The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Isabel Brown and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Catch the full interview on “The Isabel Brown Show” on DailyWire+.
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Isabel Brown: Doctor Bhattacharya, we are so excited to have you on “The Isabel Brown Show.” You’ve been one of our top-requested guests, especially from young parents. There is so much confusion about science, about what science means in the wake of the COVID pandemic, and the political weaponization of COVID. So, for those who aren’t scientists like me and don’t read a bunch of peer-reviewed studies all the time, or keep up with PubMed, can you explain where we are right now and what the big changes have been here at the NIH in the last few months?
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Sure. So first of all, the NIH is an amazing institution. Frankly, it’s the best part of government. I’m biased, but the reason I think that is because it’s responsible for so many amazing discoveries over the last century, like almost all of the things we know about medicine. A lot of those advances came out of this place where we’re sitting. And so, with that kind of history behind it and the actual mission — research that improves the health and longevity of the American people — like, who can be against that?
But the problem was that, during the pandemic, it came to be associated essentially with all of the problems we saw with the lockdowns, the school closures, you know, all of that. But even before that, the possibility that the NIH contributed to the work that may have caused the pandemic, not intentionally, but by doing that dangerous research (for reasons we can probably get into in just a bit). But then, with the vaccine mandates, a lot of the public lost trust in the NIH. And that’s just a fact. We just have to deal with that fact. And where we are now is this clash between what the NIH ought to be — which is this shining institution that makes everyone healthy and is devoted to science, and then the raw facts of what happened with the pandemic, where science really just didn’t do very well.
Brown: That’s so well-articulated, and honestly, it’s insane that we can freely have this conversation now, knowing how much backlash and censorship and confusion there has been around science. Literally. Yesterday, Google announced through YouTube that they did, in fact, cave to a lot of pressure from the last administration about censoring any sort of open dialogue related to how we treat Covid-19, how we responded to it from a public health perspective. And now, four years, five years later, they’re going to end up restoring a lot of those accounts.
Dr. Bhattacharya: In March 2021, I was in a policy roundtable organized by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. So you remember, the mask mandates, the craziness around masking toddlers, two-year-olds? The United States was always the outlier. Everywhere else in the world, no one was saying, “mask toddlers.” The governor then asked me in March of 2021, “Should we mask toddlers? What’s the scientific evidence?” And I had looked this up, because I knew he was going to ask me this question. There’s none. There’s literally nothing. It was based on nothing. And so I said to the governor, “There’s no good scientific evidence that we should mask toddlers.” And YouTube censored that video. So, it was shocking to me how the government used its muscle during the pandemic to silence scientific discussion. The Biden administration was absolutely terrible on free speech, absolutely terrible. And, you know, science can’t function without free speech — it’s fundamental to how science works, you should be able to disagree with me. That’s good in science.
Brown: Well, that’s what the scientific method is all about, right? We all learned that in elementary school, in our education system in America. But I will never forget being a graduate student here at Georgetown, right at the beginning of 2020, and seeing the COVID pandemic emerge — learning from some of the top people here at the NIH and the FDA and the WHO in their public health response — and being told in my classroom from so many of these educated scientists, “There’s something really wrong here. We’ve never responded to a disease this way, ever. This social distancing concept, the lockdown concept, the masking concept.” It was insane. I mean, priests were shooting Super Soaker water guns to baptize your child in church because that was the science! And you weren’t allowed to question anything.
Dr. Bhattacharya: That’s when the church was allowed to be open.
Brown: Exactly. Eventually, years and years down the line. But it was so confusing to me, as someone who had been trained as a scientist, to ask all of the big questions about how something works, which is never to arrive at the conclusion before you see all of the evidence. But we had inverted that entire process and silenced and censored people like yourself in the process. So that obviously spurred some action in you, and wanting to get more involved. Walk us through what that looked like for you.
Dr. Bhattacharya: Well, it’s surreal to be sitting as the director of NIH. The former director kind of went after me pretty viciously — Francis Collins, not the immediate former director. I don’t know how else to explain it other than there’s something about the way God uses people, it’s just completely unexpected. But, to me, it’s a huge obligation that I can restore the NIH to what it should be. In order to do that, we have to change the things that led to the problems of the pandemic. And then, double down on the things that I know we can do well, right? The fundamental research that advances knowledge and translates into better health for people. So that’s what we have to do to restore trust.
