The new Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who gained fame as an early critic of U.S. COVID-19 policy, delivered his first public speech on May 2 at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He described the “failed” response to COVID-19 and then explained how this failure informed his vision for reforming the NIH.
Bhattacharya began with figures on European age-adjusted excess mortality during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which show deviations from expected death rates from all causes combined after adjusting for age differences. From 2020-2023, Sweden performed better than all other European countries—even though Sweden didn’t lock down its economy and society, didn’t close schools, and didn’t mandate masks or vaccines. Similarly, Florida, which opened up rapidly, did markedly better than California, which maintained a longer, more stringent lockdown.
These comparisons show that, even if stringent lockdowns prevented any significant number of COVID-19 deaths—which is unclear—such gains were far outweighed by the losses due to other negative effects on physical and mental health, economic conditions, and so on. These negative effects will continue to accumulate over time. Such statistics, he said, “cut through political ideology.”
Bhattacharya then reviewed his own role in opposing lockdowns, which initially led U.S. government officials, Twitter, and his professional colleagues to cancel and deplatform him. In October 2020, Bhattacharya and two prominent colleagues issued the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a brief public statement that opposed general lockdowns and instead proposed targeted protection of the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions that made them especially vulnerable.
Francis Collins, then-Director of the NIH, called for a “devastating takedown” of the Declaration. Twitter blacklisted Bhattacharya, and many of his Stanford colleagues publicly attacked him. Bhattacharya contrasted such intimidation with the open discussion encouraged by the Swedish government. He blamed the U.S. COVID-19 failure precisely on refusing to allow debate.
The result has been a dramatic loss of public confidence in science and in the medical profession. Bhattacharya said that his goal as NIH Director is to recover public confidence and improve research and public policy outcomes by depoliticizing scientific work and encouraging free speech and debate. He promised to reorient research priorities away from political ideology and toward illnesses and conditions affecting the most Americans.
Bhattacharya argued that improving Americans’ health requires targeting the most devastating chronic diseases and conditions—such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension—where he said there has been little progress in recent decades. Drug and alcohol abuse, along with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, also deserve more attention. He promised to fund more research on autism spectrum disorder, which is poorly understood despite one in 31 eight-year-old children having autism-related diagnoses.
Addressing the hot-button issue of whether vaccines contribute to autism, he said that he doesn’t think so, but that it’s important to conduct high-quality research to put public fears to rest and maintain high uptake of traditional child vaccines. He noted, however, that not all vaccines are the same—that, for example, he and many others do not consider COVID-19 vaccines to have a risk-reward profile appropriate for children at this time.
For the NIH to “make big advances,” Bhattacharya supports a range of related reforms to scientific research and culture. The NIH, he said, has become “way too conservative”–funding older ideas from more established researchers at the most prestigious universities. To make more breakthroughs, the NIH should instead be willing to take more risks, often by supporting earlier-career researchers working at a broader range of universities.
The COVID-19 experience shows, Bhattarcharya said, that science—to advance, to minimize policy errors, and to regain public trust—must “encourage academic freedom” and welcome debate. “When you’re wrong,” he said, “change your mind.” Scientists should have a “fundamental humility” and, when they’re wrong, should admit it publicly. “I fully expect to be wrong many times,” he said.
Bhattacharya addressed the shocking unreliability of published scientific research.
Current research is “not useful for making decisions,” forcing biomedical companies to replicate academic research themselves before moving forward with related product development.
Academic journals and university job tenure committees should not focus solely on original research, but must also rigorously test and replicate the findings of notable, previously published work. The NIH will now allocate more resources to replication research and seek to raise its professional prestige.
Bhattacharya detailed a number of other reforms. The NIH will no longer fund “divisive political ideologies.” He gave the example of the non-falsifiable worldview of “systemic racism,” associated with critical race theory, but noted, by contrast, that research on the health of minority groups is important. The NIH will no longer require its researchers to ask for its permission to publish their work. NIH-sponsored research will no longer be kept behind the paywalls of academic journals, but will be freely accessible to the public. The NIH will no longer support unsafe research methods, as was the case with gain-of-function research that may have spawned the COVID pandemic. Use of animals in research will be minimized, both to reduce animal rights extremists’ threats to researchers and because economical substitutes using more-suitable human tissue have become available.
In the Q&A, some researchers reported facing cuts to their previously funded NIH research and claimed that the NIH was now “censoring” research based on political ideology.
Bhattacharya responded that the NIH has limited resources and must choose its priorities wisely and in the public interest. He argued that significant amounts of past NIH research—including that driven by “divisive political ideologies”–should not have been funded. Refusing to fund such research, he indicated, is not censorship. He concluded by saying that President Trump and the NIH remain committed to biomedical research and that his job is to do the best with whatever budget Congress provides.
Watch his speech here and visit our Minding the Science column for in-depth analysis on topics ranging from wokeism in STEM, scientific ethics, and research funding to climate science, scientific organizations, and much more.
Image: “Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH)” by NIH Image Gallery on Flickr
