← The Isabel Brown Show
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- [00:00]
A
As a scientist myself, I am so sick of hearing just follow the science blindly. And I know you guys are, too. In the last couple of days, we've seen such an insane political backlash to actual scientific news like what we talked about yesterday on the show, this new emerging link between Tylenol and a potential risk of autism. But our public trust in science is so low that stories are now emerging of women who are currently dying in the hospital, in the ICU who hooked up to ventilators because they desperately needed to prove Trump wrong about Tylenol having a link to autism for their children overdosing on acetaminophen and killing themselves and their babies in the process. It has never been more important for us to restore public trust in actual science, not The Emperor Palpatine, Dr. Fauci's of the world. And I'm so, so grateful that there are people in positions to do that.
- [00:55]
B
Just like our guest today on the.
- [00:56]
A
Isabel Brown Show, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institute of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya, we are so excited to have you on the Isabel Brown Show. I shared with you just a few minutes ago. You've been one of our top requested guests, especially from young parents, because there is so much confusion about science, about what science means in the wake of the COVID pandemic and sort of the political weaponization of that.
- [01:32]
B
So for those who, who aren't scientists.
- [01:34]
A
Like I am and don't read a bunch of peer reviewed studies all the time or keep up with PubMed, can you explain to us where we are right now and what the big changes have been here at the NIH in.
- [01:44]
B
The last few months?
- [01:45]
C
Sure. So first of all, the NIH is, it's an amazing institution, like a century or more of, frankly, it's the best part of government. I'm biased, but you know, the reason I think that is because it's responsible for so many amazing discoveries over a century. Like almost all of the things we know about medicine. A lot of that, those advances came out of this place where we're sitting. And so I just, you know, with that kind of history behind it, you expect it to. And like actually the mission, research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. Like, who can be against that?
- [02:25]
A
Right.
- [02:26]
C
But the problem was that during the pandemic, it came to be associated essentially with all of the, the problems we saw, like you saw the lockdowns, the school closures, all of that. Even before that, the possibility that NIH contributed to the work that may have caused the pandemic. I mean, not intentionally to cause it, but like sort of doing dangerous research for reasons we can probably get into in just a bit. And then the vaccine mandates and all of that, a lot of the public lost trust at the nih, and that's just a fact. I mean, we just have to deal with that fact. And where we are now is this clash between what the NIH ought to be, which is this shining institution that makes everyone healthy, devoted to science, and then the raw facts of what happened during the pandemic, where science really just didn't do very well.
- [03:25]
A
That's so well articulated and honestly insane that we can freely have this conversation now, knowing how much back backlash and censorship and confusion there has been around science. Literally yesterday, Google announced through YouTube that they did in fact cow to a lot of pressure from the last administration about censoring any sort of open dialogue related to how we treat COVID 19, how we responded to it from a public health perspective. And now, four years, five years later, they're going to end up restoring a lot of those accounts.
- [03:54]
C
I was, in March 2021, I was in a, a policy roundtable organized by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and he asked me in that round to pull back to March 2021. Okay, so you remember the mask mandates and all the craziness around masking toddlers, 2 year olds. The United States was the outlier. Everyone else in the world, no one was saying mask toddlers. The governor asked me on March 2021, should we mask toddlers? What's the scientific evidence? And I looked this up because I knew he was gonna ask me this question. So there's none. There's literally none. Like it was based on nothing. And so I said to the governor, there's no good scientific evidence that we should mask toddlers. YouTube censored that video. YouTube censored the video. And so, like, you know, it was shocking to me how the government used its muscle during the pandemic to silence scientific discussion. The Biden administration was absolutely terrible on free speech, Absolutely terrible. And, you know, if science can't function without free speech, it's fundamental to how science works. You should be able to disagree with me. I mean, that's good in science.
- [05:03]
A
Well, that's what the scientific method is all about, right? We all learn that in elementary school, in our education system in America. But I will never forget being a graduate student here at Georgetown right at the beginning of 2020, and seeing the COVID pandemic emerge, learning from Some of the top people here at the NIH and the FDA and the WHO in public health response and being told in my classroom from so many of these educated scientists, there's something really wrong here. We've never responded to a disease this way, ever. This social distancing concept, the lockdown concept, the masking concept.
