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interesting times

Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, says authorities broke the public’s trust in the Covid era. Now it’s up to outsiders to restore it.

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

If you want to understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the Covid era.

In the face of a once-in-a-century — we hope — pandemic, medical authorities felt they needed to respond with absolute certainty: Trust the science. Wear a mask. Postpone your wedding. Don’t open the schools. And definitely don’t listen to the cranks, the skeptics and the purveyors of “misinformation.”

The problem is that those confident authorities, inevitably, got some big things wrong. And the outsiders and skeptics sometimes got things right. And as pandemic-era life got more and more miserable, big parts of the public simply stopped trusting the experts entirely.

So now here we are in 2026, and the outsiders are in charge. One of them is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He’s in charge of the N.I.H., tasked with reforming the world’s largest biomedical research agency. But the more important task, to my mind, is proving that an outsider perspective can succeed in restoring public trust in science and medicine — as opposed to undermining that trust even further.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Dr. Bhattacharya, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Jay Bhattacharya: Thanks for having me on, Ross.

Douthat: I want to start with a general diagnosis of the collapse of public trust in the medical establishment in America and how I think the Covid-19 pandemic played into it.

So just start by talking me through your view of what happened during Covid, which was also, I should say, when you first became a public controversialist.

Bhattacharya: [Chuckles.] Am I that now?

Douthat: I mean, you’ve joined our ranks. I’m sorry to say. But, yeah, talk about Covid as a public health phenomenon.

Bhattacharya: Can I just start with where I came from into the Covid era?

Douthat: Yes.

Bhattacharya: I was a professor at Stanford for 20-some years up to that point, in 2020. I’d written what I thought were provocative papers.

Douthat: I mean, I read them obviously,

Bhattacharya: Obviously. No, like five other people have.

But the Covid era, to me, represented a fundamental break in my understanding of how science and public health operated.

I guess I was naïve before the pandemic. I would tell my students: “Don’t join Twitter” — it was Twitter back then. “Just publish your papers in scientific journals. That’s how you make a big difference in the world.”

I thought public health had the best interest of the working class, the poor, in mind. And the Covid era shattered my illusions on all of those fronts. In particular, what happened in March of 2020 represented a fundamental break that public health authorities had with the public.

And I can understand why it happened. I mean, you have a virus floating around that’s new. You get reports out of China, essentially, that it’s a 3, 4, 5 percent mortality rate.

Douthat: Right. You have videos of people collapsing on the street.

Bhattacharya: And so I could understand at the time, especially in the face of deep uncertainty, that something had to be done to guide people.

But what you’re not allowed to do is assume that the thing you’re doing is going to work. Right? “I’m going to do a lockdown; that’ll solve the problem.”

You’re also not allowed to assume that the thing that you’re doing will have no harms. So you close the schools. You know for certain that you’re going to harm a generation of children. That’s a certainty. Will that suppress the spread of the disease? We don’t know how the disease spreads. Is it aerosol? Is it droplet?

There’s a hundred uncertainties. You still have to do that kind of honest calculation, and you have to convey that deep uncertainty to the public at large.

Douthat: So you’re deeply critical of lockdowns and closures. But from my perspective, at the time, it seemed like we didn’t know how serious the disease was. We didn’t know how it affected children, for instance, in schools. I had little kids in school at the time, and it seemed to me that there was an argument, essentially, for two weeks, a month, of these policies as extreme but temporary measures. Do you think that there is room for taking extreme measures like we took in that period as a means of buying time?

Bhattacharya: I could be persuaded that that could be a reasonable thing potentially, but let’s think about the actual context. So in March of 2020, I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal — it’s the first time I ever wrote an op-ed in my life. You’re an old hand at this, but it was a weirdly scary thing. [Chuckles.]

Douthat: Once you’ve crossed that line, you can never recross it. It’s true.

Bhattacharya: I wrote this op-ed and I did some calculations using the Diamond Princess — remember that cruise ship that was floating around?

Douthat: Yep.

Bhattacharya: You could see the relative risk really, really easily in the data. It was really older people that were at high risk of dying from the disease. So that key epidemiological fact was known, I’d say, by January 2020.

