Best of the Program | Guest: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya | 5/12/25
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Hey, today's podcast, I find myself at odds with, well, I agree with this, but I don't agree with that. When Trump is proposing government coming in to regulate prescription costs, it's an interesting debate I had with myself and Stu on the air today. And I think a lot of people feel in many ways the same way. And also, is it possible that Pope Leo...

isn't going to be as bad as people thought. Hear what he had to say on AI and why I agree with him. Also, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institute of Health on the prescription drugs and that lab leak at Fort Detrick, which is terrifying. All of that and more on today's podcast. First, let me tell you, you've got too much to do, too much to fight for, too many people counting on you to be sidelined by pain. So if you've been pushing through it, masking it, ignoring it, or just learning to live with it,

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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. So I find myself in this situation today. Agreeing in theory and yet disagreeing in theory. When we're talking about the president coming in and saying, hey, I'm negotiating for drug prices. Okay, wait, hold it. Wait, I don't like this because I don't want the government involved in any of this. However, hmm.

If I don't like the government involved in any of this, then we shouldn't have Medicare, Medicaid, and socialized anything. The government should be out of it. And that's where we have been as a nation, or I'm sorry, as a movement, most of us have been, okay, can't do this. Can't do that. I don't want this. But...

That requires us to debate and win the debate on the bigger issue. Nowhere in the Constitution is this allowed for the government not to negotiate for drug prices. Nowhere in the Constitution is the government allowed to do socialized medicine. Okay? So if you want to have that argument, I am so with you on that. Let's have that argument. Let's have that argument. It's a fun argument. Right.

Now, if you want to just have the argument that, well, the president shouldn't negotiate on our behalf. Wait a minute. As a taxpayer, if you're going to, can we just not get keep getting hit in the face by everybody around the world? They're all look at this is so complex. This this makes my brain hurt.

Everyone else is negotiating. We're not. So we're getting screwed. We're paying $2,000 for a drug that the rest of the world is paying $20 for a drug. However, let's remember the rest of the world is on socialized medicine. They may pay $20 for a drug.

But you still can't get that drug over there because it's socialized medicine. Of course, this is a big part of one of the reasons why we pay a premium is we generally get access to these drugs first. Correct. The GLP-1s are a great recent example of this, all the weight loss injection drugs. These are corporations made them. In fact, not even just American corporations. Novo Nordisk is not an American corporation. They're the ones that do Ozempic and that stuff.

And when they went into shortage, which they did when they came out because everybody wanted them, we were like the only country getting them. Right. We got them before everybody else in the globe. Now, whether you like them or not is not the point here. The point is that these new drugs tend to come to markets just like, by the way, every other product. When you come up with a new product, where do they go to where people will spend more for them? Right. So they came here and they didn't go anywhere else.

You know, again, do you want that? You might not. Here's the thing. As long as you... As long as the government doesn't get into negotiating drugs for everyone, you know, personally, oh, you mean...

The socialized medicine thing that the government is doing, the Obamacare, you can't get that drug. Hey, guess what? Over here in the free market, you get off of Obamacare. You can have that drug. You know, if you make all of the system actually do what it will do eventually, which is destroy people's lives and become the VA for everybody where everybody is like, I think I'd rather kill myself than go through this anymore. Right.

then maybe you have a chance of ending it because as long as they're not negotiating for the part of the market that is semi-free, so this is not free because of all the government restrictions on, you know, healthcare and, and insurance. But if insurance, you know, maybe we can get that free and then that system would work and we'd be able to have the drugs. But right now, I don't know why we have to have this broken system and,

And not negotiate and look at the front, not with supervision, not with 2010 vision, but with a 2020 vision and look ahead and go, oh, I see that all of the bridges are out right in front of the car.

Because we're collapsing because we can't afford everything. And so nobody's willing to argue that we shouldn't have all of these socialized programs. We've got to get people off these programs. Nobody's willing to do it. So if this move actually saves a lot of money and saves us from the abyss, even for a couple of weeks, isn't it worth doing?

