National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya recently told Just the News, No Noise that the agency is leveraging the ban on gain-of-function research to commit to greater transparency among the American people.
“The United States will never again support research that has a chance of causing catastrophic human harm,” he said during the interview. “We’ve been working for a year and a half on getting the details right, getting the incentives right. I’m so excited to be able to announce that policy. It’s going to make Americans safer going forward.”
Bhattacharya explained that during the COVID-19 pandemic, he saw “censorship instead of science, and that is the death of any scientific culture.” He went on to declare that “page is turned.”
“The current NIH will not take the Fifth on what we’re doing on science. What we’ll do is we will say clearly, ‘Here’s what we’ve done. Here are the data. Please come check our work,'” he added, teasing what he called a “pandemic playbook.”
“What I have seen has filled me with hope that the pandemic playbook that we come out with will be a very different pandemic playbook that led to the lockdowns, the school closures, the vaccine mandates, and all the rest,” Bhattacharya said. “We are establishing a vaccine injury center, so that we can honestly study vaccine injury instead of gaslighting patients to say that, ‘Oh you don’t have any problems at all.’”
Bhattacharya’s comments follow the Department of State, alongside the Department of Health and Human Services, releasing a note on the Trump administration’s ending of high-risk research, including gain-of-function research.
Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it was terminating gain-of-function research. The agency moved to “terminate funding and other support for projects, including unfunded collaborations/projects, meeting the definition of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by foreign entities in countries of concern or foreign countries where there is not adequate oversight” and suspend “all other funding and other support for projects, including unfunded collaborations/projects, meeting the definition of dangerous gain-of-function research at least until implementation of the new policy.”
The efforts align with President Trump’s May 2025 executive order on the subject, which said that gain-of-function research “has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens.”