- [05:34]
C
Do you remember plexiglass?
- [05:35]
A
Yes, it was. I mean, priests were shooting Super Soaker water guns to baptize your child in church because that was the science and you weren't allowed to question.
- [05:46]
C
That's when church was allowed to open.
- [05:47]
A
Exactly. Eventually, yeah. Years and years down the line. But it was so confusing to me as someone who had been trained as a scientist to ask all of the big questions about how something works. Never arrive at the conclusion before you see all of the evidence. But we had inversed that entire process and silenced and censored people like yourself in the process. So that obviously spurred some action in you and wanting to get more involved. Walk us through what that looked like for you.
- [06:13]
C
Well, I mean, it's surreal to be sitting as the director of the nih. The former director kind of went after me pretty viciously. Not Francis Collins, not the immediate Formula One. And I don't know how else to explain it other than there's something about the way God uses these people. It's just completely unexpected. But to me, it's a huge obligation that I can restore the NIH to what it should be. We have to. In order to do that, we have to change the problems, change the things that led to the problems of the pandemic, and then double down on the things that we know can do well. Right. The fundamental research that advances knowledge, that translates over to better health for people. Right. So that's what we have to do to restore trust. I mean, you asked me earlier a few things that we've done. So the President signed an executive order banning all, essentially pausing all dangerous gain of function research, the kind of research that likely led to the pandemic. The whole idea of the dangerous gain of function research was sold as a way of preventing all pandemics. We just go out into the wild places, get a virus or whatever, bring it in the lab, manipulate it so it's more dangerous to humans. Where the idea was, how many evolutionary steps do you need before you can make the virus more transmissible in humans? And if it's very few, well, that virus is a high risk. If it's a lot, you bring the virus in. It takes a lot to do it. Then that virus is low risk. And then you prepare vaccines in advance for the viruses that are high risk. The problem with that idea is that you get like, this is crazy, but essentially you make vaccines in advance that have never been tested on humans. And then when the virus makes the leap, well, you're ready, right? But you're not ready. Cause those vaccines have never been tested on humans. You don't know they're gonna work. And then the other thing is, evolution happens. And so the virus that actually makes the leap may look very different than the one that you studied in the lab. And then, of course, there's the possibility of lab leaks. So I was really delighted when the president signed an executive order, said, no more dangers can function. And we've been working on a regulatory framework with the White House to make sure that this never happens again.
- [08:39]
A
That's fantastic.
- [08:40]
C
It's a huge advance. The president signed an executive order, I think, on day one, saying, we're storing free speech. And so I put in place these, okay, this is gonna sound crazy to you, but this was crazy to me. It turned out that you needed the nih. There's a huge amount of internal scientists. They needed to get permission from above before they can send their scientific papers out for publication. Now I sounded like I gotta be a Stanford professor for a long time. I never had to get permission until the pandemic. But that's another story. I mean, academic freedom means that scientists are going to be able to publish things that I disagree with as a director. That's a good thing, right? And so I put in a place of policy that says if you're a scientist here at the nih, you have a scientific result you believe in, you can send it out for publication. You don't need to get my permission or your supervisor's permission. I mean, there's a whole host of things. But that's the beginning of how you restore trust, put regulation of things that we should not be doing dangerous gain of function work. We shouldn't be taking existential risks on behalf of the American people or the world population without, like, you know, extensive regulation, and then restore free speech.
- [09:57]
A
I'm so glad you're talking about this bioethical conversation, because this is something we cover a lot on our show. My audience knows I'm a scientist by education, but these days I talk more a lot about science rather than participate in it. But something that's been really puzzling to me over the past few years is the ide that we've just gotten so out of control with research with clinical implementation of different scientific methods that we don't even stop to ask the question just because we can, should we. Has there been any research here at the NIH that has been alarming to you since coming in as the director on, hey, other than gain of function research, maybe. Why are we doing this? There's a lot more potential negative side effects than positive benefits.
