The Media Research Center was quite excited when Jay Bhattacharya was named to run the National Institutes of Health under President Trump because, as we detailed, he served as a convenient victim of “censorship” during the COVID pandemic, which allowed the MRC to push an anti-vaccine agenda. He’s best known for pushing the Great Barrington Declaration, which irresponsibly embraced “herd immunity” at a time when COVID was killing thousands of people and it was unclear whether herd immunity would be effective against it (and it doesn’t, given the need for regular vaccinations). He also cheered a British politician who likened COVID vaccines to the Holocaust.
Bhattacharya got celebrated again in a May 14 Free Speech America post by Tom Olohan:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), stressed that medical and scientific advancement is made possible by the protection of free speech.
Bhattacharya condemned pandemic censorship and discussed the vital importance of free speech among scientists during an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier that aired on the May 8 edition of his show Special Report. “One of the main problems during the pandemic was censorship. Free speech is absolutely essential for scientific progress. If we had had [free speech] during the pandemic, we would have had much better outcomes,” he said. Bhattacharya added that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s vision for “gold standard science” is dependent on free speech, ending long-standing scientific “taboos” around topics like autism research.
“What we’re going to do is we are going to shatter that taboo so that people can ask the question honestly, so can I look at the scientific literature and give an answer–that’s grounded in truth,” the NIH director promised. “You saw during the pandemic, it was taboo to say certain things. You couldn’t say that if you had COVID and recovered, you would have some immunity, for instance.”
It was not identified what, exactly is the “taboo” involving autism research — unless he’s referring to whether vaccines play any role in causing it, which research has already proven it doesn’t. Olohan went on to repeat his employer’s dishonest narrative that correcting lies and misninformation about COVID and its vaccines equaled “censorship”:
Previously, the Biden administration took a very different approach and pushed social media platforms to censor certain content related to COVID-19. In fact, MRC previously revealed in a report detailing 57 censorship initiatives of the Biden administration that the NIH worked with tech-based censorship outfits to fight disfavored speech, spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on this effort in 2022 (Initiative #19). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pushed platforms like Google and Facebook to embrace censorship (Initiative #20), and White House senior adviser for the COVID-19 Response Andy Slavitt, pressured Amazon to ban books about vaccination and COVID-19 (Initiative #21).
President Joe Biden even said in July 2021 that Facebook was “killing people” by not censoring enough content related to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an August 2024 letter to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration had pressured Meta to censor posts on this issue.
Olohan conveniently doesn’t provide any specific examples of content that was purportedly “censored,” presumably so he can hide that those posts really were lies and misinformation.