“I Believe It”: Bhattacharya Pushes Lab Leak Conspiracy At Contentious NIH Town Hall As Staffers Walk Out

Dozens of staffers walked out when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya promoted the unproven COVID origins story; others protested research cuts.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health director announced that he believed his agency funded research that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 1.2 million Americans. The remarks by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya came during his first NIH town hall, laying out his vision for the future, and were met with backlash from the audience.

“It’s possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings, and it is also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research,” Bhattacharya said, prompting dozens of staffers to walk out of the auditorium. The walkouts were met with applause that forced the director to pause his speech.

“It’s nice to have free speech,” Bhattacharya commented amid the clapping before continuing on to state, “If it's true that we sponsored research that caused the pandemic—and if you look at polls of the American people, that's what most people believe, and I’ve looked at the scientific evidence and I believe it—what we have to do is make sure that we don’t engage in research that is any risk…to human populations.”

Bhattacharya touted an executive order Trump signed earlier this month with him present restricting so-called “gain-of-function” research, which lab leak theorists claim created the SARS-CoV-2 virus, stating it “will allow us to…de-risk our portfolio in a way that potentially could cause a pandemic, and we'll make the American people trust our research again.”

The remarks on Monday were not the first time Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist, endorsed the disfavored lab leak theory. He was previously part of an extreme lab leak-promoting group called BioSafety Now, which was formed to oppose gain-of-function research. As a member of the fringe organization, Bhattacharya even signed onto letters demanding that the virologists behind several notable papers suggesting the SARS-COV-2 virus emerged from nature retract their work.

Evidence and the scientific community and literature consistently support natural spillover from an animal source as the most likely pandemic origin story. However, the idea that COVID came from a lab leak has become more popular over the past few years—particularly on the political right thanks to a sustained push by conservative dark money groups, political operatives, and GOP political leaders.

The Trump administration has been a major promoter of the lab leak. Donald Trump has been pushing the story since 2020 when he faced widespread criticism over his COVID response. In April, the White House took down the informational COVID.gov website and replaced it with a page called, “LAB LEAK: The True Origins Of COVID-19,” which features a picture of the president standing between “LAB” and “Leak.”

“Who says I believe it was a lab leak?”

Bhattacharya did not always publicly endorse the lab leak. He rose to prominence through the pandemic as a vocal opponent of viral mitigation measures like lockdowns, arguing in favor of a strategy of pursuing herd immunity through widespread infection of the population, limiting protections to the most vulnerable only. While his embrace of the claim that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab might seem at odds with this advocacy, the Stanford health economist has gotten mileage out of the unlikely, speculative theory as a pretext for attacking his perceived enemies.

Bhattachaya was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, articulating the herd immunity strategy, which was written and signed at a conference hosted by a libertarian think tank. Aiding in the conference planning stages was Trump COVID advisor Scott Atlas. The day after the document was published, Bhattacharya and his co-authors had a publicized meeting with Atlas and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

The declaration alarmed the mainstream of public health, including officials within the first Trump administration. Days after the authors met with Azar, former NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci expressing concern about the document and calling for a public rebuke of its ideas. The emails were made public in December 2021 and ever since, Bhattacharya has made them part of his personal lore, claiming to have been a victim of censorship rather than a truly fringe figure.

Following the revelation, the health economist began posting about COVID origins on X. His very first post referencing the lab leak in early January 2022, named both Collins and Fauci, questioning their motives for supporting natural origins. Three days later, he insisted they were behind “the lab leak cover-up” as well as “a smearing and propaganda campaign” against him and his declaration co-authors.

Although Bhattacharya began suggesting that his personal enemies had engaged in a “cover-up” of COVID origins, he did not openly embrace the lab leak for some time. In a post from May 2022, for example, he denied that his statement ought to be read that way.

“Who says I believe it was a lab leak?” Bhattacharya wrote. “I still don't know. I believe there was a cover up. That is obvious. And the tension you identify is both non existent and applies with equal force to natural origin lockdowners. Do you know how to argue in good faith? Sheesh.”