Especially if it makes things worse for those who are for socialized medicine and makes the free market a little more attractive. Well, I mean, you know, there's a very long litany of reasons as to why, you know, as you mentioned, it's not really something the government in the United States is supposed to have a role in. I'm with you on that. I think we all I think we have to just agree that the simple answer is no. No.

You shouldn't do any of this. None of this is constitutional. Yeah. And I guess like part of it is just like going back to tracing why we opposed it when Bernie Sanders would propose something like this. Right. Why did we oppose it when they tried to do it with Medicaid initially? You know, there's a lot of reasons why. One of the reasons why is when you have a big, you know, giant five thousand pound gorilla like the U.S. government and all the money that they spend on this, you wind up with major market problems.

manipulation and distortion. And that is a problem. Of course, one of the reasons why our medical system is good, if you believe it's good, by the way, we should also note that like, it's an interesting kind of confluence of events when we're sort of embracing the idea. I know you've talked about it a lot with RFK Jr., for example, that

The reason why we have so much sickness is because of pharmaceuticals. Now, that's not my belief, but it is a belief of a lot of people in the movement currently. And if that is true, why would we want to lower prices on these pharmaceuticals that we all say are causing all of our long-term disease? I don't have an answer to that part. That's something that I think if you're in that wing of the movement. I think this is why so many people who have had really strong values for so long

are waking up every day and going i don't know how to feel about right it's a confusing time i will say everything is broken every i mean you go to okay well i mean that argument that's the next level it's another one that's the next level and you're like well why because the whole thing is broken and you're like yeah good point i don't really wow i mean

It's we're so deep down the road of there are no good options because we haven't made good. You know why we don't have nice things, kids?

Because we break everything we have. That's why. Yeah, you know, it's like you come to that. I was thinking about this a little bit because one of the way we've talked about these policies, this is not a new policy. Now, it is new through an executive order, which is another layer on top of this, because obviously, if these policies could be done legally through an executive order, obviously,

My belief is both Barack Obama and Joe Biden would have done them. They didn't even have, they didn't seem to even care whether they were legal and they still didn't attempt this. We will see what the courts say, of course, about that. But like, I don't like that.

I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't think you can pout your way out of this, Glenn. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. Make it go away. Make it go away. I mean, it's so clear. But like, it's true. Right. We stopped just violating the Constitution. And that means we have to go back 100 years. You're right. Which, by the way, you know who started Mother's Day? Woodrow Wilson!

We didn't even get the Mother's Day Woodrow Wilson rant this year. No, you didn't. Hopefully that's coming later on in the program. But like when you go back and you say, okay, let's trace this back in conservative thought. Conservatives have opposed this policy forever. Why? Maybe they're just wrong. I mean, look, conservatives are wrong on stuff, right? Maybe the movement has been wrong on this the entire time. No. When other left-wing people have been proposing it. No. Well, maybe they were. No. No.

One of the reasons, though, one of the real arguments from conservatives on this was to say, hey, we're going to lose medical innovation.

Right. That's one of the main central arguments. When you distort a market like this, you wind up giving all sorts of incentives that you're not going to see coming on day one. Right. That wind up destroying innovation in the medical field. I will say the movement doesn't seem all that interested in innovation in the medical field these days. Well, you know what? Can I add a layer to that? Because I played this out of my head driving in today. Okay. Let me add that layer. Yeah.

I'm not so worried about that. We're going to have AI and AGI and ASI so soon it's going to solve all those problems. That could be. That's not even where I was going with it. I was thinking people aren't really in, like, the. I know. You know, the RFK people are as interested in that. But you're going to have, in five years from now, you're going to have, not even that, you're going to have AI or AGI or ASI that will say, oh.

