The Harvard Plan: Jay & Alan

11:15Jay Bhattacharya:In 2011, Allen was recruited to become provost at Harvard, chief academic officer, really, the number two there. He left California, but he kept Jay in his life. Alan had just obtained an NIH grant to study rising Medicare costs. He brought on Jay as a collaborator. The project lasted five years and took in several million dollars, ending only in 2016. I very much doubt either Alan or Jay had any inkling Jay would one day lead the NIH and what that would mean for Alan. People who knew Jay then say he was a consummate professor. committed to classroom debate and scholarly discussion in the pages of academic journals.

11:57Jay Bhattacharya:He was not looking to get famous or climb any ladder. Then, the pandemic came, and everything changed.

12:11Jay Bhattacharya:This is Episode 2 of The Harvard Plan. More after the break. Stay with us.

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13:30Jay Bhattacharya:48 teams we want to be one of the soccer powerhouses that people talk about 16 cities

13:34Alan Garber:the joy of the world cup is it holds up a mirror to the society that surrounds it one beautiful game. I think everyone knows that nothing is like a World Cup game. The World Cup is here, and we have you covered. Follow along on and off the pitch with the NPR app.

13:54Jay Bhattacharya:This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a collaboration between OTM and the Boston Globe. To recap, we've met our two protagonists, the Dr. Economists Alan Garber and Jay Bhattacharya, two men whose careers seemed destined to follow a similar trajectory until the arrival of a deadly, fast-spreading illness that came to be known as COVID.

14:20Alan Garber:Here with me, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Dr. B, I think you were probably on the show, I don't even know how many times, like 40 times during COVID, 50 times.

14:29Jay Bhattacharya:In March of 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency due to the pandemic. From the start, Jay saw things differently from much of the public health establishment. which urged lockdowns and moving life online. To Jay, there was so much we still did not know about the disease, like how many people had contracted it without even knowing it. Just after lockdowns went into effect, Jay co-wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that there wasn't enough evidence for the virus's lethality to justify stay-at-home orders. Then, he and some colleagues pulled together an analysis of data from Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located.

15:09Jay Bhattacharya:They concluded a lot more people had already had COVID than was known, meaning the disease really was less dangerous than the authorities were saying. In October 2020, after a little over six months of lockdowns, Jay and two other scholars came together to issue a manifesto. They did this at the headquarters of a libertarian think tank in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Great Barrington Declaration called for something radically different, which they called focused protection. For most people, there should be a return to in-person living. Herd immunity would provide enough protection, while the elderly and vulnerable could quarantine and get vaccines once they became available.

15:50Alan Garber:This is the saner approach, the more moral approach, the more scientifically based approach.

15:54Jay Bhattacharya:All three of the authors went on the hard-to-categorize, but definitely right-leaning UK channel, UnHerd. That's H-E-R-D.

16:02Alan Garber:Present an alternative way to approach COVID-19 and protect the elderly while letting the young live their lives. Depression, suicide alleviation, all that enormous collateral damage, when they face very little risk from death from the disease, that has to end.

16:20Jay Bhattacharya:I would be confident in saying that if we adopted this strategy, then maybe we could all have a very nice, normal Christmas. Within days, Jay and the other two authors were invited to meet with two Trump appointees, including the then Secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump World had begun to embrace the Great Barrington Declaration. But the public health establishment was appalled. Dr. Ashish Jha used to work under Allen at Harvard's School of Public Health and went on to advise the Biden administration on COVID policy. He's now the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown. I had very strong disagreements with that piece.

16:59Jay Bhattacharya:I thought it was really ill-time that it came out a month before vaccines were available.

17:03Alan Garber:I mean, the idea that, like, you're going to kind of lift all restrictions, just let everybody get infected a month before vaccines come out just doesn't make any sense.

17:10Jay Bhattacharya:But lately, there's been a recognition by Jha and others that the declaration probably got some things right, too.

17:17Alan Garber:He was pushing for schools to open in a way that a lot of people weren't, and I thought that was smart and good.

17:23Jay Bhattacharya:Still for Jay, his outspokenness came with professional consequences. Within Stanford, where he's still taught, Jay was blocked from giving a talk about the declaration, he says. And then, as he told Rick Rubin, he was investigated by the school.

