Bulwark Takes - The Question That Left Trump’s NIH Chief Squirming

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Will Saletan gives his take on Trump’s new NIH director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, becoming a loyalist defender of the Trump administration’s most controversial and absurd health claims. Bhattacharya repeatedly blames Anthony Fauci for COVID-era school closures, declining vaccine confidence and other public-health failures, even when the record doesn’t support those claims. He also refuses to clearly say that vaccines do not cause autism and dodges questions about anti-vaccine misinformation and the CDC shooting. What happens to science when the people running America’s health agencies become more focused on defending Trump and RFK Jr. than following the evidence?

Hey, it's Will Salatan from The Bullwork. By now, I'm sure you've heard the Republican attacks on Tony Fauci, the guy who used to run the federal COVID response at the National Institutes of Health. But now, now there's a new sheriff in town. Donald Trump has a new NIH director, Jay Batacharya. And Bottagaria says Fauci was totally wrong about COVID. And now, he says, under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., we finally have medical advice we can trust. Right. I want to show you two interviews that Badacharya just did, because it turns out these guys who tell you that Fauci couldn't be trusted are even less trustworthy themselves. Okay, let's start with an interview that Batacharya gave to CBS News about a week and a half ago right after the Republicans got a hold of Fauci's diary. Badachariah said,

the diary showed that Fauci recommended closing the schools. In black and white, there is in the diary a recommendation to the people in California to close down schools. My kids stayed out of school for a year and a half. It kind of hurt to see that. A year and a half. Badacharya says his kids were out of school for a year and a half, and he blames Fauci. So let's check that out. Here is the diary entry where Fauci said he advised New York and California to close the schools. The date on that diary entry is March 15th, 2020. That was at the start of the pandemic when Trump and everybody else agreed that we were going to shut down for 15 days.

And then, then we figured out that the schools were relatively safe. So in June, Fauci said, send the kids back. but also importantly, always make the goal that it is very important to get the children back to school for the unintended negative consequences that occur when we keep them out of school. That was June of 2020. So I'm sorry that Batacharya's kids were kept out of school for another year and a half. But when Batichari blames Fauci for that, he's just wrong. In the interview, Badachari has said countries that reopened their school,

in the fall of 2020 were acting against Fauci's advice. He was making decisions about closing schools, in my view, against what the actual evidence was saying at the time. Like the European countries opened their schools in the fall of 2020 based on a lot of that evidence that he ignored. First of all, Fauci didn't make any decisions about closing schools. What he did was he gave recommendations. and closing the schools in the fall of 2020 was not what he recommended. So then, Badacharya took another shot at Fauci. The NIH is now focused on actually doing scientific work that advances health and longevity.

I think the way that Tony Fauci acted during the pandemic, you know, he was the head of a research institute. He wasn't the head of public health. Yet he acted as if he were the head of public health in this country. Wait a minute. Joe Biden literally appointed Fauci to be his chief medical advisor. That was Fauci's title. It was his job. Now, Badachari might not like that, but when he tells you that Fauci was just a director

at NIH and he had no business taking on this, the whole larger health portfolio, that is just not true. And then Batachari suggested that Fauci, that Fauci himself may have caused the pandemic. And I think that the NIH, under Tony Fauci, made decisions to support research that actually might have led to the creation of COVID. What I do know is that the decisions made by Tony Fauci during, in the years leading up to the pandemic, very well could have led to the cause that caused the pandemic. You've got to be kidding me. Okay, I've been over this before, but I guess I got to do it again. It is virtually impossible that

the virus on which Fauci and NIH sponsored research in China could have become the COVID virus, because they're just too genetically different. I've cited this fact check before, but here it is again. The viruses, it says, were a thousand nucleotides apart. But Badacharya keeps trying to pin COVID on Fauci. And then Baratariah says, he can't be sure. that vaccines don't cause autism. Do you think vaccines cause autism? I mean, I don't know for certain. I mean, if you ask me specifically about, like,

what my view of the evidence is, that I'd say that there isn't evidence that any vaccine I know of for certain cause autism. Do I know for certain that all vaccines don't cause autism? Well, that's a different question. Look, technically, you can never be 100% certain of anything. I mean, look, you can drop a basketball a hundred times, and it still won't prove that basketballs never float up. But the idea that vaccines cause autism is one of the most thoroughly studied questions in medicine.

