“I don’t understand why public health figures like Tony Fauci who controlled 10 billion dollars of funding uh didn’t use that money to study it definitively and with running high quality trials.”
In order to obtain power, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya spent years spreading doubt about scientists in an unending stream of podcasts, Tweets, and editorials. Though there are countless examples, in 2023 he made a YouTube video with conspiracy theorist Jimmy Dore in which he excoriated his predecessors for their supposed failure to properly study ivermectin as a cure for COVID. Noting they had power and money, Dr. Bhattacharya said:
I think the key thing to me is that we needed to have an answer, a definitive answer in 2020. Why did we not have one? It’s because the NIH, the NIAID, and Tony Fauci did not actually honestly study the issue in 2020… That’s the thing I don’t understand. I don’t understand why public health figures like Tony Fauci who controlled 10 billion dollars of funding uh didn’t use that money to study it definitively and with running high quality trials.
“I’m strongly opposed to this kind of censorship. It should be out in the world at large for the scientific community to judge it for what it is.”
Today, Dr. Bhattacharya has vastly more power and resources than Fauci ever had, and he recently abused his authority to censor a CDC study because it showed the COVID vaccine is far from perfect, but it helps keep people out of ERs and hospitals. This is not surprising. Multiple previous studies have shown the same thing.
However, Dr. Bhattacharya was obviously ignorant of the Streisand effect, and his censorship brought infinitely more attention to the study than if he had quietly let it be published, only to be noticed by a small fraction of the population that still care about COVID vaccines.
However, major newspapers covered his censorship, and though there was already plenty of evidence, everyone now knows that Dr. Bhattacharya is our scientific censor-in-chief. In one article about this, Here’s the COVID Vaccine Paper the CDC Censored, Dr. Jeremy Faust shared the study and wrote:
The censored paper presents data on the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines during the 2025–2026 season. The results suggest that, in the first few months after vaccination (September–December 2025), this year’s vaccines were 53–55% effective against hospitalizations among the study’s population of adults without immune compromise.
But Jay Bhattacharya believes that the public should not see this work—or at least that the CDC should not publish solid science carried out, in part, by its own experts...
“I’m strongly opposed to this kind of censorship,” Dr. Michelle Barron, one of the manuscript’s authors, told Inside Medicine. Dr. Barron, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Colorado, believes the move is an attack against transparency and the usual open scientific process. “It should be out in the world at large for the scientific community to judge it for what it is,” she said.
Dr. Barron is right, of course, however rather than let scientists openly debate the strengths and weaknesses of the study as a professional leader would do, Dr. Bhattacharya instead used his greatest and only skill, spreading doubt in podcasts, Tweets, and editorials. He claimed there were fatal flaws with the study design, a widely used approach called “test-negative” design. According to one article on this method:
In recent years the “test-negative” design has become the most prevalent approach for studying and monitoring vaccine effectiveness of COVID-19 and influenza vaccines in “real world” situations… As with all epidemiological studies, poor study design, inconsistent implementation, and failure to take into consideration important biases and confounders can lead to misleading results. However, when well-designed and implemented with consistency and attention to detail, test-negative study designs can produce accurate estimates of vaccine effectiveness. In fact, studies have shown that effective test-negative designs can produce results highly consistent with randomized trials (the “gold-standard” of epidemiological study designs) when compared directly.
The CDC study never claimed to be a perfect study, and like all studies it acknowledged its flaw. It had a section that began, “The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations.” Dr. Bhattacharya censored that too, deliberately preventing open scientific debate and discussion.
Though Dr. Bhattacharya claims he objects to this design, he’s never been able to specifically say why, and no one is gullible enough to believe methodological concerns are why he censored the CDC study. Obviously, everyone knows that because unvaccinated people hospitalized with COVID don’t matter to Dr. Bhattacharya, he was bothered by the study’s results. Had it had come to a different conclusion, there is no doubt that he would have celebrated it as incontrovertible proof his anti-vaxx agenda was right the whole time.
“Scientific integrity demands rigor, openness to challenge and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, especially when it is inconvenient.”
In a futile attempt to salvage his unsalvageable reputation, Dr. Bhattacharya penned an editorial titled Under My Leadership, the CDC Will Follow the Evidence. In it, he blamed “misleading media coverage” for exposing his censorship and botched basic facts about the CDC study. He sought to justify his censorship in the most Orwellian way imaginable by writing:
For those of us who have dedicated our lives to public health, humility is not a weakness. It means recognizing uncertainty, questions and assumptions and insisting that evidence drives conclusions. The responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to protect the public’s health and to earn its trust by providing accurate, transparent information. I am proud to lead the CDC as we follow the evidence, no matter where it takes us…
At a moment when public trust in institutions like the CDC is fragile, we cannot afford to lower our standards. Scientific integrity demands rigor, openness to challenge and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, especially when it is inconvenient. That is the standard we are committed to upholding at the CDC.
This is this content-free doublespeak. In Dr. Bhattacharya’s telling, his critics had everything backwards. He was forced to censor the CDC study to defend transparent information. He was the one willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. His critics lacked “rigor” and weren’t “open to challenges” the way he was.
Notice that Dr. Bhattacharya isn’t actually making an argument with this high-minded drivel. He’s not responding to his critics in any serious way. He’s ignoring their points and appealing to emotions, yet again.
However, it is clear that like his boss Kennedy, who claims that measles outbreaks aren’t his problem because they started before he entered office, Dr. Bhattacharya similarly fails to grasp fundamental facts about his current position in the world, the one he chose for himself.
Dr. Bhattacharya may be surprised to learn this, but he is the medical establishment now. Though he rose to power by throwing stones in an unending stream of podcasts, Tweets, and editorials, today he leads both the NIH and CDC. As such, it’s no longer his job to cosplay as a wise, but powerless outsider who understands research methods better than experts in the field. It’s not even his job to “follow the evidence”.
Rather, it’s his job to generate the evidence we are supposed to follow. Since Dr. Bhattacharya supposedly objects to the methods of study he censored, it’s his responsibility to stop being a content creator and do better studies, ones that meet his exacting standards. It’s his turn to dazzle us all with his research prowess and ability to deliver concrete results for the American people.
Put another way, I think the key thing to me is that we needed to have an answer, a definitive answer in 2026. Why did we not have one? It’s because the NIH, the CDC, and Jay Bhattacharya did not actually honestly study the issue in 2026. That’s the thing I don’t understand. I don’t understand why public health figures like Jay Bhattacharya who controlled 58 billion dollars of funding uh didn’t use that money to study it definitively and with running high quality trials.