17:38Alan Garber:It felt like an inquisition. They're asking me about a thousand questions about my motivations.

17:42Jay Bhattacharya:He kept his job. Stanford never answered our questions about that. Jay's feeling of being picked on, disrespected, was amped up when emails surfaced in a Freedom of Information request showing the then-director of the NIH, Francis Collins, referred to Jay and his great Barrington allies in an email to his colleague Anthony Fauci as fringe epidemiologists and urged a quick and devastating published takedown. As Jay told Laura Ingram,

18:12Alan Garber:It feels like some novel from the 1950s where the House Un-American Committee is meeting to decide who to suppress and I'm some sort of like movie star in Hollywood that they're blacklisting because I'm a communist or something. It's ridiculous. If we had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad.

18:33Jay Bhattacharya:Like so much else in American life, COVID had become a polarizing issue, a wedge. No doubt Jay's critics thought they were acting in the urgent interest of public health. Jay saw them as comfortable elites with no awareness of their own blind spots as he described it on Andrew Huberman's podcast. The lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class. So Jay made allies where he found them, even if his new crowd had a weakness for pseudoscience and quackery.

19:01Alan Garber:Amazingly, there appear to be growing connections between Viagra and treatment for the coronavirus. Ivermectin, as well as other proactive treatments. Taking hydroxy as a way to prevent from getting the virus. I always ask myself, why did I have this very different reaction to the lockdown? Jay, again, on Rick Rubin's podcast. Because one of my very first thoughts when I heard about the lockdown was that experience when I was eight, seeing what life is like for poor people. And I just had this, like, vision of, like, this is going to happen at scale to every poor person on Earth.

19:36Jay Bhattacharya:Jay thought of the India he saw in the 1970s with power cuts and a fragile economy.

19:42Alan Garber:We're essentially pulling the rug out from under the sort of the economic infrastructure that allows poor people to have some semblance of access to food, access to health care, all this stuff. And we just basically said, no, the fear around this virus, the well-being of like relatively well-off people is so much more important than that.

20:01Jay Bhattacharya:While Jay became a public opinion haver with the following, Allen went in the opposite direction. As provost at Harvard, he built consensus, ran meetings, spoke publicly only on occasion. When the pandemic came, Allen led the university's COVID advisory group. Learning quickly moved online, dorms emptied out, many classrooms didn't reopen for over a year. I'm not so sure Allen personally favored this approach, though. Early in the pandemic, Allen had co-authored an opinion piece in the New York Times warning against taking measures that would shut down the economy. The piece even mentions herd immunity as the pathway back to normal life, not so different from the Great Barrington Declaration.

20:43Jay Bhattacharya:But the policies Harvard adopted were in line with what public health authorities recommended. A couple years later, as Harvard entered its worst leadership crisis in years with its first Black president under withering attack, Allen remained as provost, embodying continuity. My name is Claudine Gay, and I'm the president of Harvard University.

21:05Alan Garber:It's an honor to be here today.

21:08Jay Bhattacharya:And when that new president was hauled before Congress and questioned by Republican Elise Stefanik, Allen sat directly behind her.

21:16Alan Garber:Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term intifada, correct?

21:21Jay Bhattacharya:For over five hours, he occasionally nodded at something or other she said, but betrayed very little emotion.

21:27Alan Garber:A call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that? That type of hateful speech is personally important.

21:39Jay Bhattacharya:The hearing was ostensibly about the campus reaction to Hamas's attack on Israel. But there were all kinds of pent-up complaints about how college had changed. It was ideologically rigid, lacking conservatives, lacking the capacity for debate. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were a waste of time. Within a month of the hearing, Gay was out of the job, and Allen became Harvard's acting leader. At the end of 2024, he was sworn in as Harvard's official, actual president. This is the moment for many people, when Allen first came into focus. He grew up in a small Midwestern city. His father had a liquor store.

22:21Jay Bhattacharya:He was raised Jewish and is observant. He graduated from Harvard College, class of 1976. In true all roads lead back to Harvard fashion, Allen's year also included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

22:39Alan Garber:So I got to know Allen when, actually just before he came to Harvard, he was still at Stanford.

