Hawley's Questions to Bhattacharya at HELP Hearing: Modernizing the National Institutes of Health
What this video covers
Sen. Josh Hawley’s round of questioning at a February 2026 Senate HELP Committee hearing on modernizing the NIH. Hawley presses Bhattacharya on two fronts: accountability for NIH funding that reached Wuhan and other Chinese labs, and whether NIH is studying the effects of social media and AI on children’s health.
Key points
- Hawley charges that NIH funded coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance and then denied it for two years, and asks whether NIH under Bhattacharya has completed a thorough review of all grants and funding streams that went to Wuhan or other labs in China over the past decade.
- Bhattacharya says his focus has been forward-looking: he has put in place better oversight of foreign collaborations, paused 40 grants with some potential risk of dangerous gain-of-function research, and put in policy “so that never happens again.”
- He concedes the retrospective review is not finished, calling it a long, complicated story involving foreign partners and other parts of the administration, and says he would love to work with Congress on it.
- He agrees with Hawley that accountability matters, comparing the needed reckoning to a hospital’s morbidity and mortality conference — “an honest conversation [about] what went wrong” — and commits to making it a priority.
- Switching topics, Hawley cites parents who testified that AI chatbots led their children to experiment with suicide and self-harm, and a study he cites finding 84% of parents are very or somewhat concerned about social media’s effects on their children.
- Bhattacharya says the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has a program on social media and children’s health, and pledges that NIH will make sure there is excellent science on the specific question of AI and suicide.