You want to fix that? Well, just here. Mix this, this, this. And you don't even have to go to trials for it. It'll just be right. There will be no... There are not going to be teams of people working on stuff. It'll be AI. It could be, yeah. So that's a whole other layer. It will be. It will be. Oh, it will be. Right.

I mean, it's still, I mean, and maybe AI completely solves this. I still think though, as, as a, an old, old, old timey capitalist that like, that the profit pursuits. Right. That profit, like the profit, the pursuit of profit is an incentive for innovation. Right. So I do think that is a long-term positive. It is. For the market.

And for innovation generally, and these things, look, you can even, even if you don't like medication, you probably acknowledge that some of these have been very positive. So you probably still want at least what you would consider the good innovations. So,

Look, I understand what you're saying. I understand why a lot of people are torn on this, and I think I can see where you're coming from. It's not one that I feel torn on. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think you should be in the middle of this. I don't think it's a good idea either. But here's the thing. You're being a little bit more open to it, which I understand. Because the one thing I'm sure of, I'm not sure of anything anymore. Right, right. Okay?

Look, if the goal is to centralize power and control the pharmaceutical industry from Washington, I am 100% slam on the brakes. Now, I'm not against slamming on the brakes here.

for the other goal. But if the goal is for the power of the president to break up a corrupt pricing monopoly to give Americans leverage again because we've already violated the free market so horribly because the government has no place at the table, then is that pragmatic and is that principled? I don't know. I just know this. The market has to be free, okay?

But if the players inside, I mean, it has... Competition has to be protected, okay? You...

You have to have competition, accountability, and consequences. We don't have any of those things right now. None of those things. That's not a true free market. That's a casino where the house always win and you and I always lose. That's what this is. So...

Is this move going to reset the table? What if it forces companies to negotiate again, to compete again, to innovate again? I don't know. Usually that wouldn't happen.

But we're looking at a time where the whole country is just being sucked into a giant crap hole. And not because of Donald Trump, but because of what everyone has done for the last 100 years. The chickens are coming home to roost. So now how do you reset it? I don't know. I don't know. I just, here's what I, and I think you should use this as a model. The only thing I'm certain of is that I'm not certain of anything anymore.

Because everything, you cannot just blanket say, I'm a free market capitalist. Okay, great. So am I. Now let's take that apart and see what that means. Where did we go wrong? So what should you really be for? And until you're willing to say, I'm for that and only that, which will dig us into a deeper hole, should we not be pragmatic? Or is that selling out?

Don't know, haven't dealt with these issues before. All right, you sick, twisted freak. Want more of me and Stu? Maybe not Stu. But to hear the rest of the program, check out the full podcast. We're back with more after this. All right, it's time to take that big step and move, which means both selling your home and buying another one. Oh, jeez. I hate that. Now, that's one chance to price it as well, to time it.

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This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. And don't forget, rate us on iTunes. Okay, so Pope Leo, which I'm sorry, maybe it's just because of Leo the Lion, but when I think of Leo the Lion, I immediately think of Wizard of Oz and that lion, and I think of the Pope then saying...

What do I have that the last Pope didn't have courage? So, excuse me. But he came out there saying now that he may not be as bad as Francis. Well, that would be nice. That would be nice. But he came out and he talked about AI and said, we should be a little concerned about this because it could eat individualism. It could eat, you know, humanity and what it means to be human and

And I think he's right on that one. And, you know, there's two kinds of people. The people that think that, ah, no, this is going to happen. Everybody said bad things, you know, about the Internet and social media and how it, yeah, look what it's done in 10 sweet, sweet 10 years to our children. Look what it's done. And this is far more powerful. So don't dismiss it. And the other is, well, you're just afraid of progress. No, I'm really not. I'm more afraid of surrendering the very thing that makes us human.

