Less money spent on the administration is more money to give out to actual scientists
As the article Trump White House Cites Fringe Doctor to Defend Research Cuts reported, Dr. Vinay Prasad was recently featured in a White House statement in which he denied a Washington Post story about cuts to the NIH. The statement said:
That is shameful and dishonest framing from the Post. Dr. Vinay Prasad, a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, praised NIH’s announcement.
Dr. Prasad wrote: “Cutting indirects might even mean more science. Less money spent on the administration is more money to give out to actual scientists.”
However, when he’s not busy spreading Orwellian doublespeak, saying less money is more money, Dr. Prasad is busy celebrating cuts to researchers, as well as mass purges of scientists and the ascension of RFK Jr. Dr. Prasad, along with his friends and ideological compatriots Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, are now the embodiment of the medical establishment, and their vision is being realized. They wanted RFK Jr. to “disrupt the US medical establishment” and that’s what he’s doing.
Anyone who either legitimized these doctors or defended them by baselessly smearing their critics contributed to this moment.
UCSF ‘Borders on Panic’ Facing Potential Trump Funding Slash
Not all of Dr. Prasad’s UCSF colleagues share his delight at the decimation of scientific research and the triumph of anti-vaxxers. Dr. Monica Gandhi, for example, recently said:
MEASLES: A child died from a vax-preventable disease in US. This is a national emergency. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater (e.g. stop some USAID programs that are corrupt, not all; evaluate each vax in isolation- measles vax works; “burn it all down” will kill)
She”s right. This is a serious moment. She was also featured in articles titled Court Orders Don’t Calm UCSF Researchers’ Nerves and ‘Devastating’: Trump Research Funding Cuts Could Cost the Bay Area Billions. That last article reported that UCSF could lose $138 million annually, and it quoted Dr. Gandhi as saying:
People are acting like these schools are building palaces, but they’re supporting direct research by giving us the infrastructure. There’s just so much we would have lost, and that we could still lose.
People are acting like these schools are building palaces because her that’s what her UCSF colleague is telling them.
Another article, UCSF ‘Borders on Panic’ Facing Potential Trump Funding Slash, also quoted Dr. Gandhi. It said:
As the lead of the Center for AIDS Research at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Monica Gandhi is spending the month in a world of devastating “what-ifs.”
What would have happened if a federal judge had not, on Feb. 10, blocked the Trump administration’s order to slash billions in biomedical research funding from the National Institutes of Health? Monitoring the health of study participants in biomedical research funded by NIH would be gone. Clinical trials on patients would be stopped. Key services, like maintaining the lab equipment and keeping research data safe, would also vanish.
“All of that, as of Friday, is massively threatened,” Gandhi said.
That’s horrible, and I don’t blame her for panicking. However, I can’t help but wonder “what if” more doctors had cared about misinformation instead of spreading it.
Four years ago, Dr. Gandhi was telling us not to panic in interviews such as Pandemic Exit Interviews: Stop Panicking About The COVID-19 Variants, Says UCSF’s Monica Gandhi. She also recorded a podcast titled The End Of The Pandemic with Dr. Zubin Damania, “variants schmariants“, and The Motivation We Need to Reach the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Dr. Monica Gandhi with Dr. Prasad. Last summer, she shared a stage with Dr. Prasad, as well as Drs. Makary and Dr. Bhattacharya, during the infamous Stanford conference. When Dr. Bhattcharya was nominated to head the NIH, she said:
I can’t say I’m not nervous because our universities not only depend on this money, but it’s not the time to, stop HIV research. We have a lot of work to do. On the other hand, I think Dr. Bhattacharya is kind. He is gentle. He has had a complete reputation of being respectful of listening to others and I think that gives me a lot of hope about his leadership.
Hopefully, she is right, and Dr. Bhattacharya will arrive to save the day.
