A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community.
That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. And this idea, in the madness of that period, was considered so dangerous by federal health and Big Tech that Jay was not only smeared, but censored. His words—on platforms from Reddit to Twitter to Facebook—were suppressed.
But here’s the thing: The lockdowns were pretty disastrous. We’re still dealing with their effects—the loss of childhood learning, the cancer screenings that were skipped, the inability of those with special needs to see the people who help them, the separation of families—just to name a few consequences. And it’s still unclear if those lockdowns were worth it.
Many powers tried to silence Jay, but he persisted. And today Jay is the new head of the National Institutes of Health. If you’re skeptical of karma, this turn of events may lead you to believe in it.
He’s leading this massive federal agency, sometimes called “the crown jewel of American science”—it’s the largest public funder of medical research in the world—at a moment when public health authorities need to rebuild trust.
But here’s the wrinkle. Jay has two bosses: President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop a Covid vaccine in his first term. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, who is also the most famous vaccine skeptic in America.
Walking the line here will inevitably be tricky for Dr. Jay. So, how can he do it? How does someone who believes that vaccinating your kids for diseases like polio and measles also confront the idea that large swaths of Americans have fear around vaccinating their kids? And how will he navigate an HHS that’s empowering discredited antivax crusaders — a move that, as The Wall Street Journal recently argued, is already vindicating Kennedy’s critics.
That’s among the many, many things Bari asks him in this conversation.
Jay has lived a remarkable life. And we get into all of it. His conversion to Christianity as a teenager and how his faith allowed him to stick to his values—and even to pray for Francis Collins, the former NIH director who called his ideas dangerous. The chutzpah it took to fight the entire medical establishment. How he ultimately triumphed against his critics. How he wants to put the National Institutes of Health on the frontline in the war against chronic illness in America.
And, most importantly, how can public health authorities make America healthy again? Today on Honestly, he tells us all about how he plans to do it all.
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