April Fools Day was the perfect encapsulation of the very brief tenures of Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, the heads of the FDA and NIH respectfully.
On that day, the article NIH Director Removes Four Main Scientists amid Massive Staff Purge reported:
The Trump Administration has fired four leaders and thousands of employees at the National Institutes of Health in “one of the darkest days”. The directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) were informed late on 31 March that they were being placed on administrative leave.
Another article that day, NIH Director Pledges To Implement Changes ‘Humanely’, reported that Dr. Bhattacharya pledged to “implement new policies humanely”. Those new policies meant firing people, and to his credit Dr. Bhattacharya acknowledged that they were entirely political in nature. “Many of our valued colleagues are losing their jobs, which is in no way a reflection of the quality of their work,” he said.
He’s right. Scientists weren’t fired because they were incompetent. They were fired because of their beliefs, and they weren’t fired “humanely”. According to the article ‘A Cruel April Fool’s Joke’: HHS Layoffs Characterized by Confusion, Errors:
As NIH workers were digesting the loss of their jobs, they received an introductory email from Jay Bhattacharya, the newly confirmed director of the medical research agency.
One NIH staffer described Bhattacharya’s note as a “thank you and can’t wait to work with you email … in the middle of the massacre.”
That same day contrarian podcaster Bari Weiss posted an interview with Dr. Bhattacharya where he lamented that Dr. Francis Collins, the former NIH director, had called him “fringe” in a private email 4.5 years previously. Dr. Bhattacharya said that this insult was intended to “destroy” him and it “really hurt.” Dr. Bhattacharya spoke about how meaningful it was that Dr. Collins had apologized to him privately, and he urged Dr. Collins to make a public apology as well. At that moment, when many of his valued colleagues were “losing their jobs”, Dr. Bhattacharya, who is the current NIH director, was feeling sorry for himself because he had been called a name in 2020.
Watch that video here.
As scientists were closing their labs and cleaning out their desks, he gave another interview on Fox News that day where he said:
We’ll never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree. If scientists are censored, we actually can’t have excellent science.
That sounds nice, however journalists have told me they have trouble getting on-the-record quotes from scientists. Understandably, many of them don’t want to be caught up in the next round of purges if they criticize the wrong people.
Watch that video here.
Dr. Bhattacharya also said in that interview:
The healthcare system ought to be focused on preventing disease in the first place. The chronic disease problems that we have, many of them could be prevented. We have all these incentives to take care of people after they are sick. Let’s make incentives to make people healthier so that they don’t get sick in the first place.
Again that sounds nice. However, Dr. Bhattacharya rose to fame via his proposal to mass infect unvaccinated people under age 60-70 to reach herd immunity in 3-6 months, and his boss, Kennedy, has devoted his career to promoting disease in the first place.
Watch that video here.
Moreover, although Dr. Bhattacharya extolled the virtues of preventing chronic disease, many experts in chronic disease were victims of his purge. According to an article from that day titled Doctor Behind Award-Winning Parkinson’s Research Among Scientists Purged From NIH:
Several top scientists charged with overseeing research into disease prevention and cures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were notified that they were subject to a reduction in force on Tuesday as part of a devastating purge of federal employees carried out by US Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., WIRED has learned.
Multiple sources at the NIH, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed Tuesday afternoon that at least 10 principal investigators who were leading and directing medical research at the agency had been fired. Among them is Dr. Richard Youle, a leading researcher in the field of neurodegenerative disorders previously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his groundbreaking research identifying mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya had previously given a speech called The End of Free Speech is the End of Science.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary Gets Off To A Bruising Start As Agency Is Wracked By Layoffs
Dr. Makary had a similarly experience at the FDA. Though he had recorded a podcast in 2022 titled Cancel Culture Isn’t Good For Science, headlines from his start read: FDA’s New Commissioner Marty Makary Signed Off on Peter Marks Ouster, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary Gets Off To A Bruising Start As Agency Is Wracked By Layoffs and The FDA Is ‘Finished’ as Firings Sweep Health Agencies. Drug Stocks Are Falling. According to that article:
U.S. public-health agencies on Tuesday morning, and the impact on the Food and Drug Administration so far has been dire, according to current and former employees.
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Appropriately, all three of these articles were published on April Fools Day.