Meanwhile, seeking to enrage and emotionally manipulate his audience as usual, here’s what Dr. Prasad is saying about worried researchers like Dr. Gandhi:
I have no sympathy for academic researchers and their staff who do shit science and live off NIH grants. I am sorry. Never have. Never will. They do work that cannot be reproduced, just say the same empty slogans that are in vogue. During the pandemic they failed society and lied about the impact of school closure and the viral origins. I can’t believe we tax plumbers and bus drivers who do real work to fund this bullshit. It’s a welfare program for upper middle class kids. Recently they were saying even a single drink of wine kills you. They should be completely defunded for using low quality science to insert themselves in debates they don’t understand, or appreciate. It’s not even science. It’s propaganda that’s government-funded masquerading as science.
Charming stuff.
Dr. Howard said Dr. Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic
Dr. Gandhi is not the only UCSF doctor to suddenly started caring about the consequences of misinformation in 2025. Dr. Eric Widera, who recently collaborated with Dr. Prasad, now laments that RFK Jr. is in power. He recently said:
Does he even know what doctors and nurses do. He sounds like your weird uncle at at Thanksgiving dinner telling you doctors will be replaced by (insert anything) in the next year.
It takes competence to fix something or make it better. Any fool can break it even further. RFK Jr. is in the latter group.
Dr. Widera was obviously correct, though RFK Jr. was confirmed by the Senate 2 weeks later.
Similarly, Dr. Anil Makam, who wrote an homage to anecdotal data in Dr. Prasad’s monetized misinformation Substack, is not happy about the fate of an NIH grant he submitted. He said:
I too am unhappy because of silence on why and how long & have an R01 (an NIH grant) that might be funded if council meets next week.
It’s awful that his hard work is stuck in limbo and may be lost forever.
However, not long ago these UCSF doctors berated me because I corrected the factual errors of our new medical establishment. They felt our future leaders deserved a space space where they are immune to criticism. Last fall, I was quoted in a New York Times article titled Trump Picks Stanford Physician Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to Head NIH. It said:
But Dr. Bhattacharya still provokes extremely strong feelings. Dr. Jonathan Howard… who treated patients at Bellevue Hospital at the height of the pandemic, has assailed Dr. Bhattacharya in a book, “We Want Them Infected.”
Dr. Howard said Dr. Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as it was being made out to be, and that the death toll might top out at 40,000 Americans; in the end, 1.2 million died.
Dr. Bhattacharya responded on social media by calling Dr. Howard “unhinged” and his book “inane,” advising him to “take an epidemiology class if you don’t want to keep embarrassing yourself.”
Dr. Bhattacharya’s outburst had nothing to do with my “inane” book. After leaving his fake “review,” he later revealed he hadn’t read it. However, rather than lament Dr. Bhattacharya’s lack of maturity and professionalism, as well as his refusal/inability to engage with my ideas, Dr. Widera shared a screenshot from the NYT article and decided to hurl more schoolyard taunts at me. He even tagged Dr. Bhattacharya to make sure he knew that he was defending him against my transgression. He said:
Sensing blood in the kiddie pool, his colleague Dr. Makam added:
Elsewhere, Dr. Widera tried to discredit me by calling me “fringe”. He said I was merely a “loud voice on Twitter who by looking at his post history, mostly insults people,” though he provided no examples.
These content-free tirades from Bay Area doctors, including Dr. Bhattacharya, are not unusual and hardly worth writing about. But beyond the childishness, I want you to notice something more disturbing. Look again at what these UCSF doctors ignored:
Dr. Howard said Dr. Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as it was being made out to be, and that the death toll might top out at 40,000 Americans; in the end, 1.2 million died.
I provided a simple but vital piece of information about Dr. Bhattacharya, and it was right there in the screenshot that Dr. Widera shared. I thought people should care that our incoming NIH director drastically underestimated COVID and never looked back. Yet, these UCSF doctors didn’t care a bit. Whether or not Dr. Bhattacharya bungled basic facts, which he did repeatedly, didn’t matter to them at all. Data and evidence were entirely irrelevant to them. They intentionally ignored the numbers I presented, and never thought, “Maybe it’s a problem that Dr. Bhattacharya and his ilk spread misinformation to numb people to a deadly virus“.
