Assertion Supported
Bhattacharya: NIH funded the Wuhan lab without the capability to audit it
“The NIH had sent money to the Wuhan lab but we couldn't audit it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Bhattacharya: Leucovorin restores speech in 20% of autistic kids with folate deficiency
“You know, for kids who have this folate deficiency in their brains, that, it actually works. And 20% of the kids, I think, restore speech. Up to 60% of the kids, they get much better.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2030
Bhattacharya: FDA will issue updated pregnancy guidelines for acetaminophen use
“There will be, yeah. So that's something that Dr. McCary, the FDA commissioner is working on. And there'll be also you know, changes in, in like how Medicare pays, Medicare, CMS, Medicare, and Medicaid pay for Leucovorin. So it's a cross-agency collaboration f…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bhattacharya: COVID plexiglass barriers and restaurant masking lacked scientific backing
“You remember the plexiglass that was everywhere? There's still, every time there's see a plexiglass, it makes me, fills me with rage, but that's another story. And there was no science behind that, right? There was the, there was like the, you wear a mask when…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bhattacharya: Weak pandemic school closure policies set children back years educationally
“Closing schools, where again, the science was so weak that it, that and now kids are like years behind in their education as a result, and they'll be paying the price for that for years.”
Opinion
Bhattacharya: Scientists destroyed public trust by falsely claiming certainty during COVID
“The problem is that scientists conveyed certainty about things they had no business conveying certainty about, and then changed people's lives for the worse as a result of it during the pandemic.”
Assertion Partly supported
Bhattacharya: Disparity in MMR and COVID child vaccination rates reflects evidence strength
“So, the uptake of MMR in this country, the MMR vaccine is like, 95% of American parents vaccinate their kids with MMR. The evidence is, and, I think it's like, 13% of American parents vaccinated their kids for the COVID vaccine. I think that reflects the scien…”
Insight
Bhattacharya: Academic incentives fail to reward checking other scientists' work
“There's no return for it. Like, if I spend my career checking other people's work, I'm not going to get a professorship at a fancy university.”
Insight
Bhattacharya: Peer-reviewed journal publication does not equal scientific truth
“The fact that it's published in a journal doesn't mean it's right. It doesn't mean it's true.”
Assertion Supported
Bhattacharya: NIH shifted from funding fresh ideas to older research projects
“Look, if you look at back in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties, the NIH was funding ideas that were like zero, one, two years old. The typical scientific project funded by the NIH in the 2000 teens, it was about 2002 thousand, early 2002 thousand teens was like …”
Opinion
Bhattacharya: Biomedical research is too focused on incremental progress
“I think that's what happened to the culture of biomedical science the last few decades. It's too focused on, like, incremental progress, not enough on enormous.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bhattacharya: Patient activism forced NIH to address 1980s HIV epidemic
“The early rise in HIV did not, was not met with a sufficient response by the NIH. We're talking very, very early in the early eighties of money going to research on this vital topic. And it was the political movement of HIV patients coming together saying, loo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bhattacharya: NIH will evaluate institute directors on portfolio outcomes, not individual grants
“So what I've done is I've asked the institute directors. I've given them the authority essentially to expand what they can do in terms of the portfolio. I'm not going to judge them to make, just like within Silicon Valley, I'm not going to judge them to s on t…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2028
Bhattacharya: NIH will judge senior researchers' grant applications on mentorship quality
“And I'm gonna start to evaluate Long established investigators, because I think, I do believe they play a pretty fundamental role still but in the, in, in, in, like, how well do they advance the careers of the early career investigators that work with them, ri…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bhattacharya: Transitioning to assistant professor is biomedicine's main bottleneck
“I think the RAID problem isn't that that support for the early, I think we have a lot of portfolios pretty good on that. We could do better, but that's pretty good. The problem is, like, after you've had this career in biomedicine, how do you, like, do you, of…”
Opinion
Bhattacharya: MAHA movement is a call for NIH reform
“The Maha Movement is a, it's basically a cry for help from the American people, saying, look, all these crime and disease problems, all these problems with our kids, and we're sick, we're much, doing much worse than folks in, in Europe in terms of our health, …”
Disclosure
Bhattacharya: NIH researchers no longer need supervisory approval to publish papers
“I found out that a lot of folks at the internal investigators at the NIH, in order to publish their work, had to seek permission from their supervisors. I changed that. Like, no more permission. You, if you're an NIH researcher, you have a scientific paper, yo…”
Disclosure
Bhattacharya: NIH eliminated paywalls for taxpayer-funded scientific research articles
“They want, they actually had a sort of a if you, a policy where if a regular person wanted to go find a scientific article they had to go, there was a paywall where they pay like 50, a hundred dollars. We got rid of that paywall for NIH-funded research.”
Assertion Supported
Bhattacharya: NIH is capping grant applications to block AI-generated submissions
“I'm just to put a new policy in place where I'm limiting the number of new public applications you can have, like to, we can have, you know, six a year, six a cycle or something. We have people writing 60 applications. And very clearly AI-generated. And then w…”
Insight
Bhattacharya: Science needs Silicon Valley spirit to destigmatize productive failure
“We should stop punishing scientists who fail. If they fail productively, let them publish in a journal to explain why they're, what they learned from it. Like that, Silicon Valley spirit I think needs to come to science a little bit more.”
Assertion Supported
NIH awards $50M to 13 research teams for Autism Data Science Initiative
“Fifty million new dollars. 250 teams applied for large research grants, and we're gonna announce today that 13 teams are going to be granted you know, these grants this, for this Autism Data Science Initiative.”
Insight
Bhattacharya: Scientists cannot reliably predict which research bets succeed
“Scientists, if you ask us, we're not actually good at predicting the future of the, of future in terms of, like, our will this investment result in productivity? I mean, actually, frankly, neither is Silicon Valley, right? You can't say, you can't promise me t…”
Assertion Supported
Bhattacharya: US life expectancy hasn't grown in 15 years
“The United States has seen no increase in life expectancy.”
Assertion Supported
Bhattacharya: Median age of first-time NIH grant recipients rose to mid-40s
“So, in the data out of the NIH is that from, in the 19 eighties, If you were 35, you actually had a chance of getting a large NIH grant. Like, that was the median age of the first large NIH grant, you were 35 years old. Now you're in your mid-forties.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya