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Out of His League and Clueless: NIH Staffers Speak Out on Director Bhattacharya

Widespread dissatisfaction over the NIH’s “continuous free fall” has people speaking out.

In October 2020, Collins had called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist” following the publication of the latter’s Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a COVID herd immunity strategy reliant on mass infection of the general population with protections for the vulnerable only. One staffer, who described the state of the agency as “a horror show” with “no leadership like since January,” said they had “not been given one directive of what we should do and focus on—it's just what to terminate, ban, censor, review.” They said that as a result, the NIH had “an atmosphere of absolute fear and paralysis that's also causing a lot of people to, you know, just…be very paranoid.” Staff frustrations came to head at the May 19 town hall, but the walkout—originally planned by the NIH Fellows United union over working conditions and later triggered early by the director’s lab leak remarks—and other disruptions were just the beginning, insiders told Important Context.

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