22:45Jay Bhattacharya:Dan Lieberman is a professor of evolutionary biology and Allen's longtime running buddy. Alan had read some of Lieberman's academic work and got in touch.

22:54Alan Garber:And he had had some running injuries, and I published a lot on the biomechanics of running. So we had lunch somewhere in the square and talked about running. And then I invited him to come to my lab so we could study his gait. I have a fancy treadmill and all this fancy equipment. You said study his gait, how he runs. Yes, his running gait, because he had some injuries. So after we had this lunch, he came to my lab, and I found out that he was hitting the ground really hard.

23:19Jay Bhattacharya:Once you start thinking about Allen running long distances, concentrating on modifying his stride, the parallels to his current predicament are almost too tempting. Lieberman told me that on one of their runs years ago, Allen suggested he pick up a book about Stoicism by William Irvine. And he did. Lieberman sees Allen's low-drama analytical approach as the key to how he handles most challenges, including the government's pressure campaign right now.

23:48Alan Garber:He's not very emotional about the crisis, which is a really very serious crisis. He's just very much focused on the facts, like what's going on and what to do.

23:59Jay Bhattacharya:A lot of people who know Alan talk about him this way. But surely rationality will only get you so far in a world where the old rulebook has been tossed out. I prodded Lieberman to help me think this thing through. How does someone like Alan, who has lived his whole adult life in the halls of the academy, deal with an aggressive antagonist who has no respect for rules or established precedent? Knife to a gunfight. You know what I mean.

24:25Alan Garber:I mean, a lot of norms have been broken. I think the most basic norm that's been broken, again, this is just my opinion, right? Nobody else's opinion. But I think that the most basic norm that's been broken is essentially the golden rule to treat others as you would have them treat you. And right now we're in a world where people are quite happy to ignore that in all kinds of levels. And I would say that this particular fight is just one of them.

24:50Jay Bhattacharya:The winds were changing direction fast at the moment Alan became Harvard president. A lot of the stuff that had been built at Harvard when he was provost was now being undone. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences dropped diversity statements. The DEI office was renamed. Harvard adopted an institutional voice policy, other places call it institutional neutrality, to put an end to the expectation that Harvard speak about the pressing social issues of the day. There were revised policies on student protest and discipline. Plenty of people at Harvard were unhappy with these changes. Because he is so precise, so guarded, so cautious, because he works by consensus, it's hard to say whether the new order more closely reflects Alan's actual view of how universities should be.

25:40Jay Bhattacharya:But all of this was poor insurance against what was coming. That's after the break. This is episode two of The Harvard Plan.

26:07Alan Garber:This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know. I've never seen this happen.

26:23Jay Bhattacharya:Wait, this is true?

26:24Alan Garber:This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know. I've never seen this happen.

26:47Jay Bhattacharya:Is this true?

26:48Alan Garber:This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Jerry. Many people are overpaying on car insurance. Why? Switching providers can be a pain. Jerry helps make the process painless. Jerry is the only app that compares rates from over 50 insurers in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls or hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Before you renew your car insurance policy, download the Jerry app or head to jerry.ai.npr.

27:31Jay Bhattacharya:This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a collaboration from OTM and the Boston Globe. As the 2024 presidential race took shape, Harvard was changing, but slower than the speed of politics. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, campaigned for president on the most anti-higher ed platform in recent memory.

27:52Alan Garber:The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.

27:58Jay Bhattacharya:And he won. And then he started building his team, selecting people for the top jobs in government. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted adherent of conspiracy theories about vaccines, would lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

28:12Alan Garber:The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order.

28:17Jay Bhattacharya:To lead the National Institutes of Health, which is part of HHS, Trump chose someone with a lot more scientific cred.

28:24Alan Garber:Thank you, Dr. Bhattacharya, for appearing before the committee.

28:28Jay Bhattacharya:Context. It was March of 2025, six weeks into the new administration. And a new non-agency agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Elon Musk's trusted people, had been moving through the organs of the U.S. government one by one, slashing staff and programs.

28:45Alan Garber:I don't have my gavel, but Senator Murray said it's a doge cut. So anyway.

28:51Jay Bhattacharya:Now doge had come for the NIH's$48 billion annual budget and its workforce of 20 ,000. Clinical trials were paused, grants frozen, firings en masse. And senators were on edge. And so it was under that cloud that Jay introduced himself.

29:10Alan Garber:I'm honored to speak with you today and deeply humbled by President Trump's nomination. I'm delighted to have with me my wife, Kathy. My son, Matthew, and my brother.

29:19Jay Bhattacharya:Remember how I told you earlier that Alan had agreed to introduce Jay at his confirmation hearing? how Jay wanted him to be there, this is that moment. But Alan was not in the room.

29:31Alan Garber:The NIH has played a pivotal role in my career. I served for a decade as a standing member of NIH grant committees.

29:39Jay Bhattacharya:To the senators who thought the NIH was functioning great up until Elon Musk came along, Jay delivered a bucket of ice-cold water.

29:47Alan Garber:American health is going backwards.

29:49Jay Bhattacharya:Life expectancy has flatlined, he said, and there have been a bunch of research scandals. Public faith in science reflects this, he said.

29:57Alan Garber:A November 2024 Pew study reported that only 26 % of the American public had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interests. 23 % have not much or no confidence at all.

30:12Jay Bhattacharya:Bill Cassidy, a Republican and the committee chairman, is a doctor, a liver disease specialist who co-founded a clinic for the uninsured. Thank you, sir. I'll start with questionings. He went straight for the tension at the heart of this job.

30:25Alan Garber:There is now a child who died from a vaccine-preventable disease in Texas. Let me repeat that. A child who died from a vaccine-preventable disease in Texas.

30:34Jay Bhattacharya:Measles, a disease for which there is a safe vaccine, was raging just then. For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, had been telling parents vaccines may cause autism. Kennedy would be Jay's boss.

30:48Alan Garber:Senator, it's a tragedy that a child would die from a vaccine-preventable disease.

30:54Jay Bhattacharya:Jay affirmed his support for vaccinating kids for measles, but noted there's been a sharp rise in autism cases, and he said, we don't know the reasons why.

31:04Alan Garber:So I would support an agenda, a broad agenda, a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that.

31:13Jay Bhattacharya:Cassidy seemed genuinely disturbed that Jay was not swatting down the baseless linkage He came back to this point again and again.

31:21Alan Garber:My concern is the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. So I guess I've turned it around and said, I don't want to disprove a negative. That's impossible, really.

31:35Jay Bhattacharya:Jay suggested if part of the public has doubts about science, refuses to believe in it, then science must do better. Try harder to convince them. Jay seemed to have intuited something essential about the job he was trying out for. More than impress the senators, he needed to show his prospective bosses, Trump and Kennedy, that he will respect the conspiracy theory and viral disinformation crowd.

32:00Alan Garber:I mean, I guess, yes, you're absolutely right, Senator. We don't need to address every idea or concern. But if those concerns result in parents not wanting to vaccinate their children for a vaccine that is well-tested, My sense is that my inclination is to give people good data. That's how you address those concerns.

32:24Jay Bhattacharya:We don't know why Alan didn't introduce Jay at that hearing, but we can imagine what he might have said about his former student. He might have talked about Jay's curiosity, his refusal to accept conventional wisdom at face value, his passion for science. He might have spoken about the decades they worked together as colleagues on containing Medicare costs, aging, fighting cancer. And he might have noted Trump's pressure campaign on universities, which was then gaining force and called for a truce. Jay was confirmed in a party-line vote. Senator Cassidy, his biggest Republican skeptic, supported him in the end.

33:00Jay Bhattacharya:At the start of April, Jay was installed as NIH director, with RFK Jr. administering the oath.

33:06Alan Garber:Welcome aboard. The revolution begins today.

33:12Jay Bhattacharya:At Donald Trump's NIH, now Jay Bhattacharya's NIH too, things were changing fast.

33:19Alan Garber:The Trump administration has now frozen more than$2 billion in federal research funding.

