I Asked Trump’s NIH Director: Can You Really Restore Trust?
What this video covers
Nayeema Raza interviews Bhattacharya for her show Smart Girl Dumb Questions, taped January 6, 2026, at NIH headquarters — the day after the administration announced its revised childhood vaccine schedule. The wide-ranging conversation covers the vaccine changes, the Great Barrington Declaration, health-care costs, the biomedical race with China, GLP-1s, and whether trust in science can be restored.
Key points
- On the schedule change — universal recommendations reduced from 17 diseases to 11 — Bhattacharya insists nothing was “taken off the table”: all vaccines remain available and insurance-covered, and key vaccines such as MMR and polio are unchanged, while COVID, flu, rotavirus, and meningococcal vaccines moved toward shared clinical decision-making and risk-based recommendation, and the hepatitis B birth dose had already been moved to two months by the advisory committee.
- He frames the change as an act of humility after a collapse in public trust, pointing to Denmark and the UK, which he notes mandate no vaccines, as countries that manage the same problems differently and, he says, have better child health outcomes.
- Shown the White House’s “72 injections versus 11” graphic, he declines to defend the marketing and tells viewers to go read the actual report for the full argument.
- He recounts co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, which argued against lockdowns and for focused protection of the vulnerable — the position that made him a prominent pandemic dissenter.
- Speaking as a health economist, he notes the US spends about 18% of GDP on health care versus 10–12% for peer countries with better outcomes, argues the system prices services rather than outcomes, and says reform should attack prices and market power — while affirming his support for Medicaid and Medicare.
- He rejects the premise that his budget is shrinking, saying the NIH’s roughly $48 billion is intact and that Congress has stopped proposed cuts.
- He describes geographic bias in grant review — a scientist told him the same application scored worse submitted from Tennessee than from Harvard — and calls his remedy “merit-based funding,” not DEI.
- He says he and Secretary Kennedy “disagree all the time” about scientific and policy questions, that Kennedy defers to him on some science, and that 11 to 13 of the NIH’s 27 institute directorships are open, with hiring moving fast.