While Dr. Bhattacharya was on Fox News (he’s #7 on this list of their most “dishonest” doctors), I was working in the hospital. I didn’t predict 40,000 COVID deaths or spread fake statistics. I’ve been writing and warning about the anti-vaccine movement and RFK Jr. for years, even prior to the pandemic. And yet, these UCSF doctors treated me with contempt and scorn. They just insulted me and and accused me of just insulting people. In their telling, my 220 articles here and We Want Them Infected are thousands of pages of me calling doctors silly names. In reality, I never called Dr. Bhattacharya “unhinged” or “inane,” and I never left fake reviews of his work. I accurately quoted him and explained why I disagreed. These UCSF doctors felt that this was unacceptable, and that frontline doctors like myself lacked the qualifications to critique a laptop class, health economist like Dr. Bhattacharya.
And they did all this specifically to defend Dr. Bhattacharya, an anti-vaccine advocate of herd immunity via mass infection. More recently, Dr. Bhattacharya has called for mRNA vaccines to be removed from the market and validated core anti-vaccine beliefs as Walker Bragman reported in his article Trump Pick for NIH Director: Vaccines May Cause Autism, Alternative Schedules Okay. He also pushed for cuts to the NIH and openly championed RFK Jr., even speaking at one of his rallies with the dangerous anti-vaxx luminary Del Bigtree. That’s what these UCSF doctors are now upset about.
However, until now, these UCSF doctors were just fine with all this. They told the world Dr. Bhattacharya was reliable, while I was the “worst”. They sent a clear message that only a hysterical, fringe, unqualified, insulting psychiatrist would be concerned by the images below. According to UCSF doctors, indifference is the appropriate reaction when people suffer and die because of misinformation.
“COVID hysteria nonsense”
In reality, I wasn’t hysterical enough. RFK Jr., whom Drs. Prasad, Makary, and Bhattacharya all supported, has started his attack on vaccines and is spreading misinformation in the middle of a deadly measles outbreak. The same techniques these doctors developed to numb people to children dying of COVID- “breathless“- are now being employed with measles, and we are just getting started.
Though I underestimated the threat, I at least tried to warn people that normalizing misinformation was dangerous and that we should be serious about the threat. Indeed at the same moment UCSF doctors hurled their juvenile japes at me, I recorded a podcast titled RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vaccine Appointments: A Dangerous Future for Public Health, where I warned about much of what is happening now. These were easy predictions to make for those of us who cared and paid attention. I was nothing special. Countless others also sounded the alarm, only to be greeted with derision. There was nothing unique about my experience, which was benign compared to many others. No one harassed me on my doorstep.
However, while the infantile slurs were easy to brush off, the purposeful apathy was not. When medicine was under attack from within, these UCSF doctors shrugged and yawned. They causally dismissed our warnings as “hysterical” and said we were “insulting” people no matter what evidence we presented or what arguments we made. They made a grand, public display of ignoring data, even when it was right under their noses. They praised and amplified the forces they are currently whining about and simply did not care about misinformation until 2025. Their deliberate indifference vanished only when its consequences hit close to home and after it was too late.
To be clear, I 100% agree with the UCSF doctors’ fears about the impacts of these cuts. If I could push a magic button and restore their funding, I would. I welcome them to the resistance. However, the many doctors, not only as UCSF, who are just now realizing that misinformation wasn’t “COVID hysteria nonsense” have a lot of catching up to do to understand how the forces they’ve legitimized led to this moment. This didn’t happen all of a sudden, and there were countless opportunities to speak up along the way.
Fortunately, we at SBM can help. We cared deeply about misinformation, even when it didn’t directly affect us. It’s clear these UCSF doctors have never read anything we’ve written, and I suggest they start learning about what they’ve missed over the past 5 years.