33:23Jay Bhattacharya:This would impact medical, engineering, and science research at the school.

33:27Alan Garber:That is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases. I've lost grants that have totaled$6 or$7 million.

33:35Jay Bhattacharya:In early May, the NIH sent a letter to Allen. A letter which I think is significant, even though really it's a formality. It's from a senior NIH staffer informing Alan that Harvard's grant money has been terminated because Harvard's conduct around anti-Semitism is so bad in the eyes of the government. Still, the penultimate paragraph offers Alan one thin read of hope. He could appeal the decision directly to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH. I wonder what Alan thinks when he gets that letter. Again, Dr. Ashish Jha. He knows both Alan and Jay. I described the contents of the letter to him.

34:15Alan Garber:I don't know for sure, but I know how Alan's going to behave. Alan's going to send it to his lawyers, and they're going to write up the letter, and he'll be very formal. But Alan's also a human being.

34:23Jay Bhattacharya:There's got to be part of him that's got to be struggling with this. True to form, Alan responded calmly, rationally, when he was asked about the cuts on NPR. Do you really want to cut back on research dollars? There is a lot of actual research demonstrating the returns to the American people have been enormous. So that's Alan. And Jay is a fundamentally good guy. And he has got to be, when he's lying in bed, going to sleep, he's got to be thinking about, like, how much longer do I tolerate being in a place where I'm going after my friends and who are great researchers and great institutions? One reason I wanted to talk with Ashish Jha is that, like Jay, he's a scientist who went to Washington.

35:13Jay Bhattacharya:He became President Biden's COVID response advisor. What happens when doctors and health economists go to Washington, particularly people who haven't been involved in politics? Yeah.

35:26Alan Garber:It's a steep learning curve. And you got to get learning real, real fast. I spent a lot of time trying to think about where are my lanes of influence? How do I move policy? What do I care about? What are battles I'm willing to have? What are battles I'm willing to lose? I picked battles that I thought were really, really important. And then I use all of my connections, my relationships to figure out how to get the things that I wanted to get accomplished, accomplished. It's hard. It's a steep learning curve.

35:52Jay Bhattacharya:In his confirmation hearing, Jay laid out his goals for the National Institutes of Health. He wants to fund more early career scientists, more moonshot research. He says for too long, the agency has been too careful, favoring incremental projects instead of big leaps. Jay actually co-wrote a whole paper about this back in 2020. So those are his priorities. They may or may not be his boss's priorities. His direct boss, RFK Jr., doesn't believe in germ theory, doesn't believe in vaccines. Yeah. Believes a lot of stuff that probably Jay, from his own experience in training as an academic, disagrees with.

36:34Jay Bhattacharya:Yeah. But there are points of agreement about free speech and making space for other kinds of viewpoints. And there are places where they agree on sort of like make America healthy. Is there any way for Jay to sort of split the difference and preserve his dignity and preserve the respect of people in the scientific community? Yes, there always is. There always is. You have to, again, decide which stuff is most important.

37:04Alan Garber:You're not going to win every battle. RFK Jr. has cited that the big issue of American diet is food dyes. No serious person thinks that. But if J. Go has to go out and talk about food dyes every once in a while, I think it's fine. Like, no, we're all going to kind of be like, we get what he's doing. But he gets to do that if he's preserving the core stuff. If he is overseeing the destruction of the core things and talking about food dyes, then he doesn't get to retain his credibility and his standing.

37:34Jay Bhattacharya:We did this interview in July, by the way. Over the summer and into the fall, Jay's leadership at NIH seemed to unfold as a series of agility tests. He submitted and defended in Congress a budget request that's almost 40 % smaller. He defended the decision to cancel mRNA vaccine development, which scientists consider to be extremely promising. Meanwhile, President Trump moved to give political appointees, not committees of area expert scientists, authority over research funding, giving him, Trump, effectively more power over how the money is spent. One of Jay's colleagues, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, was forced out of the job after less than a month.

38:18Jay Bhattacharya:She said RFK Jr. politicized our processes and repeatedly censored science. In September, Trump gave a news conference where he said painkillers could cause autism, which is not true, according to major medical and scientific groups.