And here's the truth, the real hard truth on AI. It's real. AI is real. Its gifts are real. And its dangers are just as real. It is going to offer us blessings that we've never seen. It will change the world. It will. It will personalize education for every single child. It will have medical breakthroughs. We were just talking about the prescription drug thing that Trump just is signing in now and

Part of that is, well, it's going to hurt innovation. Well, is it? I mean, it could, but we are looking about three years from now, AI and AGI and ASI being able to go, oh, you want to solve that? I can solve it. Here's how you make this drug. I mean, we're not going to have these labs doing all kinds of experiments. Should AI actually solve and do what everybody thinks it's going to do in a very short period of time?

creativity is going to be enhanced, productivity, time is going to be redeemed. It's really good. Now, there is a red line here, kind of really, you know, when AI stops being a tool and starts becoming the substitute for any kind of human thought, you know, or relationships, AI, like government, just like fire. It can light your way, it can warm your home, or it will burn everything in your life down to the ground.

So when I saw the Pope's message this weekend, I, of course, went on to AI and I said, what do you think of this? OK, here's what AI said to me. Look out because there is there are going to be a few things that are going to happen that you can watch for to see how close you are to having humans being eaten. One dependence over discernment. Listen to this dependence over discernment.

If you're asking, what do you think I should do? Okay. Instead of this is what I believe. Can you challenge this or support this? You've already started to slip. If you're like, what is it I believe? Problem.

Delegating moral reasoning. Number two, when we allow AI to define harm, truth or justice, we're handing our civilization's soul to a machine that doesn't have one. That's a machine telling you this. That's a machine. You know what that is? Remember when I've ever said, I don't know, people say they're going to kill you. I take them at face value. You're foolish not to.

When you have AI saying, by the way, I'm going to destroy humanity. I don't know. I think I listened to it. I think I listened to it. So it says these are the things to stay away from. Chat bots for friends. Remember we just talked about that with Mark Zuckerberg last week? Avatars for pastors. Algorithms for God. Quote, that's the fracture point.

4. Censorship disguised as safety. When AI starts pushing or erasing certain thoughts in the name of alignment, you're already living in an invisible dictatorship. 5. The illusion of control. If you can't shut it off, opt out, or walk away, you are no longer the master of the machine. So then I asked, well, what will it look like when it starts to break? Answer? It'll be quiet. Subtle.

you'll start to see the sameness everywhere. No dissent, no original thought, just sanitized, optimized groupthink. Your kids won't be able, listen to this, your kids won't be able to explain why America matters. I don't think our kids can do that now. They won't understand what a right is, where it came from, or why it's not up for a vote.

Instead of discussion, you'll hear nothing but slogans. Instead of conviction, you'll see compliance. And when it collapses, it won't take decades. It may take hours or days. Can you unplug if the lines are crossed? That's my question. Answer, only if you're practiced before the moment comes.

Unplugging is not about flipping a switch. It's about building a new muscle now. So what is that muscle? Think critically. Knowing who you are without a screen. Standing on something deeper than a prompt or a feed. When did those become something we have to remind ourselves to do? When did that become something like, I don't know, think critically.

Know who I am without the screen? That's a crazy thought. Standing on something deeper than a prompt or a feed? How many people do that now? How many people actually know what they're for, what they're against? A lot of people will say, I'm against this, but will they even know why? Do they even know why they're for something? Most people are educated through social media. And anyone, the man...

who reads nothing at all, is better educated today than someone who only reads social media. Let that sink in, because that's true. Right now, you should use AI as a teacher, not a replacement, but as a teacher. Right now, you can use AI to educate yourself, to learn economics, to go on and say, this is what I believe, right?

Make the case, make the strongest case for and against, and then debate. Debate Western thought. Learn about Western thought. Debate morality and philosophy. Learn the Constitution. Learn how to grow food. Learn how to fix a generator. Speak clearly. Think clearly. Reclaim your foundations. Learn the Bible.

For moral law, for human dignity, divine order, those things are really important. Learn the Declaration and the Constitution. Know your rights and responsibilities. Know Adam Smith, de Tocqueville, C.S. Lewis. See the patterns and predict the collapse before it happens. And know where you should be standing if that collapse happens. Because if you know what's true, you will see what's false before anyone else.

And then that allows you to teach others and lead quietly because when confusion is the word of the day, when everything and everybody is confused, clarity is going to look an awful lot like leadership. I saw this warning. I've been, you know, 15 years ago, I launched something. I launched the blaze 15 years ago. And my goal was to disrupt the media. And I got to say, if you look, you're like,

I think that worked. I think that worked. You know, when we first started, Netflix was still sending movies in the mail. And look at now, the media, if you weren't on Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, you had no voice. You had no voice. But honestly, because of you and this audience, you gave power to the voices that would have been crushed in the system through the blaze. And we made truth competitive again.

Some of the people that we helped elevate now sit in the White House press room. That's incredible. Incredible. Now here's what needs to be disrupted. Education. And AI can be a part of it. Can be. But it is...

We have to be so incredibly careful. I don't trust AI coming from Silicon Valley. I don't trust AI coming from chat GPT. I don't trust it. I don't trust any of it. I don't trust it because I know how it works. Well, nobody actually knows how it works, but I know what a lot of its faults are right now. And I also know it depends on who's programming it.

I want to tell you that I have two teams of people that are working on something that I hopefully will be announcing soon. One in each hemisphere. So one team is working while the other team is asleep, and then they switch in the middle of the night. And we've been working around the clock for over six months on something. And we're building something. I'm building something that wasn't even possible 24 months ago. Not even possible.

But I believe in the end, this is going to be the one thing. This is going to be the thing that is the most important thing I've ever done. And the time is short. And I'll talk to you about it later this summer. And hopefully, if you feel the urgency that I feel, you'll be able to support this. But we have to corral AI and dedicate ourselves to

To education. Today I'm with PragerU all day. I'm filming a whole bunch of stuff for PragerU. That AP classes are going to have access to. All over the country. And I'll tell you more about that when it's out. But the opportunities that are happening right now on education. Are endless. And we're going to lead that. So you need to start educating yourself. Right now.

But here's the one thing. When I read this thing from Pope Leo, courage, I thought to myself immediately, okay, well, that's not good. Here's your mission today. Here's the one thing you should be working on today, starting today. Constantly say these two words, but God.

I had been saying, well, it's going to be interesting to see how that all works out. And that's kind of defeatist in a way. I mean, it's a funny way for me just to dismiss all the things and like, well, that's not going to go well. It's going to be interesting to see how everybody works that one out. Change it. But God, but God, understand the phrase, learn it and live it. So in six months from now, it's such a part of you that it shapes how you walk, how you think, how you lead. And let me explain.

Much of the stuff that we're talking about and then some, things that I talked to you about 20 years ago are still on the horizon. And it's going to be a tough ride. It's going to get much worse before it gets much better. But here's the thing that all of the models and everything else and AI cannot account for. And that is, but God.

Because nothing factors him in, except you. They never do. The models never do. But God's already working, right now, in small ways, in hearts that I don't see, you don't see, stories you don't hear, movements that are just beginning, and like candidates who get shot in the middle of the field and should be dead. They're not. I mean, the president, they tried to kill him, but God didn't.

Because that's where hope lives. Not in machines, not in governments, not even in our plans. Hope lives in truth, in light, in God. And while things might look really, really bad, but God, he's still on the move. Hey, you're locked in with the best of the Glenn Beck program. Back with more right after this.

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So I am thrilled to have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on with us. He's from the National Institutes of Health. I want to talk to him about bringing science back into the NIH. There was a lab leak, and I want to get to that here in a second, but I've got to touch on the news of the day, and it's not really his area of expertise, but the president just signed an executive order to lower drug costs. Doctor, welcome to the program, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Any comment on that as we get started here?

