‘NO MORE CENSORING’: How NIH Director Wants to Restore Trust in Public Health

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said he was blacklisted on X during the COVID-19 pandemic because he questioned certain mandates like masks for toddlers. Now, as director of the National Institutes of Health, he is making sure no other scientist is censored due to their political views.

Bhattacharya, then a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. The declaration, which received close to a million signers, including epidemiologists and public health scientists, stated, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” The declaration said people who are “not vulnerable” should resume life as normal, and that schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. 

“We were looking at the pandemic response in October 2020, and it was very clear that the lockdowns that had been adopted early in the pandemic had caused tremendous harm, especially to kids with the school closures,” he told the Daily Signal in an exclusive interview. “There were reports about 100 million people or more facing dire food insecurity, basically starvation because of the economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns.”

Bhattacharya described the pandemic as the “worst crisis the public health system had ever faced.”

The backlash to the declaration from members of the public health community was “vicious,” he said.

“The reaction to what seems to me like the sort of the correct response to the pandemic was a pretty a vicious attack on me and my colleagues,” he said.

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Bhattacharya said he saw “vilification” and “attacks on free speech rights” in response to dissent over COVID-19 lockdowns.

“As a result, a lot of the policies that ended up happening were much worse than they otherwise would have been,” he said.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, renaming it X, the billionaire entrepreneur showed Bhattacharya that he had been placed on a blacklist, which reduced the interaction with his posts on the platform.

“I learned later that the Biden administration had put together essentially a whole campaign to threaten social media companies to censor ideas that they didn’t like, and a lot of people got trapped by this,” he said. “But I was lucky enough to find out that it actually happened.”

Bhattacharya joined a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration induced social media companies to suppress “disfavored speech” by American citizens. The Biden administration argued it was persuading, not coercing, social media companies, stating in a brief at the Supreme Court that “so long as the government seeks to inform and persuade rather than to compel, its speech poses no First Amendment concern—even if government officials state their views in strong terms, and even if private actors change their speech or conduct in response.”

Though the Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Murthy lacked standing, he said the good news is that such censorship is no longer happening under President Donald Trump. The Department of Justice announced the settlement of the case in March to prevent such censorship from happening again.

“I’m a big believer in free speech,” Bhattacharya said. “I believe very fundamentally that science can’t function without free speech, and I’ve done my best to create an environment both at [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the NIH where controversial ideas can be discussed without any vilification or attacks on people just because they think something that’s different from what everyone else thinks.”

In addition to his position at NIH, Bhattacharya serves as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The scientist supports a policy of “academic freedom.” Bhattacharya said he will not prevent a scientist from publishing a study just because it doesn’t square with his political views.

“If I, the director of the NIH, don’t like your discovery, you still get to publish it,” he said. “You don’t have to ask my permission to publish it. You get to publish it. That policy, I think, protects all the institution pretty fundamentally because it doesn’t says that I, I as a political appointee, can’t interfere with your science.”

Though the NIH is not political, Bhattacharya said he shoulders many political attacks against his leadership.

 ”The NIH in principle shouldn’t be a political agency,” he said. “It’s science that should improve the health and longevity of people.”