National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya underscored the need to restore trust in the nation’s health industry, specifically after the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued.
Bhattacharya, who was just confirmed as the new NIH director, detailed how the nation’s health departments “really failed” during the pandemic at the start of the 2020s due to failing to adhere to “gold standard science.” As such, Bhattacharya argued, the way to win public trust back in these departments is by returning to this standard and using it to address the current health crises facing the nation.
“We have chronic disease levels that are at an all-time high,” Bhattacharya stated on Fox News’s Fox & Friends. “Children [are] obese, type 1, type 2 diabetes, you have cancer, you have hypertension, you have a large number of chronic disease problems that need to be addressed with excellent science. That’s how you restore faith in science.”
One factor that Bhattacharya wants to focus on as the NIH director is using science to discover how people can remain healthy before they get sick, contrasting how the current healthcare system is set to address needs after illness strikes. To remedy this, he called for the NIH to create incentives to make people healthier to prevent illness from happening.
While Bhattacharya expressed thanks that he is now working at the top of the NIH, he stressed that he is not seeking “retribution” in this role and called for people to “have their say” in how to pursue health and science, warning that censorship under the NIH would only get in the way of pursuing “excellent science.” It comes after Bhattacharya expressed skepticism of COVID-19 during the Biden administration.
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“The way forward in science is by respectful engagement with the data, and that censorship is actually, I think, the root cause of many of the problems that happened during the pandemic, and we’re never going to do that,” Bhattacharya stated.
Bhattacharya was confirmed by the Senate last week by a vote of 53-47. Every Republican senator voted in favor of him. Dr. Marty Makary was also confirmed by the Senate as the new Food and Drug Administration commissioner by a vote of 56-44.
