Jay Bhattacharya Will Bring Much-Needed Transparency to NIH

(RealClearPolitics)—Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – the Stanford professor who is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the directorship of the National Institutes of Health – will bring transparency to this government agency, which sorely needs it.

I am an odd person to write a piece supporting Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination to lead the NIH. During the pandemic, I disagreed with Jay on COVID response. Jay supported the Great Barrington Declaration, while I favored a more active and engaged public health response, broadly although not completely along the lines of what was actually done in the United States. At times our differences were fundamental, other times pragmatic. Nonetheless, the differences of opinion between Jay and me on this subject were deep.

I debated Jay over Zoom on the topic of pandemic response, so I am well aware of his views on COVID response, as he is of mine. Our debate was not archived but was roughly similar to the Munk Debate I did with Jay’s Stanford colleague, John Ioannidis, and the SoHo Forum debate I did with Jay’s Great Barrington collaborator, Martin Kulldorff. These discussions are dated now, but they still reflect deep intellectual rifts that were brought into sharp relief by COVID and the collective response to it.

What makes my endorsement of Jay all the more peculiar is that he and I still disagree on COVID response. I know because I had the chance to talk with Jay and others in October at a conference that he organized at Stanford, at which I served as a panelist. What’s more, Jay invited me to this conference knowing that his and my opinions on this subject continue to diverge. Here and in other examples, I have seen Jay’s commitment to hearing diverse and disagreeing viewpoints. Jay is not one to try to muzzle a dissenting opinion.

The most important outstanding item on the COVID agenda is: Where did SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID – come from? The pursuit of this question is where Jay Bhattacharya and I have the most in common. I am on the advisory board of Biosafety Now, an organization dedicated to increasing transparency in high-risk experiments on pathogens with the capacity to harm people. Jay was, for a time, also involved with BN.

The stakes could not be higher: COVID killed 15 million people worldwide in 2020 and hasn’t stopped killing, although thankfully at a lower rate more recently. Tracing the origins of epidemics is one of the cornerstones of public health. This task is woven into its very fabric, even from before John Snow’s founding the science of epidemiology in the 19th century, through to the work of American pioneer Theobald Smith in the 20th century, and to the present day. There are a number of questions about COVID that may point to SARS-CoV-2 having leaked from a lab.

The NIH has not heretofore acted with enough transparency on COVID origins. It was a funder of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Former NIH director Francis Collins and former director of NIAID (National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases), Anthony Fauci, were both major proponents of gain-of-function virology research, some of which is objectively dangerous enough to require the highest security (BSL-4) labs (think: labs inside an air lock and researchers in pressure suits). Grants from NIH in this area included funding the research of Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine.

However, NIH has not acted to shed light on its actions, and has even stonewalled Congress.

There is nothing inherently political about wanting to know where COVID comes from; it is a core function of epidemiology. It is virologists – not those in epidemiology who wish to get to the bottom of COVID origins – who have politicized the COVID origins debate. As one of my colleagues at the University of California, Irvine condescendingly scolded me via email in 2022: “Suggesting lab leaks or worse (without any real evidence) feeds into the right-wing, anti-China conspiracies promoted by the Trump administration.” Other virologists have shown a remarkable incuriosity: “What difference does it make where it [SARS-CoV-2] came from?” asked another one of my University of California, Irvine colleagues, at a conference here. It makes an enormous difference. To avoid a repeat of COVID, we need better regulation of gain-of-function virology, and full transparency about coronavirus research in the years leading up to the pandemic.

Jay Bhattacharya understands that the NIH budget is public money, and that every American is a stakeholder in research performed by NIH, including the grants it makes to external scientists. He and I had, and continue to have, deep disagreements about the public health response to COVID, but the most important task facing NIH at the moment is give the world a full account of its involvement in research on the bat viruses that are the ancestor of the COVID virus, so we can better understand how SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans. Transparency is a principal (and principled) solution to lack of public trust in institutions. I am confident that Jay’s pursuit of transparency can restore public trust in NIH.