DisInformation Chronicle: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya End of Year Wrap Up Talk
What this video covers
A long year-end conversation with host Paul Thacker of The DisInformation Chronicle, recorded on New Year’s Eve 2025 from Bhattacharya’s California home. Bhattacharya recounts how he was recruited, what his first year running the NIH looked like from the inside, and the portfolio, replication, and media fights that defined it.
Key points
- Bhattacharya says Kennedy’s team first reached out in November 2024; after interviews in Palm Beach and Trump’s announcement tweet came a nerve-wracking hour with the president in January 2025, when it wasn’t clear Trump realized he had already offered him the job — and he then started in early April 2025 on the day the HHS reduction in force was announced, with roughly 3,000 NIH staff losing their jobs, after the Vacancies Act had barred him from any contact with the agency before Senate confirmation while decisions he was blamed for were being made.
- He argues the NIH spent its full congressional allocation — almost $50 billion — and that the money was redirected rather than eliminated, complaining that media coverage never reports the new grants that replaced the old ones.
- Citing his pre-pandemic research, he says NIH-funded researchers in the 1980s worked on ideas zero to two years old, but by the mid-2000s and 2010s were working on ideas seven or eight years old — evidence, he says, of an agency that became risk-averse and funds incumbents instead of cutting-edge ideas.
- He argues NIH’s DEI paradigm, down to end-of-year “diversity supplements,” failed on its own terms: minority life expectancy in the US has been flat since 2010, so the portfolio is shifting toward rigor, reproducibility, and research that improves health.
- On HIV, he says new tools such as lenacapavir and other PrEP drugs create an opportunity NIH should fund deployment research around, aiming to reduce transmission to near zero.
- On long COVID, he says roughly $1.5 billion was spent without producing a clean definition of the condition, and he walks through methodological problems he sees in a Lancet Infectious Diseases study — including a definition adopted partway through the study period and denominators that miss children who never saw a doctor.
- He lays out his replication agenda: dedicated funding for replication studies chosen by the scientific community rather than the government, a “replication score” and links attached to papers, and new career metrics rewarding data sharing and well-described methods.
- He defends calling Science magazine “fake news,” saying its news arm misreported his foreign-collaboration policy as ending all foreign collaborations, and says he will keep reaching the public through podcasts and X even if critics call him “podcast Jay.”