So why does Batacharya mumble and stumble and tell you he doesn't know for sure? Because that is the new orthodoxy under Trump and Kennedy. They literally changed the CDC website to say that it is not, quote, evidence-based to say that vaccines don't cause autism. Look, Batachari is a real scientist, but he's trapped in an insane administration. And that is why he won't tell you bluntly that vaccines do not cause autism. And guess what happens when kids don't get vaccinated? We get these outbreaks of measles. But Baratariah says, oh, no, that's not my fault.

It's not Kennedy's fault. No, no, no. Batacharya blames Fauci. Right. So you've seen Canada lose its measles vaccinations, the eradication status. Mexico's on its way, the UK. A lot of this is stemmed from the fact that during the pandemic, there were claims made about the COVID vaccination for kids

that caused many people around the world to lose confidence and all vaccines. This is just amazing. Badacharya works for Kennedy. Kennedy has been trying to scare people away from vaccines forever. But Batacharya says, no, the reason people stopped getting vaccinated is that Fauci was too pro-vaccine. Okay, but fortunately, fortunately the interviewer, Matt Gutman, knows that that's not true.

because Gutman reported on the decline of measles vaccination before COVID. I distinctly remember covering a measles outbreak in a community called Vancouver, Washington, before the pandemic. And that was largely linked to a cultural shift there, that parents believed that childhood vaccinations were linked to autism and they elected not to vaccinate their kids. So I'm not sure that it is. is linked to COVID so much?

In other words, it was people like Kennedy with their scare talk about autism. They drove the decline in vaccination and the increase in measles. But But Badacharya doesn't want to offend Kennedy, right? So he glosses over the history and he just repeats this line that it all goes back to Fauci and COVID. But the real worldwide collapse in trust in public health that happens. during COVID, I think, is the root cause of the drop in vaccination. Okay, all of that is bad, but this is worse. Now I'm going to show you Bata Chari's interview on Sunday on Face the Nation.

So Margaret Brennan tries to ask him about the guy who opened fire at the Centers for Disease Control a year ago. You were down in Atlanta this past week. This is one year since that horrific shooting at C.E. CDC headquarters. Officer David Rose was honored this past week. He was killed last year protecting CDC employees from a gunman. The shooter was motivated by misinformation about the COVID vaccine. That is why he shot over 100 bullets into the windows of the CDC is enough being done to counter this kind of misinformation. She was asking about anti-vaccine misinformation, misinformation,

that motivated the shooting. And Batacharya would not answer the question. I want to focus on attention on Officer Rose because I think the shooter did was horrific. And I think that, you know, you can talk about why shooters do things, but really fundamentally... Well, his father said he was brainwashed

about the COVID vaccine and thought it was making him suicidal. That's what this... The thing is, like, to talk about the shooter puts the emphasis on somebody who's... I mean, I think we shouldn't be putting our emphasis. He says it right there. He doesn't want to talk about why shooters do things. Now, if a shooter is Muslim or transgender, oh, then the Trump administration, they're happy to talk about the shooter's motivation. But if it's about vaccines, if it comes from, you know, the kind of propaganda that Kennedy puts out, no, no, no, no, let's not talk about that. Instead, Bata Chariah tries to blame the media. for supporting Fauci's policies during COVID.

