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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And of course, they're not common in human populations. They're certainly not in the United States. The investigation uncovered a security incident that happened in March before I actually signed on, that a contractor had deliberately cut a hole in one of the bi-containment suits of a fellow worker. And let's go over a lover's bat as best I can tell. I'm not sure exactly what happened in any case.
It's leaving aside the contractor and this act, which is, I mean, effectively an act of attempted murder, if not worse. The the the the the the fact that this had happened essentially been suppressed. And what I learned is that the safety culture of the lab was really bad.
There were incidents going back into the Biden administration where essentially it was just like, you know, sort of waved aside as if it were just normal. This is not normal. You have people working with some of the most dangerous pathogens on the planet. doing experiments with them that could really, if it leaked, could spread out to the entire population, damage the whole population.
I mean, we saw what happened at Wuhan. And when I heard this, I mean, my blood was chilled. I thought, okay, you can't have a lax safety culture in a lab like this. You absolutely have to have 100% commitment to safety when you are engaged in experiments with these kinds of select agents. you know, like pathogens. And so I ordered that the lab essentially shut down until further notice.
We secured those to select agents so that they're not going to pose any risk, the select agents being the viruses and stuff, and, you know, shut down all those experiments. I'm not going to reopen the lab until I'm satisfied that whoever is actually running it has safety as job one, two, and three. The experiments, some of them are likely important scientifically. And they're worth doing.
At least some of them are. We're going to do a review of that as well. But no matter what the scientific benefit might be, it's not worth the risk of harming human populations at scale with a lax safety culture. And I won't reopen the lab until I'm satisfied that that has been regressed.
There's an ongoing FBI investigation. So I don't I shouldn't step in front of it. And I actually have not been briefed yet on what they found on that specific on those specific questions. So but as far as I know, but you're you're satisfied. Yeah, as far as I know, no one got.
Yeah, I'm satisfied there's no threat to the public. I mean, I think that if there was a threat to the public, we would have known before I got into office. I mean, it's the kind of agents we're talking about, the kind of experiments we're talking about. So I'm satisfied that there was no threat to the public, no damage to the public, no risk to the public from this incident.
But I'm not satisfied that we won't have a threat to the public in possible future incidents because it's the safety culture of a lab like this that determines what that risk actually is. In BSL-4 labs, there's no room for error. You cannot have any actions like this in a safety culture that waves its sides as it's normal. I mean, you can't have people like that running the lab.
You know, it's interesting because this job normally is bipartisan. Everyone loves you because you're doing experiments that advance human health. You go around the country giving talks, bragging about the scientific advances that actually. So, you know, in normal times, it would be a really fun job.
I landed in this job in a setting where one of the most prominent people in this institution had to be pardoned by the outgoing president. I mean, it's an institution kind of that it's a little bit of a crisis. But as I said at the beginning, at the same time, there's a lot of goodwill toward the NIH because it has produced advances that have improved human health.
Like we are able to treat childhood cancers that we weren't able to treat before the NIH's research. We're able to
have the advances in how we manage heart heart disease uh treat diabetes um these are big advances that we we now have essentially a cure for sickle cell anemia which i mean these are these are big advances and so when i talk to folks in congress it's popular the nh is popular and you know i think it ought to be popular in that sense if you um if
What I hear from folks in Congress essentially is, you know, please keep doing this research that advances human health and improves human health. But please don't do any of the politicized stuff that divides people. So that's one of the things I'm really quite proud of. This even started before I got in the office.
There were parts of the NIH portfolio that essentially were like DEI politicized nonsense. They weren't actually science. The NIH is absolutely committed to advancing the health of minority populations. I mean, minority populations are Americans, and we are –
our mission is to advance the health of every single american no matter what race you are no matter what what sex you are no matter what your beliefs are there's no democrat or republican science there's just science right we're committed to that um but we shouldn't be doing work that politicizes science and we've managed to get rid of almost all of it uh at least i hope most almost all of it there's there's a
Let me let me make the analogy with something that happened at the USAID, you know, the agency that the Doge sort of looked into first at the USAID. They were doing some really good things like they had a program called PEPFAR, really universally popular because it provided low, cheap HIV drugs to patients in Africa, saving millions of lives. It was a really good program.
I've written about that program in the past. It's a program that was actually rescued and I think brought in by Marco Rubio into the State Department. The same agency had in it a program to add a third gender to the Bangladeshi census. Now, Bangladesh has all kinds of problems.
There's arsenic in the drinking water, hundreds of thousands of children dying of diarrheal illnesses, I mean, poverty at scale. And what the US government was doing was adding a third gender to its census.
If you take something that's good, you know, PEPFAR, and then you surround it and marble it with like absolute politicized nonsense, you leave the good things open to political attacks that should never happen.
Showing 81–100 of 188 · page 5 of 10
← Previous
Next →