NIH Director Spreads Vaccine Misinformation One Day After CDC Shooting
Jay Bhattacharya called to end the mRNA platform on Steve Bannon’s War Room.
On Friday afternoon, a man who reportedly believed himself injured by the COVID-19 vaccine opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Atlanta and killed a police officer. The blood had barely dried when the National Institutes of Health Director appeared on MAGA extremist Steve Bannon’s podcast and stoked fears of the mRNA vaccines.
On Saturday, Jay Bhattacharya sat down for a virtual interview with former Trump strategist Bannon on his War Room show to discuss a recent move by the Department of Health and Human Services to wind down mRNA vaccine research. In the course of the 20-minute interview that ranged from topics like late night host Stephen Colbert to the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration Bhattacharya co-authored in 2020, the NIH director cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines and suggested the mRNA platform should be discontinued.
“As far as public health goes for vaccines, the mRNA platform is no longer viable.” Bhattacharya said. “If you look at the uptake of the recent COVID vaccines in kids, for instance, it’s less than five percent…overall less than a quarter of people have taken it despite the fact that there’s been relentless propaganda pressure to take the COVID vaccines…forever.”
”You can’t have a platform where such a large percentage of the population distrusts the platform if you’re going to use it for vaccines and expect it to work,” he said, while failing to address the role he and his political allies have played in stoking fear of said vaccines.
The NIH director is not the only Trump administration official to espouse the narrative that low uptake warrants an end to the use of the shots. After his agency stopped recommending the vaccines to pregnant women and healthy children, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary made a similar claim that people simply do not want the vaccines after his agency moved to restrict access to new boosters.
“By the way, America doesn’t want COVID boosters,” he declared, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Bhattacharya rose to national prominence amid the pandemic arguing against government interventions disfavored by the business-aligned political right, and has long cast doubt on the safety and usefulness of COVID vaccines—particularly for young people. As NIH director, however, he has sought to position himself as a champion of unbiased science and free inquiry, lamenting the loss of public trust in health authorities and framing his leadership around restoring that faith.
But Bhattacharya’s tenure at the NIH has been rife with controversy. His first agency town hall saw a walkout after he asserted that NIH research likely caused the pandemic—a highly speculative narrative that runs counter to the scientific evidence. In June, hundreds of workers at NIH signed an open letter, the Bethesda Declaration, accusing him of politicizing and undermining the agency.
Bannon, who has himself been a major spreader of COVID-related misinformation and conspiracy theories through War Room, opened his interview with Bhattacharya with clips from a segment of Colbert’s The Late Show promoting vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has killed over 1.2 million Americans to date. Evidently unimpressed, Bhattacharya accused the comedian of doing “tremendous damage to public health for several years now with this kind of like, relentless propaganda and now bullying.”
Bannon responded that Colbert “will be held accountable, over time” and pivoted to asking the NIH director what the science said about mRNA vaccines—or “this experimental gene therapy,” as he called them. Nodding along, Bhattacharya did not correct him.
“My bottom line is that the technology is promising but not yet ready for prime time for vaccines,” he said, noting that the shots do not prevent people from getting or spreading COVID. The vaccines significantly reduce the odds of hospitalization and death from the disease.
Bhattacharya made a number of misleading claims about the vaccines popular among anti-vaxxers. He suggested, for example, that they turn the body into “an antigen factory” and that the amount of antigen produced could not be controlled. And while Bhattacharya said he was “not sure” he agreed with claims that the shots had caused “large numbers of deaths,” he also said he did not agree with estimates that they saved millions of lives, as research has indicated.
“Those are estimates…are based on modeling estimates,” he said.
“What I think happened is that it’s very likely that the COVID vaccine protected people that were older for a short period of time against dying from COVID, and for younger people…because the risk of…dying from COVID is so low, especially for children, that the mRNA vaccine in that setting didn’t do very much good at all,” he added. “And we know for a fact that it had some side effects—severe ones, including myocarditis in an unacceptably high rate in especially young men.” Myocarditis is a rare side effect that can occur from both the vaccine and COVID infection, but when it occurs from the shot, it is often mild and self-resolving.
Public health experts hit back at the dubious claims Bhattacharya made on Bannon’s podcast.
Friday’s shooting put a spotlight on vaccine misinformation spreaders and fueled calls for the ouster of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vax activist who once called the mRNA jabs “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” But as Bhattacharya’s appearance on War Room highlighted, Kennedy is not the only government official in the current HHS to push vaccine fear.
Along with the secretary and NIH director, Makary and his team at the FDA—Tracy Beth Høeg and reinstated head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Vinay Prasad—have also cast doubt on the safety and usefulness of the mRNA vaccines.
After his agency moved to restrict their use, the FDA commissioner went on CNBC to discuss the vaccines. Asked for data on vaccine injury, he cited anecdotes, claiming that a friend of his had lost a parent to the shot.
NIH workers told Important Context that they were disappointed with Bhattacharya’s comments and willingness to engage openly with Bannon, who was instrumental in promoting the political conspiracies and hysteria that led to the violent insurrection, and who served time in prison for openly defying a congressional subpoena from the January 6 Commission.
“I was in the room when Dr. B said he was ‘disappointed in us’ for politicizing our interactions by having a pro-NIH rally,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute.
Kobrin, who made clear she was speaking for herself, as an individual, continued on, remarking, “How should we understand his appearances on extreme right-wing media? I’m disappointed in him.”
One staff scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that “skepticism over and false claims about the COVID-19 vaccine, championed by RFK Jr. and amplified by Dr. Bhattacharya on right-wing news media, has furthered distrust in biomedicine and discontent,” warning that the director’s “sensationalistic comments contribute to a narrative that federal workers and the public health workforce are intentionally causing harm.”
“This kind of demonization unsurprisingly leads to violence when so many people are armed in this country,” they said.
Another NIH worker, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told Important Context that Bhattacharya’s appearance on Bannon was hypocritical for the director.
“For someone who doesn't want science to be politicized he sure does a lot of politicizing of science,” they said. “It's extremely frustrating. Coupled with the recent EO (and all sorts of quotes from [Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget Russell] Vought AND Jay) blaming NIH for COVID it's a real problem.”
“We do not feel safe,” they added.
Shiv Prasad, a scientific review officer at NIH, warned that the agency needs to update security in its buildings in light of the shooting. Indeed, online threats against scientists have been worse since COVID hit.
“Americans have been misled into believing that mRNA vaccines are unsafe and that NIH was somehow complicit in the COVID-19 pandemic,” Prasad said. “As we saw in Atlanta, unstable people will be motivated by these falsehoods to attack federal research facilities. NIH has campuses and off-campus buildings across the US that are vulnerable. At risk are not only workers, but visitors, patients, and children at daycare facilities.”