Fauci SMEARED Him & Now He'll Be Running The NIH!
What this video covers
Recorded the day after President-elect Donald Trump named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as his pick to lead the NIH, this segment from comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore reacts to the news with undisguised enthusiasm. Dore frames the appointment as a vindication: the Stanford physician-economist who was vilified for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration would now run the agency whose former leadership had dismissed him as a “fringe epidemiologist.”
The segment walks through Bhattacharya’s pandemic history as Dore sees it — his early criticism of lockdowns, the focused-protection proposal of the Great Barrington Declaration, and what Dore characterizes as a smear campaign led by Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins. Dore, whose show has been consistently critical of pandemic-era public-health authorities from a left-populist angle, treats the appointment as evidence that the dissenters were right.
The discussion closes by speculating on what a Bhattacharya-led NIH might mean: an agency more open to dissent, more skeptical of pharmaceutical influence, and more willing to revisit the orthodoxies of the COVID era. It is commentary and reaction rather than an interview — Dore’s take on the news, delivered to an audience primed to distrust the public-health establishment.
Key points
- Dore presents Bhattacharya’s nomination as a reversal of fortune, arguing that the scientist “smeared” by Fauci and Collins will now oversee the agency they led.
- He credits Bhattacharya’s support for the Great Barrington Declaration — and its call for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of blanket lockdowns — as the core reason for the backlash against him. The video notes the declaration gathered some 890,000 signatories, including roughly 60,000 medical practitioners and public-health scientists.
- He argues that the pandemic-era campaign against lockdown critics amounted to censorship and character assassination, not scientific engagement.
- The segment previews Bhattacharya’s agenda: he says the new director has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH, and the video relays his claim that HHS commissioned a PR firm in September 2020 and spent nearly a billion dollars on pandemic-era messaging — which, per Bhattacharya’s telling, promoted vaccine benefits while never mentioning potential harms such as myocarditis in young men.
- The segment reflects Dore’s broader editorial stance: deep skepticism of pharmaceutical-industry influence over regulators and of the officials who managed the COVID response.