- [10:37]
C
I'll give you one that's got. It's a politically hot potato. But I think I still am puzzled how this happened. The NIH is excellent at science, right? It's excellent at doing fundamental biology. It's excellent at doing clinical research and should be better at taking that clinical research and figuring out ways to get it to the American people better, right? So those are the things we're good at For a long time, it turns out the nih, a part of its portfolio, included dei. Essentially the goal, rather than the mission of the nih, which is research that advances the health and longevity of the American people, there was an additional mission added on that was never articulated, that we were going to somehow solve these social justice problems that we're not really equipped to solve. We're scientists. We don't do that. There's nothing that we can do that will establish utopia on earth. What we can do is discover new things that make people healthier, maybe help them live longer, live, you know, live more lives that don't. Where you don't have to worry about all the chronic diseases or diseases or the acute conditions. I mean, those are things we can potentially do to establish, you know, social justice. And it perverted the way we think about science, right? It made it more difficult because in social justice, people have very, very strong feelings. You can't test it empirically. Right? So, like, I suppose I believe that the world is systemically racist. Right? And it has been for its history. Okay, well, how do you empirically test that idea and the impact. And let's say you think that that's the reason why certain groups are very unhealthy. How do you empirically test that? You can't run the world a second time. You can't get a control group. It's not something we can where it's in our capacity to do. And so we've worked to like, remove a lot of that from our portfolio. It's been painful because, you know, when you tell scientists, go do something, they'll try to do something. But that something I think hasn't actually translated over to better health minorities. If you go back the last decade and a half, there's been no real increase in life expectancy for minorities. Actually for almost every all Americans there's some flat life expectancy. It hasn't translated over to better health for most of the population. And what it's done is it's just politically divisive with no real benefit to show for it. And so I think what the NIH ought to be is something that an institution devoted to its mission, right advance, do research that advances health and leave the politics aside, just remove it from our and that's what we've been working on is trying to like get a portfolio of research projects that really are science, that really have the potential to advance health of every American minority, non minority. It doesn't matter who you are. I want the research we do to really help you. And fighting like using science as a cover to fight crazy social justice political fights, you, it's, it just harms the nih.
- [13:40]
B
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- [15:27]
A
I am not surprised to hear you say that, although I think the average public American might be surprised to hear you say we should leave the politics out of science. Especially this week. I'm seeing a lot in the media about how President Trump and Secretary Kennedy and yourself and other people here involved in the science aspect of the administration are using politics to push a political agenda and using using science to push a political agenda, particularly at this intersection of Tylenol and autism and how the media is treating that. There's been a lot that's happened in the last 48 hours or so. But let's remove the politics for a second.
- [16:01]
B
Back up.
- [16:02]
A
And can you explain from a scientific perspective where this is really coming from?
- [16:06]
C
Sure, actually. So it turns out that if you go back 10 years, there were early reports that women who take Tylenol during pregnancy, especially late in pregnancy, their children after birth are more likely to have some neurodevelopmental conditions, adhd, autism. Now there's a fight in the scientific literature, there always is, between how much of that effect is right. Some people think it's a tiny effect, but does on the positive side, hard to detect. Other people think it's larger. Right. And there was that fight going on in 2016, 17. There were like news reports about this, about this literature. That literature has gone on. There's been a lot of interest in it scientifically, but it never got to the sort of attention of the public after that big burst in 2016, 2017. Recently there was a study published by some researchers at Harvard University and at Mount Sinai University in New York, Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. And the researchers concluded, and this is included the Dean of Public Health at Harvard, that this literature supported a cautious stance toward using Tylenol when you're pregnant. Now, I can understand the reason for the cautious stance because you know, if you have a high fever and you're pregnant, that can hurt your baby and you don't want to leave that alone. And Tylenol may be the only way to do it. Do that in that case, on the other hand, there are situations where people take Tylenol and maybe they don't have to. I mean, they could have other ways of managing the problems that Tylenol is supposed to deal with. Right. And so what the researchers concluded when they did this review of the literature, where there was a, Like I said, there's a big fight is that prudent medicine says take the lowest possible dose for the shortest amount of time. Think carefully before you use it, because there might be this side effect. You know, there's a big fight over whether it actually causes as the rising autism or it's just associated with. And these other things. In my view, that scientific fight I don't think is yet resolved. But I think I have an obligation to tell people when there is this finding that can help guide people's decisions. You should know when you're pregnant that there is this fight going on in the scientific literature about.
- [18:37]
A
That sounds so reasonable. That's so shocking to me that this is such a reasonable conversation.
- [18:43]
C
I don't, I don't understand it. I. Why it. I mean, I. Okay, I have a theory. I don't. This, this is my. Okay, so let me go back to the pandemic. Remember June 2020, you probably weren't paying attention. You didn't have kids yet, but you're. But I was paying careful attention because my kids were in school then. June 2020, everyone, a whole bunch of scientists looked at what happened in Sweden with the opening of schools. The Swedes never closed their schools for kids under 16. And the evidence was that it was that the teachers were at the same risk as other workers in the economy, not higher risk. And that the kids got to have. No, they got to have school, they got to go to school. They got to have a normal life. Yeah. And you can see in the numbers now, their Swedish kids have no increase in depression, anxiety. There's no learning loss. The Swedes do not hurt their kids. That evidence was in by June 2020. And so people are saying, let's open schools then, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. Right, let's open schools then. President Trump has a press conference where he says, well, we should open schools. And then the aap, the American Academy of Pediatrics, changes their mind. Shortly after, the president, based on no scientific evidence, because scientific evidence already by June of 2020 was clear that closing schools and spring of 2020 was a mistake. It was only. As best I can tell, the only thing that changed was the president said we should open schools and somehow Whatever the President says is for some group of people is automatically wrong. He was more scientifically right than AAP was. And in, you know, I can't speak like the President. I'm not, I'm never going to. I'm a geeky scientist, right? So I'm not going to. I'm never going to be like him. But when he goes and tells people, I mean, I was standing there right next to him in that press conference. Don't take it. Don't take it unless you need to. Isn't that exactly what I said?
- [20:42]
A
Yes, just a little bit louder, perhaps, with his style of speaking. And that's the part that's just been baffling me these last 48 hours. Because what's really unfortunate is that this isn't just silly clickbait headlines or ridiculous posts on social media. This is actually impacting people's health. Now this has turned into a TikTok viral challenge of these pregnant women who are basically down bottles of Tylenol to try to prove Trump wrong, that it won't cause autism. This morning I came across several stories of women who have overdosed from acetaminophen and they are now on ventilators in the hospital and likely them and their children, their babies are going to die because of this. That's why I think this restoration of public trust in science is so, so important, because this really has nothing to do with President Trump or whoever is sitting in the Oval Office. This is just belief in objective medicine and science.
- [21:32]
B
Right?
- [21:32]
C
Yeah, no, exactly. I saw some of those reports. You know, Tylenol, it's an over the counter drug, but it's probably the most dangerous over the counter drug. It's very easy to overdose and make your liver basically kaput with it. So you gotta be careful with it. Regardless. There's cumulative overdoses also, like, if you take too much over a relatively short period of time, it doesn't have to be just the whole bottle. It can be like you can build up toxicity in your liver and actually kill your liver. And so baseline, like doctors will, when they're talking about Tylenol, will say, be careful with it. The President is just saying, be careful with it. In pregnancy especially, it's heartbreaking to watch people take such risks with their health simply for, like narrow political points. I mean, in medicine we're supposed to do no harm. And I've seen doctors, pregnant doctors, women, pregnant women, doctors who like, are on TikTok taking it when they don't need it. Need just blows my mind. I feel like it basically, it's a poisoning of medicine with politics in a way that just, it should never happen.
- [22:44]
B
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- [24:36]
A
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head that just because it happened to come out while this administration is in political power here, there is obviously going to be a natural response to that, which is unfortunate, but is systematic of the society that we live in today. And I'm starting to see a little bit of that associated with many of the other initiatives championed by Secretary Kennedy and the department, Department of Agriculture. I know we just brought on Dr. Ben Carson as a nutrition advisor, which is fantastic, and I'm very excited to see that. What potential backlash are you guys anticipating when it comes to some of these new initiatives? And what are some of the next initiatives that are going to come out of the NIH here.