38:35Alan Garber:With Tylenol, don't take it. Don't take it.

38:38Jay Bhattacharya:Look to Trump's right side. Jay is there, beside his boss, RFK Jr. They're there for over an hour. When it's his turn to speak, Jay does not endorse or refute the purported link between Tylenol and autism, but announces a new program to pump$50 million additional into peer-reviewed autism research.

38:58Alan Garber:For too long, it's been taboo to ask some questions for fear that scientific work might reveal a politically incorrect answer.

39:05Jay Bhattacharya:Jay's colleagues in health economics are near unanimous that he believes in good science, but within the NIH, a lot of people are worried. In June, a group of NIH staffers put out their own manifesto, the Bethesda Declaration. They contend that the Trump administration and NIH harmed academic freedom by selectively canceling high-quality work at out-of-favor universities. They say that essential research into health disparities has been blocked, even when it does not include the words diversity, equity, and inclusion. The declaration has close to 500 signatures just from current employees.

39:42Alan Garber:So we described it as dissent.

39:44Jay Bhattacharya:Sarah Cobran is one of them, a 21-year NIH veteran, who agreed to speak with me in her personal capacity.

39:51Alan Garber:You know, he laid that out for us. He has his own letter of dissent. He says publicly very often that he welcomes dissent. And so he said specifically in our letter, and even in the email that accompanied the letter, we hope you welcome this dissent.

40:06Jay Bhattacharya:Jay did not at first respond directly, but posted his thoughts on X, saying the declaration contained misconceptions about NIH's new policy direction. But then, in July, he invited many of the signers to meet with him. Sarah Coburn told me Jay was courteous, personable. He listened.

40:24Alan Garber:One of the things that he told us several times and wanted to emphasize, it seemed, was that there are no bad words that cause grants to be cut or not funded. There are no bad words. And those of us who were spending a lot of time most days evaluating grants for their use of bad words know that that's not the case.

40:43Jay Bhattacharya:Coburn and others saw grants connected with ideas like gender and diversity being blocked, although exactly how this was happening was not totally clear to them. In our thank you note, we did say thank you and then said one urgent note.

41:00Alan Garber:You said that there are no bad words and we don't think that message is making it all the way down to the people who are making the funding choices. If you could please communicate that more strongly, we would be appreciative. Or something along those lines. I don't think he's the one choosing what gets cut. I don't think he's the one, yeah, that's the reason. I think those priorities are not his personally, not his scientifically. They come from elsewhere.

41:27Jay Bhattacharya:Although the meeting was cordial, it didn't leave Cobran feeling optimistic.

41:31Alan Garber:He wants to be a scientific colleague working in collaboration at NIH for the good of NIH. But that's not really the truth of the job he's accepted.

41:43Jay Bhattacharya:We sent the NIH a detailed list of questions raised by our reporting. A spokesperson responded with some bullet points. She did not address the idea of banned words, but told us, any updates to NIH review processes aim to strengthen accountability and efficiency while maintaining the central role of expert peer review. As for Jay's relationship with Alan, the spokesperson called it a personal matter. The disgruntled NIH staffer's manifesto, the Bethesda Declaration in 2025, followed Jay's Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. Both documents, in response to a sense that scientific inquiry and speech were being improperly stifled.

42:27Jay Bhattacharya:The idea of speech, the proper boundaries of it, who sets the rules, it runs through this whole thing. For example, on September 3rd, Jay gave a talk at the National Conservatism Conference. He had top billing alongside Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and OMB Director Russell Vogt. Jay recounted what happened to him on Twitter a few years back.

42:50Alan Garber:I was very naive. I decided I was going to join Twitter to tell people about the Great Barrington Declaration. When Elon Musk bought Twitter a couple of years later, it turned out that the day I joined Twitter in August of 2021, I had been placed on a blacklist. I found this out because Elon Musk invited me to Twitter headquarters, and I got to see with my own eyes the database with my face on it and the word blacklist written over it.

