STAT+: ‘Wrong,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘reasonable’: How Jay Bhattacharya became, for some, the least bad option to run NIH
Judges criticized Jay Bhattacharya's expert witness testimony as untrustworthy, but a Stanford colleague described him as a "reasonable person, not an ideologue"
When Jason Abaluck saw how a colleague was describing his research in court filings, he was annoyed. He’d just been over this. It had started on Sept. 1, 2021, when he’d noticed Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya tweeting about a study Abaluck had done on the effects of masking on Covid-19 in Bangladesh. To Abaluck, Bhattacharya was misrepresenting the findings. He’d reached out. Bhattacharya had responded. They’d gone back and forth, first by Twitter message, then by email, and eventually, on Sept. 29, Bhattacharya agreed that Abaluck was right, at least about a few statistical details.
But in a court document filed on Sept. 28, there was Bhattacharya, acting as an expert witness in a Tennessee case, repeating the same old stuff about those same statistical details as though the whole month-long exchange had never taken place. Abaluck is a health economist at Yale. He thinks of his field as one with a genuine appetite for evidence — a yen to put data over preconceptions. It was a high standard, and to him, Bhattacharya wasn’t upholding it.
“I felt that he was behaving pretty badly. Basically, in all of our interactions, it seemed like he was just trying to justify a position he had already arrived at. He didn’t really care to figure out what was true,” Abaluck said. “And it’s hard to say: Was he being deliberately deceptive? Was he just deluding himself?”
He wasn’t the only person to see that side of Bhattacharya. In 2023, one judge in Alberta, Canada, wrote that, as an expert witness, Bhattacharya was unwilling to accept inconvenient facts and “advancing a personal agenda.” In the Tennessee case from 2021, the judge wrote that “the Court is simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya.”
Now, if confirmed by the Senate, Bhattacharya will be entrusted with directing the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world — and if you ask many of his collaborators about him, a very different Bhattacharya emerges. “I do think Jay is a reasonable person, not an ideologue,” said Mark Hlatky, a Stanford professor of health policy and medicine. “If there’s anyone I wanted to be making the case to the president about the value of science to solve problems and contribute to economic prosperity, it would be Jay Bhattacharya right now,” said Dana Goldman, director of the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
That’s the contradiction of Bhattacharya, a man reprimanded in court for refusing to acknowledge evidence but also held up as a champion for it, an academic who’s called Covid-19 vaccines a “triumph of science” but written they might be “more harmful than beneficial” for younger adults and kids, an expert who’s warned against the “rule” of experts but accepted the nomination when he’s the one who’ll be given the keys. He’s a wonky professor whose transformation into a Covid-era lightning rod and social media personality has now brought him into the halls of government.