- [25:11]
C
Well, I. Backlash, I hope none, because I think they make sense. So one big initiative that I've been working on, I'll just do two of them, but let's do the first one. Okay. I have to do some background on this. It turns out that a lot of the scientific papers that are published, peer reviewed, published even in top journals. When independent people, scientists, look at the same question, they don't find the same answer. Now, we've known this for decades. When I was a med student 5 million years ago, because I'm old, my favorite professor would tell me, look, Jay, half of what you're learning is not true. And I was like, as a young med student, they're like, wait, what do you mean? Which half is not true? And you said, look, science is difficult. If you have some knowledge about something, it's very often the case that the thing that, you know, when other people look at the same thing, they're going to find a different answer. And it's absolutely true. Like when I was a med student, the ulcers were not caused by bacteria. You're scientists, you know they're caused by bacteria. But when I was a med student in the, in the ancient days, it was not caused by. You had to. The treatment for ulcers was like, stop drinking coffee. And sometimes they do surgery to like cut off your recurrent vagus nerve. Like, they literally would do surgery. Anyways, enough about the old times. But the point is that, like, that thing I learned in med school wasn't true. That was in part because of a new discovery. But it's also the case that a lot of what scientific papers that are published, they're just not true. And it's true. That's because science is hard. I think something is true. The publication process first. If it's a negative result, you can't get it published. A null result is very hard to publish. And even true positive results, I can convince myself I'm right. I can even be very persuasive in the scientific literature that I'm right, get it published. But if you were to do another look at it yourself, independent of me, maybe you won't find the same thing that's really common in science. So it's called a replication crisis. I think the NIH should solve that right now. What happens is you have authority. I publish in a top journal, therefore I'm right. I'm an NIH director or a fancy Stanford professor or something, and therefore I'm right. But that's not what the basis of truth is in science. What basis of truth is that other people looking at the same thing find the same answer or very similar answers, looking at it from a different point of view, get the same answer. There's this idea of consilience, like other people, everyone looking at it, looking at it together, looking at it in different ways, find the same answer. That's how we know the world is round.
- [27:49]
A
Well, that's how something is supposed to be peer reviewed, right? Ultimately, yeah.
- [27:52]
C
I mean peer review by itself, by the way, is not, that's actually a narrow process. Right. So like I've peer reviewed thousands. I mean, I mean I've lost count of how many papers, got some crazy number of papers and no one ever gives me the data that they, I just read the paper and see does it make logical sense. But I don't get to, I don't actually replicate what they did. Peer review is a, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient to establish truth. And so with the nih, we can solve that problem. So I'm, that's what I'm working on. Like let's make people who do replication, let's have them have the honored place in science they deserve. Right. Right now you can't make a career out of it. We can fix that. Let's have a place to publish those results, those negative results that replication studies and link them back. So you do a search for a paper instead of, oh, it's published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it must be true. No, there'll be a replication button. You click the replication button and all the relevant replication research to that paper comes up summarized and you can click and see each one and see do other people looking at the same thing find the same answer. Let's make that the basis of truth in science. I think that. So I'm really excited about that. So we're going to fix the replication crisis. Again, a very geeky thing.
- [29:00]
A
But no, it's important actually, because I think there is that assumption even in the scientific community. If it's in a journal, then it's true. If it's in a journal, I can trust it. And that is especially shoved in front of the faces of medical school students who think if anything is outside of the realm of this peer reviewed literature that I'm constantly reading, then it can't possibly be true. And everything that is in front of my face here, I have to be able to trust.
- [29:22]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, let's go back to the pandemic. A lot of the reporting that you would see was so biased. It's because they would talk to a couple of experts who had a particular view. Lockdowns are good. School closures are good. Mask mandates are good. Vaccine mandates are good. And they would point to some New England Journal piece or something or Science or Nature piece and say, oh look, here's evidence. But that's not evidence. Evidence is, yeah, that piece is fine, but you have to have other people looking at the same thing to find the same answer. Right? Let's train scientists to use replication as the basis of truth. Let's have it make it easy for reporters to go and see. Not is it New England Journal, but like click the replication button in the search engine and see do other people find the same thing in the spirit.
- [30:10]
B
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- [31:38]
A
I'm glad you brought up vaccine mandates because I would love to ask you about this. One of the biggest questions we're getting from our community right now is from.
- [31:44]
B
Young moms like myself. I have A five month old at.
