Jay Bhattacharya on the COVID shot, measles shot, RFK, COVID origins, and Gain of Function research [Transcript Excerpts]

Selected excerpts from Peter Robinson's 28 May 2025 interview of Jay Bhattacharya

Transcript excerpts from a 28 May 2025 Uncommon Knowledge (Hoover Institute) interview with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya - “Dr. Jay Goes to Washington: Reforming Science from the Inside at NIH - by Peter Robinson.

Links are embedded and the transcript presented without commentary, except in selected footnotes.

On the need for and efficacy of the COVID-19 shot

Peter Robinson: Marty Makary and FDA vaccine advisor Vinay Prasad published an update to the government's guidelines on COVID-19 vaccine boosters. They published this in the New England Journal of Medicine, a big time journal.

In that article, they wrote, “Although the rapid development of multiple Covid-19 vaccines in 2020 represents a major scientific, medical, and regulatory accomplishment”— big deal what we did and how quickly we did it — “the benefit of repeat dosing — particularly among low-risk persons who may have previously received multiple doses of Covid-19 vaccines, had multiple Covid-19 infections, or both — is uncertain.” So we're backing away officially, formally from advice to get repeat boosters, is that what's going on?

Jay Bhattacharya: Not just boosters, but also the recommendation, for instance, that kids as young as six months old be given the COVID-19 vaccine. If you look at other countries, no country other than the United States, I think, maybe you'll find some exception. But no country in Europe, for instance, I think, has a recommendation where kids as young as six month olds get the COVID vaccine, that's unique to the United States.

Robinson: So this is a long time coming, actually.

Bhattacharya: Yeah, and I read that paper, actually, and I think it's a fantastic paper. What that paper says is that if a drug company wants to have COVID boosters and COVID shots for kids as young as six months old. They need to produce excellent scientific evidence, randomized studies where they demonstrate an actual benefit to those people getting those shots, right?

Not just did you produce antibodies, but did you prevent dying from COVID, did you reduce the risk of hospitalization, did you at least prevent getting COVID for six months? And this is a minimum you would ask in order to market a product.

If you're gonna market a product, you should be able to demonstrate that kind of benefit.

Robinson: Niggling little question, does it work?

Bhattacharya: Yes, and are there side effects, and are we looking at those side effects carefully? This asks the question to the manufacturers of COVID vaccines, it says, “please demonstrate to us that this product actually does good for the people that we're giving it to.” Actual clinical good not just productions of antibodies.

RFK, Jr. and COVID & measles shots for children

Robinson: Okay, now I have one other question here that's mandatory, and that you and Bobby Kennedy Jr. Couple of quotations. The most frequent line of attack on him, as you very well know, is that he's some kind of anti-vaxxer, RFK Jr. and this comes from his confirmation hearings, he's speaking himself. “News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry, I'm neither, I am pro-safety. All of my kids are vaccinated, and I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.”

The New York Times, on May 1st, just a couple weeks ago: “Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. on Thursday announced plans to require all new vaccines to be tested against placebos. And to develop new vaccines without using mRNA technology, moves that extend his reach deep into vaccine development.” The New York Times is always leery of deep reaches and raise questions about whether Covid boosters will be available in the fall. Okay, what's going on here? You like this man, I know, because I've heard you speak admiringly of him.

Bhattacharya: I like him and admire him, I think he's not anti-vaccine, so lemme step back.

Robinson: All right.

Bhattacharya: So what's happened is we have a regulatory framework where vaccines are treated in a special and different way. I very fundamentally believe, for instance, that the measles vaccine is quite important for child health, I've said that multiple times, I believe it fundamentally.

I've also heard Bobby Kennedy say that in the face of the measles outbreaks that have happened, that children should get the measles vaccine, right? That's not a man that's anti-vaccine.

Robinson: Right.

Bhattacharya: Right, what he said is exactly true. Every conversation I have with him reinforces this. He cares about making sure that people understand what they're getting. Because of their successful history of vaccines going back centuries, the scientific community treats vaccines with kid gloves. But nevertheless, the regulatory bodies of this country have an obligation to make sure that the products we recommend that especially children take have a proven track record of safety behind them, and in many cases, they do.

And in some cases, like the COVID vaccine for children as young as six months old, they do not, the fact is—

Robinson: That's incredible to me, but those who are rushed through without the usual FDA—

Bhattacharya: Normally the safety testing of vaccines takes decades.

Robinson: Got it, and we didn't have time.

