Trump named Stanford epidemiologist and staunch free speech advocate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead a major branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. 
Trump cited Bhattacharya’s prestigious career and his role in formulating the much-censored, COVID-19-era Great Barrington Declaration(which critiqued lockdown policies), when he announced Tuesday, “I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health.” He added, “Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with [Health and Human Services Secretary nominee] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.” Bhattacharya gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was censored for his critiques of draconian COVID-19 policies.
Accepting the nomination, Bhattacharya tweeted, “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”
Unlike former NIH director Francis Collins, who insisted that supposed “misinformation” spreaders like Bhattacharya should be censored and “brought to justice,” Bhattacharya has a documented record of backing free speech. Bhattacharya was one of the plaintiffs in the landmark lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration over government’s pressure on Big Tech to censor speech: Murthy v. Missouri. The original lawsuit referenced exclusive MRC research from its unique CensorTrackdatabase.
In a June 2024 interview on the Murthy case, Bhattacharya excoriated the dystopian attempts by the Biden administration to stifle speech online. “What I really want is that [sic] the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online,” Bhattacharya expressed. “I think that free speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of scientific discussion, of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made, and the government suppressing that is a really, really bad idea.”
But that’s not the only example of Bhattacharya’s pro-free speech bona fides. Bhattacharya gave a speech last April titled, “The End of Free Speech is the End of Science.” In 2022, he posted on X, “censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.”
The Great Barrington Declaration and its authors — including Bhattacharya — were censored across multiple platforms, including Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, as MRC’s unique CensorTrack database shows.
The Twitter Files also revealed that Dr. Bhattacharya endured a very targeted censorship effort by social media companies. Bhattacharya was placed on a “Trends Blacklist” as soon as he joined Twitter in 2021, and his request for verification was denied. Twitter shadow-banned the doctor, per the Twitter Files. Facebook also deleted the Great Barrington Declaration page in early 2021.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
