A ‘Fringe Epidemiologist’ on What’s Wrong With Public Health
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How did Dr. Jay Bhattacharya become a 'fringe epidemiologist'?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.
If you want to understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the COVID era. In the face of a once in a century, we hope, pandemic, medical authorities clearly felt like they needed to respond with absolute certainty. Trust the science. Wear a mask. Postpone your wedding. Don't open the schools.
What went wrong during the COVID-19 response?
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.
What responsibilities do public health leaders have?
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.
Can I just start with where I came from into the COVID era? I was a professor at Stanford for, I think, 20-some years up to that point, up to 2020. I'd written what I thought were provocative papers. I mean, I read them, obviously. Obviously.
How can public health and the NIH be reformed?
Like five other people have. But the COVID era to me represented a fundamental break in my understanding of how science and public health operated. I mean, I guess I was naive before the pandemic. I would tell my students, don't join Twitter. It was Twitter back then. Just publish your papers in scientific journals. That's how you make the big difference in the world. I thought public health had the best interests of the working class, the poor in mind. And the COVID era shattered my illusions on all of those fronts. And in particular, what happened in March of 2020 represented a fundamental break that public health authorities had with the public. And I can understand why it happened. I mean, you have a virus floating around that's new.
You get reports out of China, essentially, that it's a 3%, 4%, 5% mortality rate. You have videos of people collapsing on the street.
What are the major controversies affecting public health today?
Collapsing on the streets. And so I could understand at the time especially in the face of deep uncertainty, that something had to be done to guide people. But what you're not allowed to do is assume that the thing you're doing is going to work, right? I'm going to do a lockdown. That'll solve the problem. You're also not allowed to assume that the thing that you're doing will have no harms, right? So you close the schools. You know for certain that you're going to harm a generation of children. That's a certainty. Will that suppress the spread of the disease? We don't know how the disease spreads. Is it aerosol? Is it droplet? Is it, you know, there's a hundred uncertainties. You still have to do that kind of honest calculation and you have to convey that deep uncertainty to the public at large.
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.
What metrics should be used to measure success in public health?
We didn't know how it affected children, for instance, in schools. I had little kids in school at the time. And it seemed to me that there was an argument essentially for two weeks, a month, like kind of these policies as extreme but temporary measures. Do you think that there is... room for taking extreme measures like we took in that period as a means of buying time?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Dr. Jay Bhattacharya become a 'fringe epidemiologist'?
0:03–0:49
2
What went wrong during the COVID-19 response?
0:49–1:31
3
What responsibilities do public health leaders have?
1:31–2:38
4
How can public health and the NIH be reformed?
2:38–3:35
5
What are the major controversies affecting public health today?
3:35–4:36
6
What metrics should be used to measure success in public health?
4:36–5:17
7
How does the NIH plan to improve trust in science?
5:17–5:57
8
What future challenges does public health face?
5:57–1:04:18
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Interesting Times
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