Ross Douthat

Wear a mask.

Postpone your wedding.

Don't open the schools.

And definitely don't listen to the cranks and 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, well, 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 NIH, tasked with reforming the world's largest biomedical research agency.

But his more important task, at least to my mind, is proving that outsiders can actually rebuild public trust in science and medicine, as opposed to just undermining that trust even further.

Dr. Bhattacharya, welcome to Interesting Times.

Thanks for having me on, Russ.

I want to start with a kind of 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 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.

Am I that now?

I mean, you've joined our ranks.

I'm sorry to say.

So, I mean, you're deeply critical of lockdowns, closures, but from my perspective at the time, it seemed like

We didn't know how serious the disease was.