NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya speaks out on autism and COVID in new interview

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has landed the coveted role as director of the National Institutes of Health, and those in the Make America Healthy Again movement couldn’t be happier, as getting to the root cause of our nation’s health problems is what Bhattacharya has been working toward his entire career.

“I want to fulfill the mandate that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy gave to me, which is to use the NIH to do the research so we can understand how to make America healthy,” he tells Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight.”

And one of the first steps Bhattacharya is taking is launching a major initiative where scientists across the country will be compelled to actually answer the question of why autism has risen so significantly in recent years.

“The problem with autism is that — first, the rise, when you look back, is just meteoric,” Bhattacharya tells Savage.

However, to question the cause of autism or to focus on its rise coincides with a disbelief in vaccines or being “anti-science.”

“Somehow, you’re automatically anti-vaccine if you just notice the fact that there are so many more autistic kids than there were when I was a kid. And you put that together, and what you have is millions of families that don’t have an answer to this question,” he explains.

In the coming months, Bhattacharya tells Savage that Americans can expect to see tons of resources thrown at this problem.

“In just a few months, we’ll have a dozen or more research teams, where we chose them competitively from lots of research teams across the country,” he says. “It’ll be a range of methods, so, you know, basic science lab work to epidemiology to you name it, and with no holds barred as to hypothesis.”

As Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the lone voices that was willing to speak out against the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that we’re in good hands.

“The rest of the industry was saying, ‘No, you’re wrong,’ and, ‘Don’t say the things that you’re saying,’” Savage comments.

“It was a shocking experience for me. I thought scientists had academic freedom, and I’ve learned differently. In fact, probably the biggest problem during COVID was that. Like normally, if you can’t have free speech, then you can’t have science, is what I learned. And I think that’s why we had such bad outcomes with COVID,” he tells Savage.

“We suppressed speech of scientists. The Biden administration suppressed speech of normal Americans who questioned the school closures, the lockdowns, and all the policies that didn’t actually protect anybody, that yet ended up harming so many people at scale,” he continues.

“That’s actually another one of my priorities. I want to restore free speech in science,” he adds.

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