Jay Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya

Jayanta Bhattacharya (born 1968) is an American physician-scientist and health economist who has served as the 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2025.

Quotes

  • One of the lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic…the mistake I saw over and over again was this desire to use science communications to manipulate the public, to vastly underestimate the capacity of the public to understand nuance, and oversimplify and demonize who disagreed with the public health message as if they were somehow the enemy.
    I think all of those things breed distrust, it miseducates the public about what science is learning and discovering and what it is not learning and discovering, and if it impinges on people’s lives in ways that end up hurting them (like their children can’t go to school for years and they’re depressed or they’re addicted to opioids after their doctors and everyone are telling them that these things can’t get your addicted, they’re fired from their job on the premise COVID stops you from spreading COVID). All of these things are the fruits of a paradigm that views scientific communication as something which ought to lord over you rather than something which helps you decide how to make good decisions about your life.
    Essentially, we created a class of unclean people as a matter of public policy. You can understand why people who went through that would say, 'Given that the vaccine didn't turn out to stop you from getting and spreading COVID, why should I trust you on anything else?' That, that's where we currently are.
    [T]he problem here is that the scientific community embraced an ethical norm about unity of messaging and then enforced it on fellow scientists. And then it cooperated with the Biden administration to put in place a censorship regime that made it impossible even for legitimate conversations [e.g., about vaccine injuries] to happen.
    There was essentially a groupthink at scale. It was impossible to organize a panel with the kind of diversity of opinion that was needed.
    There were [a] million or more — I know this from the set of people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, tens of thousands of scientists and doctors who disagreed [with the lockdowns], but they were afraid to stick their head up for fear of getting chopped off. It's not an accident that Stanford didn't allow a scientific panel with my point of view about the efficacy of lockdowns until 2024.
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