Sure. It's actually something I studied in a past life when I was a professor. So the difference in drug prices between the United States and Europe is sharp and alarming, and it's been persistent for decades. The Americans pay sometimes between two to five times, sometimes as high as ten times the price of the same drug as Europeans do.

And as a professor who has a PhD in economics, I'll tell you, when you see persistent price differences like that, that indicates a very unhealthy market. And in this particular case, what it means is that American consumers essentially are being taken advantage of. American patients are paying

through the nose for drugs that Europeans pay much less for. And the reason is that the European countries will tell drug companies, if you don't lower the drug prices to a very low level, just above marginal cost, then we're not going to cover you at all. And what the drug companies have told Americans is that if we don't pay higher drug prices, there won't be any R&D on drugs.

What the President's Executive Order does is says, "Tell the Europeans, look, this is not fair to Americans. This is actually lowering the investment that we ought to be making on R&D for drugs." And so they should be paying prices that are equal to the level that Americans pay. And Americans should be paying

much lower prices than we do pay, much closer to competitive prices. It's a huge move forward. And now what we'll have to see is what the Europeans do and what the drug companies do in response. But to me, I've been hearing about this problem for decades. It's the first time I've seen a president really take a big step forward to try to address it. I mean, as somebody who is in, you know, research for a very long time, let me...

doesn't the promise of AI, AGI, ASI lessen this whole thing of we need gobs of money to be able to do R&D because that should, you know, maybe five years from now begin to do a, to cut those costs dramatically to take that chair away from the table or put that chair back into the table, if you will.

Yeah, no, that is actually a quite promising thing. So, I mean, just to give one example, there's this technology called AlphaFold that allows scientists to much more easily understand how proteins will fold on each fold and as a result, hopefully anyway, dramatically reduce drug development expenditures. Drug development is always going to be expensive because you still have to run

randomized large-scale clinical trials, and those are gonna be expensive. But the initial steps of drug development with AI, and as well the clinical trials are gonna be much more efficiently run over time. The idea that you need to have trillions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars

to develop a single drug we hope will become a thing of the past. In any case, there's no reason why Americans should be shouldering the burden for the whole rest of the world, though the developed world should be bearing this burden together. Let me switch. You know, I originally reached out to you because I wanted to talk to you about the HHS halting work at high-risk infectious disease labs around the world. And I can't believe this is true, but you tell me.

So there was an incident at a bio lab that apparently what happened is there was a, I don't know, a personal squabble between people and a contractor actually punched a hole in the other person's bio lab suit. I don't know, to get them sick or whatever. But it was, I mean, is that what happened at that bio lab? I think it was at Fort Detrick.

That is exactly what happened. Oh my gosh. This is something I learned. Yeah, it was, I haven't been scared about anything in this job except for that one thing. So I learned about this about three weeks into the job. I've been in the job about since the beginning of April.

It turns out that there had been a incident a few weeks before, in fact, right before I joined as the NIH director at Fort Detrick, a lab run and a part of the lab is run by the National Institute of Health. And it's a BSL-4 lab, which is the highest biosecurity level lab.

I mean, the lab, the experiments done there are on some really nasty bugs. I mean, you know, uh, Ebola, a whole, whole bunch of like viruses and pathogens that if it gets out in the population or if it infects lab workers, it's just really quite deadly. Right. Uh,

And what I learned was that there had been this incident just a couple weeks before I joined as director of the NIH where a lab worker had cut a hole in a biocontainment suit of a fellow worker with the express intention of getting that worker infected.

Um, if that, if that, if that, and apparently it was over some lover staff or, or I'm not sure exactly the full details. There's an ongoing investigation of that. Um, uh, what I learned was that, that, that, that the, uh, not just that this incident had happened, uh, which actually has a threat, not just to the worker, but also if that gets out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, I mean, I was actually, I mean, I was, I was absolutely livid. Um,

And so what I did is I ordered the lab on an operational shutdown, secured all of the vials of the nasty bugs in a safe environment, made sure that the animals were cared for, that they're in the lab.

