Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
A ‘Fringe Epidemiologist’ on What’s Wrong With Public Health
29 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
Chapter 4: 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.
Chapter 5: 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.
Chapter 6: 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?
I could be persuaded that that could be a reasonable thing, potentially. But let's think about the actual context. So in March of 2020, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It's the first time I ever wrote an op-ed in my life. You're all handed this, but that's a weirdly scary thing.
Chapter 7: How does the NIH plan to improve trust in science?
Once you've crossed that line, yeah, you can never recross it.
It's true. I mean, I wrote this op-ed, and I did some calculations using the Diamond Princess. Remember that cruise ship that was floating around? You could see the relative risk really, really easily in the data. It was really older people that was high risk and younger people for dying from the disease. So that key epidemiological fact was known, I'd say, by January 2020.
And so, I mean, I fully expected two things to happen almost immediately, say March, April 2020. One was that we would do a much better job protecting vulnerable older people and conveying to the public at large the absolute necessity of doing that.
Chapter 8: What future challenges does public health face?
For instance, not sending COVID-infected patients into nursing homes. And then the second problem was a sort of lack of urgency on the part of public health authorities involved. to develop scientific evidence to clear up the uncertainties, to guide decision-making.
So I wrote a study very early on in the pandemic in April of 2020, estimating how many people in Santa Clara County, where I used to live, had been infected. And it was like 3% of the population in early April 2020.
That doesn't sound like a lot, but it was like for every infected person who was a case that had been identified as having had the disease, there were 50 people walking around with antibodies. I did a replication study in LA County a couple weeks later, same result.
And then dozens and dozens of studies all around the world, including at the NIH, found this very, very similar result, like that the disease had spread much more widely than people had thought. This is how naive I was, Ross. I thought that that... result would change everybody's mind about how to manage the pandemic.
This is a disease that's obviously spread much more widely than people realized, despite, I mean, I call them draconian measures to try to keep the spread down. That means the infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was much lower than we thought. I would have thought that would have changed our approach, but that didn't happen.
Instead, I faced essentially attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious. What form did those attacks take? Like, I mean, at the university, there were like an investigation into the study, funding of this, all of which had been cleared up before the study was even done. So it was entirely spurious.
At the NIH, the former head of the NIH wrote an email to Tony Fauci in October 2020, calling me a fringe epidemiologist. I love that term, by the way. It's fantastic. Hopefully it will be on my grave. I mean, the whole thing was absolutely extraordinary. What was needed was an honest scientific debate. I might have been wrong. I mean, look, let's have a scientific debate and discussion.
Let's have alternate voices. But instead, the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing. That's, if you want to ask me, you started with what went wrong. That is the fundamental thing that went wrong.
And what is your diagnosis of why there was such a closing of ranks?
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