— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) August 29, 2025
Meet our NIH Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
Director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, sat down for an extended interview with ZeroHedge. Bhattacharya, long known as one of the fiercest critics of lockdown orthodoxy, has gone from blacklisted dissenter to running the world’s largest biomedical research agency. He carries into his new post a distrust of entrenched power, a skepticism of politicized science, and an insistence that free inquiry—not censorship—must guide American health policy.
What follows is a candid conversation, in Bhattacharya’s own words, on censorship, woke politics in research, the threat of bioweapons, and why he believes science cannot exist without free speech.
Further on in the article….
A Strong Stance Against “Biodefense”
As documented thoroughly in RFK Jr’s book “The Wuhan Coverup”, Anthony Fauci played a pivotal role in ballooning the U.S. biowarfare budget following the post-9/11 anthrax scare, an event still riddled with open questions Kennedy himself addresses in the book.
While our previous overlords would espouse morally virtuous stances against “bioweaponry” and lecture us about the importance of “biodefense”, Bhattacharya sees through the sleight of hand and dismisses the entire concept as suicidal. His full answer below which we find incredibly important:
“I think that bioweapons are useless to national security and incredibly dangerous for human populations. The Biological Weapons Convention in 1973 is a tremendously important convention. And I think that the United States adheres to it. But we have to make sure that we adhere to it not just on the letter, but in the spirit. That includes, for instance, research for biodefense. Biodefense sounds good, but often there’s very little line between bioweapons and bio-defense… this line of research is fundamentally useless to protect this country from anything and potentially places the whole world at risk.”
The warning is timely. President Trump recently signed an executive order banning gain-of-function research—which some read as only applying to foreign nations but Bhattacharya assured us is indeed a universal ban.