A ‘Fringe Epidemiologist’ on What’s Wrong With Public Health
1/29/20261 hr 4 min
If you want to understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the Covid era. Medical authorities spoke with certainty: Trust the science. Don’t listen to skeptics. But a lot of people stopped trusting experts entirely when outsiders got some things right and the establishment got some things wrong. Now those outsiders are in charge, like my guest this week. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health. I wanted to know: Can an outsider restore trust in public health institutions without undermining trust even more?
- 02:11 - How the “fringe epidemiologist” came to be
- 08:18 - What went wrong while “crushing COVID-19”
- 15:18 - “The responsibility of public health leaders”
- 28:42 - Reforming public health and the NIH
- 42:52 - Three areas of controversy plaguing public health
- 1:00:52 - Success metrics
(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)
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First 90 secondsRoss Douthat· Host0:00
[upbeat music] From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. [upbeat music] If you wanna understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the COVID era. In the face of a once-in-a-century, we hope, pandemic, medical authorities clearly felt like they needed to respond with absolute certainty. Trust the science, wear a mask, postpone your wedding, don't open the schools, and definitely don't listen to the cranks, and the skeptics, and the purveyors of misinformation. The problem is that those confident authorities inevitably got some big things wrong, and the outsiders and skeptics sometimes got things right. And as pandemic-era life got more and more, well, miserable, big parts of the public simply stopped trusting the experts entirely. So now, here we are in two thousand and twenty-six, and the outsiders are in charge. One of them is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He's in charge of the NIH, tasked with reforming the world's largest biomedical research