No, I am on misinformation about vaccines. I think the key thing is there's a loss of public trust in public health that happened in part because of a lot of, frankly, even even on this network and on other networks, there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic about how, you know, that led to things that really did cause harm to people. The school closures is probably the number one thing. School closures. She is trying to ask about a shooting.

at CDC. And he is trying to change the subject to schools. And instead of answering her question about vaccine misinformation, he says, oh, well, what about the other side? What about, what about their misinformation? What I'm saying is, you want to talk about misinformation. The kinds of decisions and sort of the public sort of phase of public health during the pandemic led to many people losing trust in public health. The Trump administration officials. No, I mean, like Biden. Biden, for instance, censored me. The pandemic began under the Trump administration. She's right.

Even if you didn't like Fauci's advice during COVID, he was giving that advice from the White House podium. He was standing next to Donald Trump. This message is brought to you by soul. Now, if you're anything like me, your day and night routines are not always routine, whether it's doom scrolling, keeping you up or just the Sunday scary is keeping you down. Bad habits can throw you off your rhythm. Something I found helpful to balance out my bad habits is sold mood gummies. Sol is a wellness brand that makes delicious, hemp-derived CBD and THC products designed to make

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Go to getsold.com and use the code bulwark takes. That's getsold.com promo code, bullwork takes for 30% off. Batacharya, who used to be an independent voice when he was at Stanford, see, now he has a job working for Trump. So he can't admit that Trump bears responsibility. responsibility. He can't even admit that Kennedy lied about the vaccines. RFK Jr. called the COVID vaccine, the deadliest vaccine ever made. That is misinformation. And we're not being clear about that. And I think that is dangerous. Wouldn't you agree?

Because the Biden administration censored people. Look over there. Look over there. Don't look at my boss lying about the vaccines. Look at all the bad stuff Joe Biden did. Is this what we want from the director of NIH? Batacharya says Fauci was too political. He says, oh, everything's different now. We have a new NIH, and it's just going to do science. But then Batacharya talks exactly like a politician. He shouts down the question, and he tries to change the subject to his own talking points.

And when Brennan tries to remind him that the question was about the shoe. shooting at the CDC, Badacharya goes all in on defending the boss. And said, look, you can't even talk about COVID vaccine harms. Yeah, and I'm talking about why you have the kind of distrust that's led to the kind of problems that we're talking about earlier in public health. That distrust was not caused by President Trump. It wasn't caused by Bobby. Look, this is really sad.

I've seen a lot of people criticize Fauci. And this guy, Badacharya, he was the best of them. He tried to be honest and he tried not to be political. And now that he has a job working for Trump and Kennedy, he's become just another flunky. And the saddest part is you can't trust him anymore. Here is what Batacharya said yesterday about the COVID vaccine mandates. People lost their jobs because of these.

vaccine mandates that didn't make any public health sense. So if you want to talk about public trust, you have to embrace that fully. Look, there's a lot of things that you could say about those vaccine mandates. You could say it was wrong to force them on people. You could say they backfired. They made people even more stubborn about not getting vaccinated. But to say that they didn't make any sense for public health, those vaccines were the single most effective weapon against COVID. Every study shows that. So when Batacharya tells you that the mandates made no sense for public health, he's the one you can't trust. And he's so fixated on COVID and his grievance about being censored that it's clouding his ability to see what we're dealing with now. He says,

you should vaccinate your kids against measles. And he's right. But then he says, no matter what is going around, you should send your kids to school anyway. In no way, shape, or form should this show or any other show like it perpetuate the idea that they're sending their kids to school is worse because they're going to be some health risk there when it's just not true. Wait a minute. It's true that you should send your kids to school if what's going around is COVID, because kids are pretty safe from COVID and they need to be in school.

But if what's going around is measles and if your kid isn't vaccinated, that kid has a 90% chance of getting measles if he is near an infected person. He's got a 5% chance of getting pneumonia. And he's got roughly a 1 in 500 chance of dying. Not everything is about COVID. Look, I'm not here to tell you that Fauci got everything right during. COVID, but when Badacharya and Kennedy and all these guys, when they tell you that Fauci was wrong about everything and that they've cleaned up NIH and the politics are all gone and you can trust them to tell you the truth, when they tell you all of that, they're full of it.

See you next time.