The Free Press
In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was condemned as a quack and considered a pariah by the medical field for co-authoring a public declaration questioning the efficacy of Covid lockdowns. One of the most influential people leading the charge against him was Francis Collins, who was then the director of the National Institutes of Health.
In an October 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that was later leaked online, Collins called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist,” and urged a “quick and devastating published takedown” of his declaration. In an interview with The Washington Post, Collins went on to call Bhattacharya “dangerous” and his work “not mainstream science.” Around this time, Bhattacharya received death threats from members of the public and was shadow banned on Twitter for his views.
Today, in a sign of how much has shifted in Washington since the change of administration, Bhattacharya is now the new director of the NIH. In his first long-form interview since his confirmation, he told The Free Press that Collins has since apologized for his comments—but only in private.
Collins “apologized privately about the fringe epidemiology comment” during a meeting in the summer of 2024, Bhattacharya told Bari Weiss during an interview on The Free Press’s flagship podcast, Honestly.
To listen to the full episode, press the play button below, or follow Honestly wherever you get your podcasts.
In a conciliatory tone surprising for a person whose career was almost destroyed by the controversy, Bhattacharya said: “It was a really nice moment. I’ve admired the man for my entire career.”
He added of Collins: “As a Christian and a scientist, he was very outspoken about his faith in ways that I found a lot of encouragement in when I was a young scientist. And to me, the fact that he was on the other side of this debate is fine. . . but that he would abuse his position to try to destroy people who disagreed with him, that really hurt.”
“But,” he said, he would like to see Collins “try to publicly engage in that same spirit that we had when we met privately.”
Bhattacharya said of Collins: “I’ve been praying for him ever since I found out that he’d written that email. I told him that I’d been praying for him and I still will pray for him. I think that reconciliation is really possible. Even if people disagree with each other fundamentally, even hate each other—and I’d never hated him and never will.”
Five years ago, Bhattacharya was a relatively unknown Stanford professor and medical doctor with a PhD in economics—until co-writing The Great Barrington Declaration put him at odds with Fauci. Fauci’s power during Covid turned him into a “cultural figure, even beyond science,” the newly minted NIH director told The Free Press.
Bhattacharya added: “People were looking for a guru figure to save them when they were scared about dying from this new virus. And he fully embraced that role.”
But Bhattacharya “wants to extend [Fauci] the same grace that I want to extend to everybody. . . I think he was deeply wrong in his scientific ideas in 2020, but I believe he was sincere in them. And I think that he was trying to do what he viewed as the best for the American people.”
Before he left office on January 20, 2025, President Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for his extreme Covid response measures, including mask mandates and school lockdowns, which eventually led to learning loss—a fact that Bhattacharya had warned against in his declaration.
And yet, Bhattacharya said he is “actually in favor” of Fauci’s pardon, calling it “a really good thing.”
“Rather than trying to destroy people,” he said, “let’s use the time that we now have to learn the lessons of the past and build people up.”
Though Bhattacharya has a big job ahead of him, he said he feels certain in his priorities. His “most important initiative,” he says, is earning back the trust of the American people.
“The public health establishment made tremendous mistakes with a mantle of authority during the pandemic,” he said, and yet the NIH has not fulfilled its primary job, which is “solving the chronic disease crisis the American people face.”
The first step to rebuilding trust, Bhattacharya argues, is transparency.
One idea he’s keen on is creating a database where the public can “look up the conflicts of interest of scientists, just like you can go and look up the conflicts in the interest of doctors.” A database on doctors’ relationships with Big Pharma already exists, thanks to the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which allows anyone to search for and view all pharmaceutical money doctors have received since 2013.
Producing a similar website that shows where scientists get their research funding, and the results of their research, “would be a really productive way to reestablish trust,” he said. “The work of the NIH in particular affects basically every single aspect of biomedical research. And of course, there are pecuniary interests involved. People make money off of the results of the research.”
Of his boss, Robert Kennedy Jr., who is now leading the Department of Health and Human Services, Bhattacharya says “he admires him,” despite their disagreements over the safety of vaccines. Mistrust in vaccines doesn’t exist “because Bobby Kennedy says what he says in public,” Bhattacharya said. Instead, “those question marks are there because the public health establishment during the pandemic said many things that didn’t turn out to be true or accurate and yet fundamentally altered the lives of so many people for the worse.”
Jay’s full first name is Jayanta, which he said means “one who will be victorious.” When asked if he believes in karma, Bhattacharya said, “I believe in God, and he’s really laughing at me. If you’d asked me five years ago, did I even have an ambition to be the head of the NIH, I would have laughed at it. But to have the chance to lead this institute, which I believe is the most important biomedical institute in the world. . . is such a great honor, and it does feel a little karmic.”
If you missed it, read our editorial, “Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya.”