From Blacklist To NIH Director: Jay Bhattacharya On Fauci, Bioweapons, And The Collapse Of Free Speech In Science

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.

Fauci’s Censorship Apparatus

Bhattacharya did not hesitate to call out what he experienced during the pandemic years:

“It wasn’t just ZeroHedge that got subject to this censorship. I did too. I was on the Twitter blacklist. It was all true information that was just found inconvenient. That’s what you guys were sharing. That’s what I was sharing. And it was a gross violation of the American First Amendment.”

The Stanford professor—blacklisted for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration—was among those exposed in the Twitter Files as a target of covert suppression. He says the NIH under his leadership will chart a different course:

“We’re no longer in the misinformation detection business. We’re no longer in the censorship business.”

ZeroHedge itself was deplatformed during that same period for reporting inconvenient facts on the origins of COVID.

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— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) August 29, 2025

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. 

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— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) August 29, 2025

Woke Science

Bhattacharya doesn’t see DEI as harmless bureaucracy—he sees it as poison to science. The problem, he argues, isn’t the stated goal of improving minority health, but the way the system forces scientists to pledge allegiance to political dogma instead of data.

“Many universities, before they would hire some people as professors in scientific disciplines, would require DEI statements. It’s essentially like loyalty oaths.”

He says this ritual signals to scientists that advancement isn’t about competence or discovery—it’s about parroting the right ideology. That corrodes the incentive to produce results that actually improve health.

At NIH, he saw the same rot: tax dollars poured into programs that branded themselves as equity-driven but failed to move the needle.

“There was some chunk of our portfolio that was really huge during the Biden administration of DEI grants… The problem is that this DEI work—I don’t see any evidence that it actually improves minority health. It just politicized the agency.”

Bhattacharya’s stance is simple: real health equity will come from rigorous science applied to concrete problems—diabetes, cancer, infant mortality—not from “loyalty oaths” or politically branded grant programs. In his words, most scientists would gladly jump at the chance to “just do your excellent science” if freed from ideological policing.

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— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) August 29, 2025

Science and Free Speech

For Bhattacharya, the single thread tying all of this together is free inquiry:

“If you were a scientist in the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin, you’d have this guy named Trofim Lysenko who fundamentally believed that Mendelian genetics was false—in fact, that it was a capitalist plot. You were only allowed to agree with his theories. And so he used his position to suppress the speech of all the Mendelian geneticists around him. Many of them went to the gulag. As a result, science on agriculture basically froze and people were always starving as a consequence of this.”

That lesson, he argues, applies directly to America today.

“You can’t have science unless you’re allowed to criticize the predominant ideas. And if you have scientific power married to political power in a way that suppresses the ability for lots and lots of other scientists to say, ‘Look, you’re wrong, here’s this experiment to prove it’—you don’t have science. You have something else.”

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— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) August 29, 2025