43:14Jay Bhattacharya:Jay said his speech was suppressed at the request of the Biden administration, although, as he acknowledged, he was not directly personally singled out by the White House. Still, the Biden people did ask social media companies to help contain the spread of what they considered harmful messaging around COVID. Jay joined a lawsuit over this, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. His co-plaintiffs included the states of Missouri and Louisiana and the Gateway Pundit, a hub for conspiracy theories. And Jay's side lost in a 6-3 decision. He says that shows the First Amendment is on thin ice.

43:51Alan Garber:At this point, the only thing protecting free speech in this country is, frankly, is President Trump.

43:54Jay Bhattacharya:Jay did not mention that his own parent agency, HHS, had been sued by Harvard for violating its free speech rights when research dollars were cut. In court, Harvard argued that the government pressure campaign, the weaponized research dollars, amounted to attempted interference in what can be taught and who can be hired. This is something Allen talks about.

44:17Alan Garber:We cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights.

44:24Jay Bhattacharya:The very same day Jay went on stage to claim his speech had been improperly suppressed, the judge in Harvard's lawsuit against the government issued her decision. She granted Harvard summary judgment on most of its claims. What lies at the core of this dispute, she wrote, is the fact that defendants are trying to pressure Harvard to accede to the government's demands in a way that squarely violates plaintiffs' First Amendment rights. She went on, in language that is bracingly direct, the idea that fighting anti-Semitism is defendants' true aim is belied by the fact that the majority of the demands they are making of Harvard to restore its research funding are directed on their face at Harvard's governance, staffing, and hiring practices and admissions policies, all of which have little to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with defendants' power and political views.

45:20Jay Bhattacharya:Okay, we are now recording. Hey, Sarah, how are you doing?

45:25Alan Garber:Hi, doing okay.

45:26Jay Bhattacharya:Do you want to give me the business again? I caught up with Sarah Cobran in late September, about two months after our first conversation.

45:33Alan Garber:Yes, so just to be clear, I'm speaking as myself. I'm a person, citizen of the United States.

45:39Jay Bhattacharya:Not in her role as an NIH staffer. Now that that was clear, I wanted to know how things were going for her and the other signers of the Bethesda Declaration. So this was actually my number one question, whether there have been any reprisals of any kind.

45:54Alan Garber:No. Okay. Not at NIH. Just no.

45:58Jay Bhattacharya:So that's the good news. The bad news? Everyone is stressed. Everything feels broken.

46:04Alan Garber:It's eight months now of being asked to do things that we think are wrong.

46:09Jay Bhattacharya:The formerly functional grant review process has lately been turned on its head, she told me. High-quality proposals are not getting approved. Is it because of something they wrote?

46:20Alan Garber:Now the new administration is saying, okay, we have some new criteria we want to use, but we won't tell you what they are. grants being put up in spreadsheets and the program directors being told these grants were flagged. They were flagged. And we don't want to tell you what search terms we used, and we don't want to tell you what it is that we want to cut. We just want you to figure it out. And Dr. Bhattacharya, when we met with him at that roundtable, said, no, there are no band words. He said that to our faces, and we said to him, that's great. Please communicate that to the IC directors and the grants management people because they're hearing something else.

47:05Jay Bhattacharya:IC directors. Those are the directors of institutes and centers. The NIH contains 27 of these, like the National Cancer Institute, where Coburn works. They're supposed to be reviewing grants, funding science, but with no formal list of banned words, it's all guesswork.

47:23Alan Garber:So we are between a rock and a rock and a rock. A judge has said it's illegal to do it. Our leadership is telling us we have to do it. Our boss is telling us it doesn't exist.

47:35Jay Bhattacharya:Jay said science should not be partisan. Coburn told me any scientist applying today for federal money would have to have an acute sense of the Trump administration's politics rather than relying on traditional scoring by a committee of scientists.

47:50Alan Garber:So people won't be able to have a sense, oh, I got an excellent score. No. The score is only going to be one piece. That's the peer review result. And that the ultimate decisions will be made by the presidential appointees, who are now numerous within NIH, and many more numerous than in the past. We used to only have two. Now we have dozens.

48:13Jay Bhattacharya:That was in September. This month, November 2025, one of the signers of the Bethesda Declaration, Jenna Norton, was placed on non-disciplinary administrative leave from the NIH with full pay and benefits. She released this TikTok.

