National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya stopped CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan cold during a Sunday morning interview, refusing to let her steer the conversation away from what he says was his censorship by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Midway through the interview, Brennan turned to Bhattacharya’s trip to Atlanta that week, marking one year since the shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters that killed DeKalb County police officer David Rose — a Marine combat veteran and father of three who had graduated from the police academy five months earlier. Brennan asked whether enough was being done to counter that kind of “misinformation,” noting that the shooter’s father said his son had been “brainwashed” about the vaccine and thought it “was making him suicidal.”
Bhattacharya, the acting CDC director, pushed back, reminding Brennan that not everyone agreed on what constituted “misinformation” — and that had been weaponized to great effect during Biden’s administration.
“I think the key thing is there’s a loss of public trust in public health that happened in part because a lot of — frankly, even on this network and on other networks — there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic that led to things that really did cause harm to people,” he said. “The school closures are probably the number one thing that the —”
Brennan interrupted, attempting to redirect the conversation: “This is not a productive line of claims. We covered COVID in depth on this program like no other Sunday show did.”
“I’m not blaming you specifically,” Bhattacharya replied. “What I’m saying is that you want to talk about misinformation — the kinds of decisions and the public, sort of the face of public health during the pandemic led to many people losing trust in public health.”
“The Trump administration officials,” Brennan interjected.
“No, I mean like Biden. So Biden, for instance, censored me,” Bhattacharya said.
“The pandemic began under the Trump administration, and we put those officials on our air,” Brennan said.
“Just so we’re clear, the Biden administration censored me,” he said. “They sent out direct attacks on people who disagreed on whether the COVID vaccine stopped — ”
Brennan cut in to note that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had called the COVID vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
“That is misinformation, and we’re not being clear about that,” she said. “And I think that is dangerous. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“People lost their jobs, Margaret, because the Biden administration censored people and said, ‘Look, you can’t even talk about COVID vaccine harms,” Bhattacharya responded.
“We’re talking about a shooting,” Brennan said.
“Yeah, and I’m talking about why you have the kind of distrust that’s led to the kind of problems that we were talking about earlier in public health,” Bhattacharya replied. “That distrust was not caused by President Trump, it wasn’t caused by Bobby.”