- [31:46]
A
Home who are just shocked at the childhood and infant vaccine schedule. It is certainly not the one that we grew up with. And I'll honest, you know, as a scientist myself, I was floored, flabbergasted that my child was supposed to receive six vaccines in her first visit at just a few weeks old at the pediatrician's office. There's been a lot of conversation in our country, and especially in this administration, about whether or not that is the appropriate path to take forward. Are we expecting any major changes to the childhood vaccine schedule? And tell us a little bit about some of the announcements that have come out in the last few days.
- [32:19]
C
Sure. So first, that's not the nih, that's the cdc. Right. So that's the somebody else, not me. But I've been watching very carefully and closely. Okay, a couple of things about this. So first of all, let's talk about mandates because I think a lot of people get this confused, right? So you don't need a mandate to encourage people to take a vaccine that's worth taking. A mandate means you can't send your kid to school unless you have exactly the schedule, right. If you don't do exactly what the CDC recommends, then your kid doesn't get to go to school. That's what a mandate is, essentially denying kids education if they don't agree with the CDC schedule. You don't need a mandate to encourage parents to give vaccines where the scientific evidence is really, really good. You just don't. The UK has no mandate and very high uptake of the measles vaccines and all the other standard vaccines. Scandinavia, neither Norway nor Sweden have a vaccine mandate, yet their uptake of vaccines is very, very high. Because people in public health are honest with parents about what they think is really good and they'll tell you the scientific evidence. They'll allow a debate and discussion and ultimately science wins, right? People are convinced by good evidence. I mean, I happily vaccinated my children with the MMR vaccine, the DPT vaccine, polio. I mean, these are like important vaccines in my view. And I think the scientific evidence that of course there's side effects for some cases, and we have to acknowledge that, but they're rare enough and the benefits are so great that I'm glad that I did it. Maybe I would think differently if my kid had unfortunately had one of the side effects. Right. So we have to acknowledge both. But that kind of conversation leads to public trust in public health and ultimately leads to the right outcome. So, like, you don't need the mandate to get high levels of vaccination in kids because when the scientific evidence points in that direction, the mandate happens because of a failure in public health. The public health, basically people have lost trust in public health. And now the only way we can get you to what we want is by forcing you, by threatening your kid's education if you don't agree with, if you don't comply. Right. So I think that's just as a baseline of where we are. That's just to start. As far as the schedule itself, I don't know what the right schedule is. Let's just say up front, I don't know. I look at like the Danish schedule, many, many fewer vaccines than the American schedule. Just looks like it's just chock full. As you said, multiple vaccines within a short period.
- [34:59]
A
I believe I counted five Covid boosters until quite recently when that has now changed the recommendation before your child turns two. I mean, it's crazy.
- [35:08]
C
It was unique in the world. In the United States was the only country that was essentially recommending boosters for children under six months and above. No other country on earth was doing that. And I look at the evidence on that. Frankly, I don't understand what some of my scientist colleague friends are thinking. Right. The harm from COVID infection in babies is very limited. Now I'm not saying you can't have bad outcomes. Absolutely you could. Right. But on the other hand, the evidence that the vaccine stops you from getting Covid or stops your child from getting Covid. Well, there isn't any randomized. In fact, almost all of the randomized, in fact, all of the randomized evidence in children as young as 6 months only asks whether the COVID booster increases antibody levels. It doesn't ask if it prevents death. This is the randomized evidence. If it doesn't ask if it prevents hospitalizations, there's non randomized evidence. But it's frankly, this is what I do for a living is I do observation, I do observational data analysis. I just don't like, I think it's not high quality outcomes. And then on the flip side, there's a possibility of side effects for kids. I mean young men we know have high rates of myocarditis after the booster and after the COVID vaccine. So like on balance, why would you Recommend it for 6 months? Most 6 month olds and most of the world agrees. Right? So, and yet the CDC put it on this childhood vaccine schedule. Like your child is probably gonna, I don't know which pediatrician you have, but like they're probably gonna go tell you when Your child is 6 months old that they should get the COVID booster again on the basis of sort of very mixed evidence. On the other hand, the MMR vaccines, I think it's a thing that every parent should have their kid, unless there's some very, very special circumstance, every