And so, I fully expected two things to happen almost immediately in, say, March or April of 2020. One was that we would do a much better job protecting vulnerable older people and conveying to the public at large the absolute necessity of doing that. For instance, not sending Covid-infected patients to nursing homes.

The second problem was a lack of urgency on the part of public health authorities to develop scientific evidence to clear up uncertainties to guide decision making. So I wrote a study very early on in the pandemic, in April of 2020, estimating how many people in Santa Clara County, where I used to live, had been infected. And it was about 3 percent of the population in early April 2020. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but for every infected person who had been identified as having had the disease, there were 50 people walking around with antibodies.

I did a replication study in L.A. County a couple weeks later — same result. And then dozens and dozens of studies all around the world, including at the N.I.H., found this very, very similar result, that the disease has spread much more widely than people had thought.

This is how naïve I was, Ross: I thought that that result would change everybody’s mind about how to manage the pandemic. This is a disease that’s obviously spread much more widely than people realized despite — I mean, I call them draconian measures to try to keep the spread down. That means the infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was much lower than we thought.

I thought that would’ve changed our approach, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I faced, essentially, attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.

Douthat: What form did those attacks take?

Bhattacharya: At the university, there was an investigation into the study’s funding, all of which had been cleared up before the study was even done. It was entirely spurious. At the N.I.H., the former head of the N.I.H. wrote an email to Tony Fauci in October 2020 calling me a “fringe epidemiologist” — I love that term, by the way.

Douthat: Yes.

Bhattacharya: It’s fantastic. It’s hopefully going to go on my grave.

The whole thing was absolutely extraordinary. What was needed was an honest scientific debate.

I might’ve been wrong. Like, look, let’s have a scientific debate and discussion. Let’s have alternate voices. But instead, the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing.

That’s, if you want to ask me — you started with what went wrong — that is the fundamental thing that went wrong.

Douthat: And what is your diagnosis of why there was such a closing of ranks?

Bhattacharya: So I think there’s two levels to this, all right? First of all, this is an analogy to this. When you’re a third-year medical student — I was in medical school once — that’s the first time you see patients. You put on a white coat and, my God, the effect that putting on a white coat has on the desire for the patients to tell you stuff. People tell you everything about their lives. And they have problems that they want you to solve. And the instinct that you have with the white coat on — you’re 24 years old, 25 years old — is to answer their questions, even when you don’t know the answer.

All of public health found itself in that position. They’re facing an uncertain threat. There’s no real science yet about it. It’s a brand-new disease. The entirety of society is looking at them, saying: “What should we do about this? What’s the wise, right thing to do about this?” And you don’t know the answer.

As a med student, you have to learn to say, “I don’t know.” You have to learn to say that. It’s not an easy instinct. And public health failed at that, at large. So they looked to leaders, like Tony Fauci and others, to guide them on what to say in that setting. And those leaders also failed at that.

The second element is what happened to potentially cause the pandemic. I believe — and I think a lot of scientists agree with me — that the best available evidence suggests that the pandemic was the result of a lab accident that happened in Wuhan, China.

Douthat: What are the percentage odds of that being true would you say?

Bhattacharya: My view is it’s pretty close to certain. But again, scientists disagree with me on this. I don’t want to — —

Douthat: Well, and we don’t have the smoking gun in terms of the minutes of the Communist Party meeting where they acknowledge it’s a lab leak or something like that. So it is as much a scientific debate still as a kind of intelligence community debate.

Bhattacharya: I think if you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain. Again, there’s legitimate, excellent scientists who don’t think it was a lab leak. I tend to be on the side of the scientists who think it was a lab leak, based on other things.

There was a whole effort by the scientific community — by the N.I.H., the Chinese scientific groups and European groups — to essentially prevent all pandemics. The research program was: You go into the wild places. Find viruses in those wild places — —

Douthat: Right. Find the bats.

Bhattacharya: Find the bats.

There’s one trillion or more viruses out there, most of which do not have any chance of infecting humans. But you don’t know which of those viruses that you’re pulling out of the wild places and into the lab are likely to jump into humans.

