Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
speaker
188 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 11 May
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But I'm sad to say that the NIH also supported that same research, this gain of function research that very likely led to the pandemic. So the place needs fundamental reform. The plus side is I found lots of great allies. There's a lot of great Americans here who want the best for the country and want to advance scientific knowledge.
um there's a lot of people that are really you know they're they're uh they're they're sitting they're concerned because they might lose their jobs and all this um and i have sympathy for them too um but the place needs change and and i think uh It's been interesting. I've been here six weeks, and we've accomplished a lot. I've uncovered some things which I wish had never happened but did.
And we managed to make a lot. I'll tell you specifically about an incident at a high-security lab that I found as we went on the conversation. But it's been eye-opening, and it's been really useful to learn so many things. It's still a great institution, but it definitely needs some changes, and I'm working on that.
I think the NIH should be an entirely civilian organization. It should not be involved in any military kind of research at all. I think that there are other parts of the government that do that and do that better than us.
The mixing of missions actually poisons the NIH's primary objective, which is to do research that improves the health and well-being of the American people, the longevity of the American people. On the question of this gain-of-function research, it's funny, Vince, because the same research, it was pitched as biodefense can also be used as, bio offense.
It's the same research, the same exact research. And in fact, the civilian justification given to the research agenda that I think led to the pandemic was to prevent pandemics, to go out into the wild places, find all of the viruses and pathogens that live in places where humans generally don't go, bring them into labs and catalog them and ask how close are they in evolutionary space?
So they'll make the leap into human populations. And to do that, you have to essentially weaponize them, right? Make them more infectious in humans and ask how many mutations are needed before they become infectious in humans. You know, it's one of those things where it's a utopian agenda. It was sold as, well, we can prepare for all possible pandemics.
And so any possible pandemic in the future we'll know about before it happens, have countermeasures in place like vaccines and antivirals. That utopian agenda, I think, actually caused the pandemic because it's not possible to handle those agents so carefully that they never leak. It doesn't have to be malicious. It's just... human error.
And I don't know exactly what happened in Wuhan because the Chinese won't share their lab notebooks with us. But what I will say is that we should not be engaged in any of these kinds of utopian exercises that pose a risk to human health at the scale that we saw during the pandemic. It's just a catastrophic mistake that we ever engaged in this.
And whether it's a civilian justification or some biodefense justification, it makes no sense to me for the U.S. government or any other government to be engaged in it.
Vince, actually, the gain of function ban the president signed is expansive. It's actually everything I wanted. It essentially directs the U.S. government as well to not support this kind of dangerous research internally and externally. It mentions specifically some adversary nations.
I mean, it's amazing to me that we cooperate with the Chinese on this kind of research in the past because that's especially dangerous. But, you know, part of the reasoning why was that the biosafety standards were more lax in Wuhan than they were here.
And so we, some researchers, I keep saying we when it wasn't me, some researchers engaged in offshoring this kind of dangerous work because they knew it would be more difficult to do here. But it is also still done here, Vince. And I think it's dangerous no matter where it happens. And the president's order essentially says no more of it. It's a little tricky because gain of function –
as a tool is actually useful biologically for human health. So for instance, human insulin is produced at scale using a kind of gain of function work. You take E. coli and trick them into making human insulin. The problem is gain of function work that has the possibility of causing a pandemic. That's the work we should not be doing, no matter what it is, no matter where it is.
And I saw Secretary Kennedy say this, and I completely agree. We should be promoting an international treaty to get rid of this work. It helps nobody. It won't help us win battles with our adversaries. It just endangers human populations.
I mean, Vince, you're the soul of common sense on this. It's amazing that scientists have made decisions that don't have that kind of common sense. We should be focused on things that improve human health. That's our mission. Why are we focused on utopian schemes that have never been proven to advance human health and that have the risk of causing worldwide pandemics?
I've not been made aware of any NIH connection to those labs. I have read reports about them from the outsides. But if I learn of things, I'll let the public know. I mean, I've been uncovering things left and right. And some of us have been shocking. We'll talk about one thing, I'm sure, right? And so you're about to ask me, I hope, in a second about it.
But I haven't found anything yet about the Ukraine biolabs.
Oh, goodness. I've been scared by very little in the last five years, but this one really scared me. So about three weeks ago, I'd been three weeks in the job, I got a report from someone who was doing a routine inspection of this lab. The NIH runs one of the labs at Fort Detrick. They're military labs as well. The lab the NIH runs is a BSL-4 lab. BSL-4 means like the highest security level.
You wear basically, you know, spacesuits and stuff. I mean, they're called whatever, biocontainment suits, if you're going to be working in a BSL-4 lab. And some of the stuff that are analyzed in those labs are just really nasty things. You know, Ebola, encephalitis viruses. I mean, they're just terrible if they get out in the human populations.
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