Bhattacharya: Yeah, so I'm not trying to indict anybody over this, I'm—just a fact, right?

Bhattacharya: In April 2021, I wrote a op-ed with Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard University, arguing that healthy children should not be recommended to get the COVID 19 vaccine.¹ And the reasoning was there was a very limited evidence of benefits for children because they die of COVID at such low rates that you don't really have much to gain from the vaccine for kids.

You're not preventing deaths, no randomized study had demonstrated prevention of deaths for children given the COVID vaccine. That's not a randomized study, does not exist that shows that. And there was a possibility of risks of side effects, so the benefit harm balance tilted against recommending children to get this.

To put yourself back in early 2021, COVID was killing older people at very high rates. And there was some evidence that the COVID vaccine might prevent those deaths.

Robinson: I know this, Jay, because you told me to go ahead and get vaccinated.

Bhattacharya: I got the COVID vaccine myself, cause I'm an old guy, right?² So the balance was different for older people, right? The right policy advice then.

Robinson: Based on the science.

Bhattacharya: Yes. Was no for children, yes for older people, especially for older people who are high risk with multiple chronic conditions that put them at high risk, that's a reasonable balance given the uncertainty.

Robinson: And so all that Bobby Kennedy is saying is let us not claim to know more than we know.

Bhattacharya: Correct.

Robinson: And let us know what we need to know.

Bhattacharya: Right, and then let make people make their decisions.

Robinson: So he's fair as far as you were concerned?

Bhattacharya: My experience with him is that the press has treated him tremendously, unfairly in part because they believe that he is threatening financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry and elsewhere.

Robinson: By the way, so let's face it, he is. And so are you. If you want to rearrange the way the scientific enterprise in this country is conducted and you have just eloquently described ways in which you would like to shift incentives have.

If there's a settled order that's very comfortable and there is a settled order, and people within that scientific establishment are very comfortable people by comparison with average American incomes, they will scream. This is politics.

Bhattacharya: I mean, the problem here is that I believe very firmly in capitalism. I believe very firmly in the ingenuity of American companies to address the problems of the American people. I mean I just, that's like, I'm an economist that, I mean that's just a fact. But the idea that requiring drug manufacturers to actually do honest safety testing or having regulators of the country, they're supposed to do honest safety testing and report it honestly to the American people, that's not anti-capitalist.

Robinson: It's no outrage.

Bhattacharya: In fact, it protects the companies, right? It makes it so that people trust the products of the companies more. It allows there to be a private sector that people view as addressing their needs. It directs the companies of the country to activities and products that actually advance the health and well being of the American people rather than simply improve the bottom line without actually translating to improved health.

“Origins”: Gain-of-Function/Lab Leak

Robinson: On May 5, I'm about to ask you about something that has actually happened. Most of this in prospect, but this is most of what we've been discussing is what you hope to do. Here's something that's happened. On May 5 after the White House announced new restrictions on gain of function funding, quote (this is you): “This is a historic day. The conduct of this research does not protect us against pandemics as some people might say. It doesn't protect us against other nations. There's always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out just by accident and cause a pandemic.”

Well, now, hang on. Gain of function research has been going on for decades. We have military labs and scientific labs that are constantly trying to figure out what the bad guys might do. Tweaking viruses to make them more and more lethal and then rushing to figure out what antidotes.

I thought this was a fixed part of the scientific slash military establishment. And you're saying, “no, do away with all of it”?

Bhattacharya: Well, so first of all, there's a bioweapons convention that President Nixon signed in 1973 that binds the United States. So we don't do offensive bioweapon research.

Robinson: Okay, right.

Bhattacharya: So that's—

Robinson: Details first.

Bhattacharya: That's the first, right?

Robinson: So we really don't?

Bhattacharya: We don't.

Robinson: And we've held to that.

Bhattacharya: Okay, right. Well, I mean, I've been in the government six weeks. I hope we've held to that. Well, I hope I don't find out we haven't. If I find out we haven't held to that, I'll go public with that.

Robinson: All right.

Bhattacharya: But I will say this: What we have done is we've done —we, including the NIH — has supported a research program with the utopian vision of preventing all pandemics. The way the research program has worked is that we fund people, the Eco Health alliance, once upon a time, to go out into the wild places, partner with foreign countries, including China, go out in the wild places collect the pathogens in the bat caves or wherever.

Robinson: Picking up bat droppings.

