Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), stressed that medical and scientific advancement is made possible by the protection of free speech.
Bhattacharya condemned pandemic censorship and discussed the vital importance of free speech among scientists during an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier that aired on the May 8 edition of his show Special Report. “One of the main problems during the pandemic was censorship. Free speech is absolutely essential for scientific progress. If we had had [free speech] during the pandemic, we would have had much better outcomes,” he said. Bhattacharya added that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s vision for “gold standard science” is dependent on free speech, ending long-standing scientific “taboos” around topics like autism research.
“What we're going to do is we are going to shatter that taboo so that people can ask the question honestly, so can I look at the scientific literature and give an answer–that's grounded in truth,” the NIH director promised. “You saw during the pandemic, it was taboo to say certain things. You couldn't say that if you had COVID and recovered, you would have some immunity, for instance.”
Bhattacharya followed up by promising changes from the Biden administration’s widespread promotion of social media censorship during the pandemic. “Those kind of taboos are an anathema to scientific progress in this administration and in this administration, under Secretary Kennedy's leadership and President Trump's leadership, we are not going to have those taboos. We are going to have free speech in science and free speech in medicine,” he said.
Previously, the Biden administration took a very different approach and pushed social media platforms to censor certain content related to COVID-19. In fact, MRC previously revealed in a report detailing 57 censorship initiatives of the Biden administration that the NIH worked with tech-based censorship outfits to fight disfavored speech, spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on this effort in 2022 (Initiative #19). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pushed platforms like Google and Facebook to embrace censorship (Initiative #20), and White House senior adviser for the COVID-19 Response Andy Slavitt, pressured Amazon to ban books about vaccination and COVID-19 (Initiative #21).
President Joe Biden even said in July 2021 that Facebook was “killing people” by not censoring enough content related to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an August 2024 letter to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration had pressured Meta to censor posts on this issue.
MRC’s exclusive database CensorTrack has accounted for 1,319 cases of censorship across major platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google and others that heavily censored users, including 45 doctors and medical researchers discussing the pandemic and vaccines.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