You asked me earlier about a few things that we’ve done. So, the president signed an executive order pausing all dangerous gain-of-function research (GOF), the kind of research that likely led to the pandemic. The whole idea of the dangerous gain-of-function research was sold as a way of preventing all pandemics. We just go out into the wild places, get a virus or whatever, bring it to the lab, manipulate it so it’s more dangerous to humans. The idea was, how many evolutionary steps do you need before you can make the virus more transmissible? And if it’s very few, well, that virus is a high risk. If it’s a lot, you bring the virus in, and it takes a lot to do it — then that virus is low risk. And then you prepare vaccines in advance for the viruses that are high risk. The problem with that idea is that you make vaccines in advance that have never been tested on humans. And then when the virus makes the leap, you’re not ready, because those vaccines have never been tested on humans. You don’t know if they’re going to work. And then the other thing is that evolution happens. And so the virus that actually makes a leap may look very different than the one that you studied in the lab, and then, of course, there’s the possibility of lab leaks. So I was really delighted when the president signed the executive order, and said no more dangerous gain of function. And we’ve been working on a regulatory framework with the White House to make sure that this never happens again.
Isabel Brown: That’s fantastic.
Dr. Bhattacharya: It’s a huge advance. The president signed an executive order, I think on day one, restoring free speech. And so, this is going to sound crazy, because it was crazy to me. It turned out that, at the NIH, there are a huge number of internal scientists who needed to get permission from above before they could send their scientific papers out for publication. I started looking over, and I’ve been a Stanford professor for a long time, and I never had to get permission until the pandemic, but that’s another story. Academic freedom means scientists are going to be able to publish things that I disagree with as a director. That’s a good thing. And so, I put in place a policy that says, if you’re a scientist here at the NIH and you have a scientific result you believe in, you can send it out for publication. You don’t need to get my permission or permission from any of your supervisors. There’s a whole host of things, but I think that’s the beginning of how you restore trust. Put regulation of things that we should not be doing like dangerous gain-of-function. We shouldn’t be taking existential risks on behalf of the American people or the world population without extensive regulation. And then, let’s restore free speech.
Brown: I’m so glad you’re talking about this bioethical conversation, because this is something we cover a lot on our show. My audience knows I’m a scientist by education, but these days I talk more about science rather than participate in it. But something that’s been really puzzling to me over the past few years is the idea that we’ve just gotten so out of control with research, with clinical implementation of different scientific methods, that we don’t even stop to ask the question, just because we can, which is, “Should we?” Has there been any research here at the NIH that has been alarming to you since coming in as the director, other than gain-of-function research, that made you ask, “Why are we doing this? There could be a lot more potential negative side effects than positive benefits?”
Dr. Bhattacharya: I will give you one that’s become a political hot potato. But I think I still am puzzled. How did this happen? The NIH is excellent at science, right? It’s excellent at doing fundamental biology. It’s excellent at doing clinical research and should be better at taking that clinical research and figuring out ways to get to the American people better. Those are the things we’ve been good at for a long time. Essentially, the mission of the NIH is to conduct research that advances the health and longevity of the American people.
It turns out, the NIH, as a part of its portfolio, included DEI. So there was an additional mission added on that was never articulated. The NIH is supposed to solve the social justice problems that we’re not really equipped to solve. We’re scientists. We don’t do that. We can’t. There’s nothing that we can do that will establish utopia on Earth. We discover new things that make people healthier, maybe help them live longer. To establish social justice? It perverted the way we think about science and made it more difficult. In social justice, people have very, very strong feelings. You can’t test it empirically. Right? Suppose I believe that the world is systemically racist. And it has been for its history. Okay. Well, how do you empirically test that idea? And then you say you think systemic racism is the reason why certain groups are very unhealthy. How do you empirically test that? You can’t run the world a second time. You can’t establish a control group. It’s not something in our capacity to do, so we’ve removed a lot of that from our portfolio. It’s been painful when you tell scientists to do something, they’ll try to do something. But that’s something I think hasn’t actually translated over to better health for minorities.
If you go back to the last decade and a half, there’s been no real increase in life expectancy for minorities. It hasn’t translated over to better health for most of the population. It’s just politically divisive with no real benefit to show for it. And so I think what the NIH ought to be is an institution devoted to its mission. Right? Advanced research that advances health, and leaves the politics aside. Just remove it. And that’s what we’ve been working on is trying to get a portfolio of research projects that really are science, that really have the potential to advance the health of every American minority and non-minority. It doesn’t matter who you are. We want the research to really help you. Using science as a cover to fight crazy social justice political fights just harms the NIH.