Bhattacharya: Right, so that we can catalog all of the viruses and pathogens out there. Even if there's—very unlikely that many humans will come in contact with those things. Bring those viruses and pathogens into labs, often in city centers, often not necessarily in high-security environments, do research on them to see if it's easy to manipulate them and cause them to become more transmissible among humans.

And the idea is, if we can identify those viruses and pathogens that are more likely to make the leap into humans, then we can prepare in advance. We can create vaccines, antivirals, or whatever before they make the leap in the population, so that when they make the leap, we are already ready.

There's two major problems with that. One, it working, which it doesn't, and then one of its safety, which it's not. First, if you make a study of a pathogen you found in the wild places that have never really ever infected humans before, and you create vaccines or whatnot to combat it when they actually make the leap, evolution still works, right? It's not going to be the same virus you cataloged. These viruses—

Robinson: Evolve very quickly.

Bhattacharya: All the time, and so you have a snapshot from ten years ago when you went to the bat cave, but you don't know what they look like now. And the vaccines and things that you've produced to try to prepare, you've never tested them on human populations before because no human had ever gotten the disease. So this is a foolhardy way to you pretend to yourself that we've protected ourselves against a pandemic when we haven't.

Second, the actual conduct of this research is very dangerous. And I think it's very likely that the COVID pandemic was the result of this kind of research agenda because it's not possible to guarantee even in high security labs.

Robinson: Are you prepared to say that the preponderance of evidence now is that COVID arose from a leak from gain of function lab in Wuhan?

Bhattacharya: Yes.

Robinson: Is that the position?

Bhattacharya: That's my position, and I believe it's also the position of various intelligence agencies of the government³ as well as other governments as well, that have looked into this.

Robinson: We were funding gain of function research in a lab of China, something went wrong and the world shut down?

Bhattacharya: Yeah, dangerous. Now, I want to make a distinction: there's only a small fraction of the portfolio of biological experiments that people do that meet this category of dangerous gain-of-function research that have the potential to cause a pandemic. It's a tiny fraction. There are gain-of-function activities that people do that actually advance human health, right? I'll give you an example.

We produce human insulin using a gain of function experiment. What we do is we take E Coli, put a gene in. I'm not sure exactly what the current manufacturing process is, but this was—you put a gene in that produces human insulin and the E Coli, then you grow them and they make human insulin. That's a gain of function that has no chance of causing a pandemic.

Robinson: Got it.

Bhattacharya: What we want is to make sure that researchers understand that they should not be doing research that has the chance of causing a pandemic. It's not, don't work on Ebola, don't work on a list of pathogens. Are you doing an experiment where even if you think you have a benign virus of that virus from the middle of nowhere that doesn't seem to infect humans. And are you doing experiments that augment them in ways that might infect humans and cause a pandemic? Then you shouldn't be doing that.

And the institutions that fund that work, that support that work, universities, NGOs should understand that if they allow that kind of work to go and they don't have it as part of the regulatory process where, say, let's evaluate it from the point of view of the risk of causing a pandemic.

If they don't say that that work is going on, they sort of surreptitiously do it and it's discovered ex post they did, they're gonna face essentially existential threats.

Robinson: Got it.

Bhattacharya: Right, it's so dangerous. It's like allowing everyone in the United States to have their own home nuclear reactor. Right? Are you doing—

Robinson: Unwise.

Bhattacharya: Yeah, it's not most of scientific—most of it's a tiny, tiny part of science. We regulate it. We have a Comprehensive Nuclear Testing Ban Treaty to make sure that we don't test nuclear weapons routinely because it doesn't actually improve the security of anybody, but does pose—

Robinson: Would you like to see an international treaty like the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on gain of function?

Bhattacharya: I would. I think that, it's not in any country's interest to invest in this kind of research. It doesn't give them any advantage in any geopolitical sense and it does pose potentially existential risk to human populations. Just look at what happened during the pandemic. You can have an experiment like this that causes literally trillions of dollars of damage, killing tens of millions of people with not just the virus itself. But the sort of outsized, inappropriate damaging response to the virus, you really should be not doing that kind of research.

Robinson: So this is one on which the planet ought to be able to come together in your—

Bhattacharya: Yes.

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1. Kuldorff and Bhattacharya wrote such an op-ed in June 2021.

2. Born in 1968, Bhattacharya was 53 years old when he received the COVID-19 shot.

3. It is not the position of the CIA under the Biden administration, per the written assessment the agency issued. See https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/follow-up-cia-assessment-of-covid