National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya claimed the dean of Stanford Medical School asked him to stop speaking with the press at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic due to his stance against universal business lockdowns and school closures.
In a freewheeling interview released in Monday lasting over four and a half hours with podcast host and Stanford Medical School neurobiologist Andrew Huberman, Bhattacharya described efforts in detail by his former employer to stifle his position on pandemic closures.
“Stanford failed the academic freedom test,” said Bhattacharya about the university where he was a student and professor from 1986 until his confirmation as NIH director in 2025. “My academic freedom was pretty directly threatened.”
The university did not meet its responsibility to provide a forum for debate, only made “mealy-mouthed statements” about academic freedom, and allowed for the anonymous intimidation of one of its professors, Bhattacharya claims.
Medical school administrators also intervened in a paper by Bhattacharya and “ordered [him] to redo” a study measuring population immunity to COVID-19 with antibody data, he told Huberman.
Former Stanford President John Hennessy approached Bhattacharya about a panel on COVID-19 policy but could not find sufficient support within the university, Bhattacharya said. Bhattacharya asked the medical school to host academic conferences on the subject in 2021 and 2022, but a conference would not occur on campus until October 2024.
Stanford Medical School did not respond to a request for comment.
The revelation comes amid a debate about the future of academic medicine and scientific institutions like the NIH amid proposed cuts by the Trump White House of $17.9 billion in NIH spending. The proposal follows earlier cuts to grants to a range of topics the Trump administration has directed a pivot away from, including COVID-19 and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Bhattacharya discussed how the scientific community’s errors during COVID-19 have opened up a debate about perverse incentives at NIH that contribute to stagnation: Many scientific studies prove irreplaceable in subsequent studies; researchers are reluctant to tackle taboo topics like COVID-19 vaccine injuries or increasing rates of autism; and senior scientists tend to accumulate power and disempower younger upstarts.
Bhattacharya said the NIH would commit to prioritizing replication studies and innovations to the NIH grantmaking process, among other reforms.
Bhattacharya said his ascension to the top of the NIH flows from his swimming against the current during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the public felt betrayed by public health agencies during that time, which has contributed to declining support for NIH research, Huberman acknowledged.
“It’s almost like big segments of the population feel like they’ve caught us in something as scientists and we won’t admit it,” said Huberman. “This isn’t just the health and wellness, supplement-taking, anti-woke crowd. This is a big segment of the population that says ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care if labs get funded. I want to know why we were lied to or why the scientific community can’t admit fault.’”
“I don’t think I’m the NIH director unless that were true,” Bhattacharya replied.
Bhattacharya added that scientific intuitions should “come clean” about the possibility that federal money underwrote research tied to the origins of COVID-19.
In the final days of the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services debarred the NIH contractor EcoHealth Alliance for its failure to oversee its subcontracted lab in Wuhan on coronavirus gain-of-function experiments.
Bhattacharya also described prolonged school closures and remote learning as emblematic of the “anti-scientific bent” of the public health establishment during the pandemic, citing the evidence from European schools that did not close available as early as the summer of 2020.
Bhattacharya argued that the evidence showing school lockdowns would not help in mitigating viral spread was clear by the time his Great Barrington Declaration was published in October 2020. The Great Barrington Declaration argued that protecting the most vulnerable should be the central aim of pandemic interventions and that minimized social harm should be a top goal for individuals without a high risk of severe disease and death.
“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls,” it states. “Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
“Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19,” the declaration reads.
The declaration cut against the conventional wisdom and received backlash in the scientific community, in the legacy media and privately from former NIH Director Francis Collins, who privately sought a “quick and devastating public takedown” of the document.
In a 2023 Tablet Magazine article, Bhattacharya described an exchange with the dean of the medical school, Lloyd Minor, in which he asked why skeptics of lockdowns had never been invited to present a “Grand Rounds,” a presentation on a topic of public interest to other faculty in the medical school.
“He told me that the experience of caring for COVID patients in March 2020 had scared some Stanford clinical faculty and that it was still too early for a dispassionate ‘academic’ discussion on COVID policy,” Bhattacharya wrote.
He also described the revolt on campus to remarks Bhattacharya made at a roundtable with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in March 2021 when he advised that there were no randomized trials to recommend masking young children.
The Stanford chair of epidemiology circulated a petition demanding the medical school leadership take action against Bhattacharya, while others papered campus with posters linking him to COVID deaths in Florida, according to the account. In response to his safety concerns, the university referred Bhattacharya to an advisor to help him reduce his personal information online.
“Faculty at Stanford should rightly worry whether their professional work will lead to deplatforming, excommunication, and political targeting,” he wrote. “Members of the public should understand that many of those urging them to ‘trust the science’ on complicated matters of public concern are also those working to ensure that ‘the science’ never turns up answers that they don’t like.”
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