Brown: I am not surprised to hear you say that. Although I think the average American might be surprised to hear you say we should leave the politics out of science, especially this week. I’m seeing a lot of people in the media say that President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, you, and other people here involved in the science aspect of the administration are using science to push a political agenda, particularly at this intersection of Tylenol and autism. There’s been a lot that’s happened in the last 48 hours or so, but let’s remove the politics for a second and back up. And can you explain from a scientific perspective where this is really coming from?
Dr. Bhattacharya: Sure. So, it turns out that if you go back ten years, there were early reports that women who take Tylenol during pregnancy, especially late in pregnancy, their children, after birth, are more likely to have some neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD and autism. Now, there’s a fight in the scientific literature, there always is, between how much of that effect is right. Some people think it’s a tiny effect, on the positive side (hard to detect). Other people think it’s larger. So, there was that fight going on.
Then, in 2016, 2017, there were news reports about this literature. There’s been a lot of interest in it scientifically, but it never got the sort of attention from the public after 2016, 2017. Recently, there was a study published by some researchers at Harvard University and at Mount Sinai University, their medical school in New York. And the researchers concluded, along with the dean of public health at Harvard, that this literature supported a cautious stance toward using Tylenol when you’re pregnant. I can understand the reason for the cautious stance because, if you have a high fever and you’re pregnant, that can hurt your baby. And you don’t want to leave that alone. Tylenol may be the only way to alleviate that. Do that, in that case. On the other hand, there are situations where people take Tylenol, and maybe they don’t have to. They could have other ways of managing the problems that they are dealing with. And so, what the researchers concluded when they did this review of the literature is that prudent medicine says take the lowest possible dose for the shortest amount of time. Think carefully before you use it, because there might be this side effect. There’s a big fight over whether it actually causes autism or it’s just associated with it. In my view, that scientific fight I don’t think has yet been resolved, but I think I have an obligation to tell people when there is this finding that can help guide people’s decisions. You should know when you’re pregnant that there is this fight going on in the scientific literature.
Isabel Brown: That sounds so reasonable. That’s so shocking to me that this is such a reasonable conversation.
Dr. Bhattacharya: So, I have a theory. When you go back to the pandemic — you remember June 2020? You probably weren’t paying attention because you didn’t have kids yet, but I was paying careful attention because my kids were in school then. In June 2020, a whole bunch of scientists looked at what had happened in Sweden with the opening of schools. The Swedes never closed their schools for kids under 16. The evidence was that the teachers were at the same risk as other workers in the economy, not higher risk, and that the kids got to have school, had to go to school, they got to have a normal life. And you can see it in the numbers now, the Swedish kids have no increase in depression or anxiety, there’s no learning loss. The Swedes did not hurt their kids. That evidence was in by June 2020.
And so, people were saying, “Let’s open schools,” including the American Academy of Pediatrics. Then, President Trump has a press conference where he says, “We should open schools.” And then the AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, changes its mind shortly after the president’s speech, based on no scientific evidence, because the scientific evidence already by June of 2020 was clear — that closing schools in the spring of 2020 was a mistake. As best I can tell, the only thing that changed was the president said, “we should open schools” and somehow whatever the president says is, for some people, automatically wrong. He was more scientifically right than the AAP was.
I can’t speak like the president, I’m a geeky scientist so I’m never going to be like him. But, when he goes and tells people — I was standing there right next to him in that [Tylenol] press conference — and he says, “Don’t take it. Don’t take it unless you need to.” Isn’t that exactly what I said?
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Brown: Yes. Just a little bit louder, perhaps with his style of speaking. And that’s the part that’s just been baffling me these last 48 hours. Because what’s really unfortunate is that this isn’t just silly clickbait headlines or ridiculous posts on social media. This is actually impacting people’s health. Now, this has turned into a TikTok viral challenge of these pregnant women who are basically downing bottles of Tylenol to try to prove Trump wrong that it won’t cause autism. This morning, I came across several stories of women who have overdosed on acetaminophen and were on ventilators in the hospital. Their babies could die because of this. That’s why I think this restoration of public trust in science is so important, because this really has nothing to do with President Trump or whoever is sitting in the Oval Office. This is just belief in objective medicine and science, right?