48:30Alan Garber:I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity.

48:40Jay Bhattacharya:We reached out to the NIH. An anonymous official there told us over email, Instead of focusing on her actual job to promote gold standard science, radical leftist Jenna Norton chooses to constantly criticize this administration, even when she is supposed to be working.

49:04Jay Bhattacharya:I thought about Camilla Naksarova, the Harvard cancer researcher we met in the last episode. She told us back in July that she is prepared for her current NIH grants, which were recently restored by court order but could be challenged again. She is prepared for these grants to potentially disappear and never come back.

49:24Alan Garber:I think I could live with that. I would just work really hard and write new ones, somehow make it work.

49:30Jay Bhattacharya:But then you think about what else could happen.

49:33Alan Garber:Maybe a budget cut. Okay, so that would be bad. then this means you would have to write even more grants and do an even better job. Maybe you could still get funded. I could live with that too. But then it sounds like they're trying to make further changes to the system where not only are the grants reviewed now, but then there is some political appointee that looks at them and that can decide based on I don't know what criteria, whether they're in the national interest or not, And they want to further make changes such that the grants can be revoked at any given time for reasons that I don't quite understand or I don't know if there's any criteria for that.

50:17Jay Bhattacharya:What really scares her is the idea that research funding is becoming a political decision rather than one made by scientists.

50:24Alan Garber:That I think would be completely devastating.

50:27Jay Bhattacharya:Science moves at its own speed, ignorant of the rhythms of politics.

50:31Alan Garber:We can only do the work if we can do it for a long time. Otherwise, there's no point in even doing it. So if that becomes more of a concern that your grants may get yanked as political situations shift, then I think I'd want to leave. I think I wouldn't do it anymore just because it's just not possible. I can't work on projects with a one-year outlook. I would go look for a different job.

50:57Jay Bhattacharya:Alan told The Wall Street Journal, it's not just about Harvard or universities. It's about America's place in the world. For example, quantum science, which right now is a huge strategic area for the nation, particularly in our competition with China. They support this research because of the economic benefits. Ashish Jha is more direct. The heart of the biomedical and the convergence of biology and IT and AI in America is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

51:28Alan Garber:And that's where they have taken their gun.

51:31Jay Bhattacharya:He is very concerned that China is pulling ahead of the U.S. in biosciences. He says we were neck and neck recently.

51:39Alan Garber:Now we're behind. Already? Yeah. Like every serious person understands, we are now behind China.

51:45Jay Bhattacharya:Time is running out for the United States to hold its own against a rising China. Time is also running out for colleges and universities to settle on a strategy to defend themselves. Time is running out for Alan Garber to preserve everything Harvard is and has built. And time is running out for Jay Bhattacharya to leave the kind of mark he wants to make on American science.

52:08Alan Garber:This is the most self-destructive move I've seen an administration do. And Jay is at the heart of that self-destructive behavior. Jay must know this. He must understand this. If he has credibility, which I believe he does, and if he has integrity, which I believe he does, he has got to wrap this battle up quickly and move forward with getting America back on track. Because otherwise, generations of people will look back and not blame just Donald Trump and RFK Jr., but Jibhad Acharya on overseeing the great American loss to China.

52:43Jay Bhattacharya:Coming up on the final episode of The Harvard Plan Season 2. What if there were a way to ensure that critical research does get funded? The Trump administration is proposing a science grants fast lane for universities that sign on to its vision for higher ed.

52:59Alan Garber:The compact lists things that I think are pretty, I don't actually find them controversial.

53:05Jay Bhattacharya:We meet the Trump advisor behind what they're calling the compact.

53:09Alan Garber:Merit-based admissions, merit-based hiring, things that maybe people don't think about as much, like addressing great inflation. These are the types of things that I don't feel like are partisan. They are actually just defining the necessary elements to a strong relationship.

53:26Jay Bhattacharya:That's next week. The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is reported and written by me, Ilya Meritz. The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for The Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer. mixing and original music by Jared Paul Tom Colligan is the fact checker thanks to the Boston Globe's editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode art and thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers I'll see you next week for episode 3 of The Harvard Plan This is On The Media

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