parent should have their kid vaccinated with it. Now, part of the compact here is that if we do, if I make these kind of recommendations, that I am committed to studying the side effects and then honestly saying what they are and then working to find better versions of the vaccines so that they have fewer side effects. So something that CDC just recently did, acip, this advisory committee for immunization practices did at the cdc, they used to have a recommendation of taking the MMR vaccine, measles mump rivella, and combining it with chickenpox. They call the MMRV vaccine varicella is the chickenpox. And there was some evidence that when you combine it in this way, the rate of seizures in infants is higher. It's not a huge increase, but it's like, why give your kids seizures, right? Instead? So what they recommended is to split out the MMR vaccine from the varicella vaccine vaccine. Completely reasonable. They're following the scientific evidence with the aim toward reducing the side effects and somehow it gets painted as anti vax. I don't understand. It seems to me if you're going to be, if you're truly pro vax, you're doing honest research on the side effects, telling people when you find them and replacing the vaccines that have elevated side effects with other vaccines potentially, and then always re evaluating. Right. So your kid is not going to need the smallpox vaccine. I got smallpox when I was a kid. It was still a disease that was still floating around the world. 1979 is the last case of diagnosed smallpox on earth and no one has had the smallpox vaccine in the United States in decades because why would you? The benefits are zero and there's still potential harm.
- [38:51]
A
That nuance I think is so important. And this blanket reaction and very emotionally driven backlash of everything is anti vaxx or everything is pro vax and that can transcend vaccines too. I think just across the public health spectrum today has really been such a characteristic of our modern culture right now, largely driven by the media. So in our last couple of minutes together, I'm hopeful to see if you have any recommendations for the average person who doesn't like to sit there and read PubMed articles and peer reviewed studies like we do but how can people find that nuance themselves and actually know what they're reading is trustworthy?
- [39:25]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think, of course you should read all the PubMed articles that came out. I mean, it is hard, right? And I think we just need to. It would be so much easier if our culture were a little bit different, right? So, like, think about. Follow the science. You know, those, like, those like, yard signs, what people have in this house, what we believe in, we trust science or whatever it is. Right? So that is a reflection of a sort of elevating science to the position of an idol. It's no longer subject to rational discussion. It's just. It's taken over your hind brain. It's like all. And you're like, you put your faith in it as opposed to being something where you can reason around. I'm not saying that faith and reason aren't in conflict. What I mean is that it's the worst version of that. Right. If our culture shifts to have science in its proper place, where it's a place where we reason together about how the physical world works, it sometimes translates over to things that we can do that makes our lives better, healthier, our kids healthier. It gives us good advice about what to eat, what's good to eat, what's not good to eat, what kind of exercise to do. All this stuff that everyone asks about and wants to know. That culture would make it so much easier for people to make those decisions. Right now you have to go hunt around and it's very easy to get misled unless you have a lot of background. And I think if we. This is my hope about the nih. It's not all of science, but part of science. I can help make our scientific culture healthier by restoring free speech, by restoring science to its proper place as a way to advance our knowledge about health and to really make our lives healthier and better. It'll be much easier for people to make informed decisions because you won't have to ask what the motives are. You can just click the replication button, metaphorically, and then just know.
- [41:23]
A
Yeah, you'll have perfect public trust, which is exactly what our goal should be in science.
- [41:27]
B
Always.
- [41:27]
A
Dr. Bhattacharya, thank you so much for taking some time out of your very busy schedule here at the nih. This campus is amazing, and I know our audience is very excited to hear from you and we'll have to have you back on the show soon.
- [41:38]
C
So nice to see you. Awesome.
- [41:39]
A
Yep, we love Dr. J. Please, please, please keep up with his work here at the NIH and across the board in the scientific community when it comes to the Trump administration. I know you guys want us to.
- [41:49]
B
Interview everybody else working on all of.
- [41:51]
A
These fronts, and we are on it right here in Washington, D.C. but then.
- [41:55]
B
Make sure you're subscribed to the channel.
- [41:56]
A
Wherever you're listening, so that you catch the next episode of the Isabelle Brown show. Go read actual PubMed articles. I promise they're not that bad. See you guys tomorrow.