during COVID-19, saying the scientific community, at the time, was not humble.
“They decided that they knew what was best, and they would suppress all the people that disagreed,” he said. “...The key to solving that problem is free speech in science, allowing people — even with ideas that I disagree with — to talk to each other.”
The reproducibility crisis..
The conversation then switched from past issues to the present. Battacharya said his top priorities in his new position are focused on restoring the public’s trust in science, addressing the reproducibility crisis in research, focusing on chronic disease and encouraging innovation in health and medical science.
There is a general agreement among scientists and researchers that there is a reproducibility crisis in science. This pertains to the concept that scientific research often cannot be replicated. There are retractions that come too late after people and institutions have already built upon the research findings that later turn out to be flawed. Results are later debunked, and new results are established.
Bhattacharya said his solution is to strive to create a culture of replication. When looking at results, he believes there is importance in other individuals independently finding the same result as the original claim. He wants to encourage incentives and honorability for scientists whose research is subject to replication.
“The incentives in science are to publish papers and then statistical criteria for deciding whether they’re true. Really, it’s an epistemic problem. What we think of as truth is: Is it published in a top scientific journal? And that, by itself, determines whether it’s true or false. But in fact, that’s not what determines truth in science. What determines truth in science is other scientists looking at the same thing. Do they find the same thing?”
In response to what research should be prioritized to be replicated, he emphasized letting the scientific community decide what key questions are to be subjected to replication, and to include a variety of questions from different points of view to avoid agenda-driven outcomes in research.
“What we need is a culture of science that lifts up science that is replicated, science that where independent folks find the same answer,” he said. “Everybody has an agenda. The issue is not that. The issue is does the scientific method, a different approach to the same problem, produce the same answer?”
‘A huge scandal’..
His next prioritization is to improve the overall health of the American population, especially in regards to chronic disease. Chronic disease is the leading cause of death in America, responsible for 70% of all deaths.
Bhattacharya is particularly disturbed that there has been no increase in life expectancy in Americans since 2012, referring to it as “a huge scandal.” He explained how with the continually increasing amounts of money invested into scientific research — and to better study and care for people with chronic diseases — the lack of an increase in life expectancy is a pressing issue.
“The fact that we’ve had no life expectancy increase means that the advances that we have had in science have not translated over to the most important things that actually impact human health in this country,” he said. “And we have to fix that problem, right?”
Fostering innovation..
Another of the listed goals for Bhattacharya is to foster increased innovation in science — what he refers to as “edge science.” He has previously stated that failure in science is punished too frequently, leading to risk-adverse science and scientists.
“We become much more conservative, much more afraid of failure in science than we had been in the past,” he said. “So how do you fix that? One thing is we have to give support for early career investigators. We fail at that.”
The median age at which scientists are awarded their first R01 grant — often considered a sign of success in one’s career in research — is 45. This age has steadily increased since the 1980s. Research shows that even after receiving one’s first grant, funding in the 10-year period that follows is challenging.
“...Science really advances when we allow new ideas to refresh how we think about things,” he said.
He further emphasized the importance of hearing out all different points of view in the scientific community, and fostering conversations among those with colliding viewpoints. He pointed out that historic scientists — like Ignaz Semmelweis and Galileo Galilei — challenged mainstream ideas.
“I think that the key thing is to re-embrace the culture of respectful discussion with each other, even when you disagree fundamentally with the premises of the people you’re talking with,” he said.
Funding..
Bhattacharya and Ilgenfritz also discussed the Trump administration’s controversial funding cuts for the NIH, especially universities concerns on proposed caps on indirect cuts.
Citing the difficulty to discuss this topic because of legal issues, he spoke about his desire to break the cycle for “the rich to get richer,” referring to top universities like Harvard receiving most of the NIH support and funding.
“It’s kind of a vicious cycle,” he said. “In order to have excellent researchers in the first place, you have to have excellent institutions. It’s a cycle that almost guarantees that places like Harvard … will almost always get the bulk of the fixed cost support that we give.
“But I’ve met great scientists across the country. Across the country, people tell me that it’s very difficult if you’re not in the top 20 universities to get NIH support. Why? Because they don’t have the institutional support that would allow them to attract excellent scientists more and then build a sort of a competitive portfolio.”
With many Trump administration cuts tied to eliminating DEI programs, research and hiring, Bhattacharya said he supports some DEI research initiatives, provided they are founded in concrete research rather than ideology.
An example of a DEI-based research he would support and be in favor of funding was studying the impacts that “redlining” has in health outcomes for black men in screening for prostate cancer. An example of research that would not be supported is researching structural racism as the reason why minorities have worse health.
“What has happened is that the NIH has gotten involved in the activity of trying to achieve some kind of cosmic social justice to right historical wrongs, rather than its mission, which is to advance the health and longevity of the American people. That’s hard enough. So a lot of the grants we’re talking about, we’ve been working with researchers to try to sort of remove out the second part and bring in the first part.”
The lockdowns were intended to be nationwide psy-op to facilitate mail-in balloting and massive election fraud in the 2020 Big Steal. That was its planned purpose, and everything else was just BS.
Some would say it was criminal.
I didn’t mention Remdesivir.
And many of those who did were punished severely.
I beg to differ. It also trained and programmed a whole generation into obeying their government masters without question.
Failure in truth from concept to conclusion, but a victory for the Lying Tyrannical Left.
The best way to stop the next planned - pandemic is to arrest the people who started the first one.
Not enough. The monetary incentives for hospitals to classify every illness and death as covid were a great success. Some would call the ventilator/remdesivir treatment as murder.
Another Establishment-grubbing limited hangout.
He knows better than what he claims about there being a deadly spreading “Covid” to stop.
Dr. Jay Goes to Washington: Reforming Science from the Inside at NIH.
Once labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous administration at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya now leads the world’s largest biomedical research agency and its $50 billion annual budget. Peter Robinson speaks with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a former Stanford professor and epidemiologist, and the newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health. Once labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous administration at NIH, he now leads the world’s largest biomedical research agency and its $50 billion annual budget.
Their conversation explores the structural flaws in America’s public health institutions, including the replication crisis, the culture of scientific risk aversion, and the NIH’s growing failure to address the rise of chronic disease. Dr. Bhattacharya outlines his vision for reform—emphasizing transparency, innovation, and restoring public trust in science. He also addresses the politics of scientific funding, the need for better vaccine evaluation standards, and the rationale behind the administration’s new restrictions on gain-of-function research.
It is a candid and thoughtful discussion with a scientist now tasked with reshaping the very system he was once attacked by.
The lockdowns have devalued education in America at all levels.Attendance is down everywhere.
BINGO! It started in Boston after the marathon bombers.
What I meant was those who stated that the various COVID measures were criminal were the ones being punished.
Unless your goal was to steal an election.
it was a failed attempt at a reset across the board, remember build back better?
Successful for the totalitarian left.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.