NIH staff stage walkout during director's town hall as tensions persist over research cuts, ideology

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: CNN Health

Updated 8 hr ago
PUBLISHED May 26, 2025, 8:00 AM ET


Twenty-seven minutes into a town hall with staff last week, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya acknowledged that he was going to get into uncomfortable territory. “This one’s a tough one for me,” Bhattacharya told the audience of researchers and other NIH employees gathered in an auditorium at the biomedical research agency’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, last Monday, before introducing one of the most divisive topics in science.

“It’s possible that the [Covid-19] pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings,” he said, according to a video obtained by CNN. “And it’s also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research. And if that’s true – ” At that point, Bhattacharya paused to watch as dozens of NIH staffers stood and filed out of the auditorium. “It’s nice to have free speech,” he said with a smile. “Welcome, you guys.” Bhattacharya then persisted.

“If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused a pandemic – and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe, and I looked at the scientific evidence; I believe it – what we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that’s any risk of posing any risk to human populations,” he said. The walkout was a gentle protest, one Bhattacharya – a former Stanford professor of health policy and economics who frequently claimed to have been censored during the Covid-19 pandemic for communicating views in opposition with those held by US scientific leadership at the time – referred to later in the town hall as “silent dissent.”

It represented not just disagreement with – and dismay over – Bhattacharya’s assertion that the NIH may bear some responsibility for the pandemic, which killed more than 7 million people worldwide, by sponsoring so-called gain-of-function research that created the SARS-CoV-2 virus that then leaked from a lab. That’s a view not shared by a large number of expert virologists and epidemiologists, who think it’s more likely the virus emerged via a spillover from animals.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/26/health/nih-town-hall-walkout

[Skittles]

1. Trump.2 is literally trying to rewrite history

truly fucked up

[dickthegrouch]

2. Free speech never anticipated integrity-free assholes

What the fuck does he think the Manhattan Project was?
What was Mengele's research?
If we don't know what's out there, we can't possibly contain it!
No, "most people" don't believe that, not if they've looked at the real, valid research.

Someone should just have yelled "Free speech doesn't include lies, and made up shit!"

[moniss]

3. Noted for the record that his education and expertise is

not in biological science but rather in "health policy and economics". But there he is claiming he looked at the science. Probably will have a secondary group consisting of Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers double check his work.

[slightlv]

4. Magas will never believe anything but that it was

as intentional leak from a lab. (SMDH) With as many viruses that have emerged from China in their "wet market" you'd think this would be the first place a mind would go to explain a new virus from China. But no... their lord and savior, DJT, told them otherwise and so it must be. Idiots. I do hope the next pandemic (or US epidemic) takes a huge number of them out from our midst.

[drmeow]

5. One of the many people in the world

who I wish would get a fatal case of COVID 19!