Indeed, early on, the health economist’s objective appeared to be linking his grievances over the widespread rejection of his herd immunity strategy to those of lab leak proponents who similarly felt their ideas had not gotten a fair hearing. Over time, however, he became more explicit in his embrace of the lab leak.

In June 2023, for example, Bhattacharya posted on X that the lab origin was “likely” and natural origins “I suppose…still a remote possibility.”

“The paper may be a product of scientific misconduct”

Bhattacharya joined the board of directors of BioSafety Now in August 2024, two months before Trump nominated him to lead the NIH. The group was co-founded by Rutgers University-based duo Richard Ebright and Bryce Nickels and Justin Kinney, an associate professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. None are virologists.

Ebright and Nickels have both called for the prosecution of public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci for his alleged funding of gain-of-function research they believe created the SARS-CoV-2 virus and for his role in what they claim has been a cover-up of its origins.

While with BioSafety Now, Bhattacharya co-signed letters calling for the retractions of publications from virologists that point to the Wuhan wet market as the source of SARS-CoV-2. In September, he co-signed the group’s open letter calling for the retraction of a paper published that month in Cell showing that genetic material from the virus and from animals that can carry the virus were present in the same swabs from the area of the Wuhan wet market where the majority of the positive samples were collected.

The letter accuses the authors of “unsound” research and scientific misconduct on a previous paper from 2020, citing Slack and email communications made public through a GOP-led congressional inquiry in which one of them suggested early on the lab leak was possible.

“When a paper--such as Crits-Christoph et al. 2024--has unsound premises and conclusions and has authors who committed scientific misconduct on a previous unsound paper on the same subject and may have committed scientific misconduct on subsequent unsound papers on the same subject, there is clear basis to infer the paper may be a product of scientific misconduct,” it reads.

Bhattacharya also co-signed a BioSafety Now letter last June calling for the retraction of two 2022 papers that supported a zoonotic origin of COVID.

BioSafety Now wrote two other letters—one in 2023 and another in 2024—calling for the retraction of the proximal origins paper Trump’s COVID.gov site takes aim at, which was published in 2020 in Nature. The paper was the first major publication to point to a natural origin of the pandemic-causing virus. Bhattacharya does not appear to have been involved in either letter calling for its retraction—though the first featured a change.org petition and it is unclear whether he signed.

While hundreds of problematic COVID papers have been retracted, none of the papers highlighted by BioSafety Now are among them.

In early 2020, Bhattacharya was himself a co-author of a paper about the seroprevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that came under widespread scrutiny for methodological problems and a whistleblower complaint alleging the authors failed to disclose funding from the founder of JetBlue.

“My studies have been terminated”

The staff walkout was not the only contentious moment of Monday’s NIH town hall. Bhattacharya, who has been talking up the importance of freedom of speech in science—another reference to his personal censorship narrative—faced interruption from the audience during a Q&A when discussing the more than $1.8 billion in federal research grants his agency had cut amid a larger push by the administration against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Bhattacharya told NIH staff that “there's been a line of research supported by the NIH that I don't actually fundamentally believe is scientific—that that is ideological in nature, and that doesn't advance the health and well-being of anybody, but does diminish public trust.” The comment echoed a response he’d given at a recent appearance at the Medical College of Wisconsin when questioned about the research cuts.

The NIH director advised would-be researchers pursuing grants from his agency to “avoid political ideology,” meaning issues like systemic racism and climate change.

“My promise to you is that if you put your talents to the things that actually affect American health and avoid political ideology, you’re going to be very successful,” he said.

At the town hall, Bhattacharya told staffers that they ought not to worry about the anti-DEI push, explaining that studies of the impacts of specific policies like redlining affecting minority populations would not be cut. However, this remark was met with pushback from the audience.

”As the program officer who oversees this research, I will tell you my studies have been terminated,” an individual interrupted.

Bhattacharya clarified that studies into the effects of structural racism would be cut, to which the individual responded, “What do you think redlining is?”

The NIH, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has also been canceling research into SARS-CoV-2. The Trump administration’s position is that the pandemic is over and the research is wasteful.