Dr. Bhattacharya: No, exactly. I saw some of those reports. Tylenol is an over-the-counter drug, but it’s probably the most dangerous over-the-counter drug. It’s very easy to overdose and make your liver basically go kaput. So you have to be careful with it regardless. I think there are cumulative overdoses also. If you take too much over a relatively short period of time, you can build up toxicity in your liver and actually kill your liver. And so doctors will say when taking Tylenol, to be careful with it. The president is just saying be careful during pregnancy. It’s heartbreaking to watch people take such risks with their health simply for narrow political points. I mean, in medicine, we’re supposed to do no harm. And I’ve seen doctors, pregnant doctors on TikTok, taking it when they don’t need it. It just blows my mind. Basically, it’s a poisoning of medicine with politics in a way that should never happen.
Brown: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head that just because it happened to come out while this administration is in political power, there’s obviously going to be a natural response to that, which is unfortunate, but is symptomatic of the society that we live in today. And I’m starting to see a little bit of that associated with many of the other initiatives championed by Secretary Kennedy and the Department of Agriculture. I know we just brought on Dr. Ben Carson as a nutrition advisor, which is fantastic, and I’m very excited to see that. What potential backlash are you guys anticipating when it comes to some of these new initiatives? And what are some of the next initiatives that are going to come out of the NIH?
Dr. Bhattacharya: Well, I hope there are no backlashes, because I think they make sense. So here’s one big initiative that I’ve been working on. It turns out that even when a lot of scientific papers are published and peer reviewed in top journals, many independent scientists don’t reach the conclusions when looking at the same question. And we’ve known this for decades. When I was a med student 5 million years ago, because, you know, I’m old, my favorite professor would tell me, “Look, Jay, half of what you’re learning is not true.” And as a young med student, I was like, “Wait, what? What do you mean, what’s, which half is not true?” And he said, “Look, science is difficult. If you have some knowledge about something, it’s very often the case that when other people look at the same thing, they’re going to find a different answer.” And that’s absolutely true. For example, when I was a med student, ulcers were not caused by bacteria. Scientists now know they’re caused by bacteria. But when I was a med student in the ancient days, the treatment for ulcers was to stop drinking coffee. And sometimes they do surgery to cut off your vagus nerve.
The point is that often what I learned in school turned out not to be true. That was in part because of new discoveries. But it’s also the case that a lot of scientific papers that are published are just not true. That’s because science is hard. If I think something is true, but it’s a negative result, I can’t get it published. It’s very hard. But I can convince myself I’m right. I can even be very persuasive in the scientific literature. That I’m right and then get it published. But if you were to do another look at it yourself, independent of me, maybe you won’t find the same thing. That’s really common in science. So it’s called a replication crisis. I think the NIH should solve that. What also happens is that maybe you have some authority. I publish in a top journal. Therefore, I’m right. Yep. I’m an NIH director or a fancy Stanford professor or something. Therefore, I’m right. But that’s not what the basis of truth is in science. The basis of truth is that other people looking at the same thing find the same answer or very similar answers, looking at it from a different point of view. There’s this idea of consilience — everyone looking at it, looking at it together, looking at in different ways, to find the same answer. That’s how we know the we’re right.
Brown: Well, that’s how something is supposed to be peer reviewed, right?
Dr. Bhattacharya: Ultimately, yes. Peer review by itself, by the way, is actually a narrow process. I peer reviewed thousands of papers — I’ve lost count of how many because I get some crazy number of papers — and no one ever gives me the data that they used, I just read the paper and see if it makes logical sense. But I don’t actually replicate what they did. Peer review is necessary, but it’s not sufficient to establish truth. And so, with the NIH, we can solve that problem. That’s one thing I’m working on. Let’s make people who do replication, let them have the honored place in science they deserve. Right now, you can’t make a career out of it, but we can fix that. Let’s have a place to publish those results, those negative results, those replication studies, and link them back. So if you do a search for a paper, it’s published in the New England Journal of Medicine, therefore it must be true. No, there’ll be a replication button. You click the replication button and all the relevant replication research to that paper comes up summarized. So you can and you can click and see each one and see, do other people looking at the same thing find the same answer? Let’s make that the basis of truth in science.
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Catch the full interview on “The Isabel Brown Show” on DailyWire+.