And so the argument was, in this 2003-to-2020-something era, that we have to manipulate those viruses and make them potentially more dangerous and more infectious to humans, in order to triage and identify the viruses and pathogens that are closer to making the leap into humans in some evolutionary sense. And then prepare countermeasures.

Douthat: This is what so-called gain of function research is trying to do? It’s trying to essentially hype up multiple viruses, and the ones that become the most deadly are the ones you try and treat?

Bhattacharya: Yes. Or in advance of it ever infecting a human being. The utopian promise was that we are going to prevent the world from ever having to suffer from a virus making the leap from a natural location into humans ever again. That was the utopian vision.

Obviously there’s problems with the vision, but the countermeasures that you develop for those pathogens in the lab, that you’ve never made leap into humans, will obviously never have been tested in humans. Like the vaccines you develop, because no human has ever been infected by that ——

Douthat: Right. So you’ll have a set of vaccines whose efficacy is hypothetical.

Bhattacharya: Right. Or it could be other kinds of measures, but let’s say vaccines.

Douthat: So, part of the scientific establishment was committed to this project — —

Bhattacharya: Including the N.I.H.

Douthat: Including the N.I.H. And there was, at the very least, a good chance that that led to Covid-19 and the pandemic. Why then do you think that overcommitted the establishment to school closures, mask mandates and everything else? What is the link there?

Bhattacharya: OK, so what if you opened Pandora’s box? What would you do? You’ve unleashed hell on the world. And you’ve done it. You’re responsible for it. What would you do?

Douthat: Go to confession.

Bhattacharya: [Laughs.] Well, you’re a Christian.

Douthat: What would you do?

Bhattacharya: God willing, I never have to be in that position, but the idea is I’m going to try to shut it — —

Douthat: Shut it down.

Bhattacharya: With whatever means I can, at my fingertips, to make that happen. Powerful people in public health have a lot of means, it turns out — we learned in 2020 — to try to do that.

Douthat: But are you saying they tried to shut down knowledge and debate about the origins? Or are you saying that the attempts to crush Covid itself through lockdowns and so on were a kind of expression of guilt? Like, “I have to be able to crush this disease because I, myself, released it.”

Bhattacharya: I’m saying both. So imagine that you’ve done this. You’ve recommended the lockdowns, you’ve recommended the school closures, you’ve recommended a set of measures that are going to harm the poor, you know are going to harm the children, but you’re doing it because you want to suppress the spread of this deadly disease that, in the back of your mind, maybe you think you might have been responsible for. Maybe you can’t admit that to yourself.

You do it, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s summer of 2020 and it’s very, very clear the disease is still there. The Chinese claim that they got rid of the disease, but that result is not replicated anywhere on earth other than there.

And so you’re like: “Well, what went wrong? We just didn’t do it hard enough.”

The problem is a lot of people have been hurt. There are people in the scientific community, pesky “fringe epidemiologists,” who are saying: “Look, this is a really bad idea. And you can’t get the political will to do this unless for something so extraordinary.” In the scientific community, you need absolute unanimity. And if there’s debate, it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to have another lockdown.

And so what you do is you suppress speech, you suppress dissent, and you make sure that anyone who dissents, that their reputation is destroyed so that other people won’t speak up.

Douthat: So we don’t have Anthony Fauci here to argue with you, but let me try and offer a couple of arguments to you for what you could imagine people in his position were thinking.

First argument would be: OK, Covid-19 did not have a 5 percent mortality rate. It was not particularly dangerous to children, thank God. It did have a much higher mortality rate, you would agree, than any sort of seasonal flu that we have encountered in ——

Bhattacharya: There’s still some arguments over that, but yes, I’ll grant that.

Douthat: Yes, you’d grant that. OK.

Bhattacharya: The 1918 flu was really bad.

Douthat: Yes, certainly.

Bhattacharya: Meets that seasonally, I think.

Douthat: And it is profoundly risky for older Americans, senior citizens, and so on. It might be that it’s just really hard in a big, diverse, fluid society to design a set of........

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