And we're not going to open that up until the safety environment on the lab is absolutely solid. The contractor that was overseeing this, I think, did a very lax job. What I learned is that this goes back to the Biden administration, that the safety environment in the lab essentially downplayed these kind of security problems. If you're going to run experiments on these bugs, and I'm not, personally, I'm not surprised

that all of these experiments are worth doing. But in any case, if you're going to run them, you have an absolute responsibility to have zero tolerance for safety problems. The issue here wasn't just a one-off thing. It was something that was problematic in the safety culture of this lab where I cannot guarantee that if we reopen the lab right now that it would be a safe environment. I won't reopen the lab.

Thank you. Until that's the case. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I mean, shouldn't that person be punished? I mean, that really is attempted murder, and maybe even on a mass scale. I mean, there's an ongoing investigation, so I probably shouldn't say much more about this, but it's one of those things where, like, I was actually actively scared when I first heard it. Yeah. I mean, I think Americans are actively scared because none of this stuff should be happening. I mean, we are just...

We're just an accident or a stupid move or an intentional leak away from mass death. And, you know, you keep hearing people like Bill Gates say we're on the verge of another pandemic. Why? Why? I mean, why are we on the verge of another pandemic? Do you think we are?

I mean, you know, pandemics happen and they've happened all throughout history. The key thing to me, though, Glenn, is we don't want to cause one. We don't want to increase the risk of them. The irony of this past pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, is that it was very likely caused by actions aimed at stopping pandemics from happening.

There was almost this hubris, I mean, it is hubris. There was this idea that we could somehow, if we go into the bat caves of China and all the wild places, bring all of those viruses that we find there and pathogens that we find there into the labs, catalog them. We can somehow prevent all pandemics from happening, make them more preventable.

transmissible, more dangerous to humans, we can somehow, as a result of that exercise, make it less likely to have pandemics happening. But of course, what we found out is the opposite is true, that you can't do this kind of work entirely safely. And actually, even if you fully accomplish what was the aim of that research program, which is to go out in the wild places and find the pathogens,

you wouldn't protect anybody against the pathogen because what would happen is when and if the outbreak happens, whatever countermeasures you designed for them would already be out of date because the evolutionary biology of these viruses is they mutate very rapidly. And so when they got into the population, the countermeasures you prepared for, which you never tested any humans, very likely would not work. Have we stopped all of the gain-of-function stuff now? Are you convinced it's done yet?

Yeah. So last week, president Trump signed an absolutely historic executive order that said, uh, it puts a pause, uh, a full pause on all gain of function work throughout the government. Um, and, uh,

We implemented that pause at the NIH and I'm sure the rest of the government has done the same. Over the next 90 days, we're going to develop a framework and here's how the framework is going to work, right? So you have to be a little careful here. So gain of function can mean many things. So for instance,

Insulin is produced via a gain of function exercise. There's no risk of a pandemic being caused by it, but you take a bacteria, E. coli, you change so they can produce insulin, and that's how you produce human insulin. There's a completely safe thing to do.

On the other hand, you take a virus like a bat virus, a virus that has these like sort of coronavirus-like properties, add a furin cleavage site and manipulate it so they can infect human cells more easily. Well, now you have the potential to cause a pandemic.

If you're going to do an experiment like that, you as a scientist alone or scientists alone should not get to decide whether that risk is worth taking. The public should have a say. The public should be able to say, no, no matter what knowledge you think you're going to gain from that, it's not worth the risk of causing a worldwide pandemic that's going to kill 20 million people and cost $25 trillion or something.

And that's exactly what the framework's going to do. It's going to say, if you scientists want to, if I, the scientist, wants to run this project, the public will have a veto over that, say, no, you're not allowed to do it because it's not worth it. Most science won't be affected by this. Most science has no chance of causing a pandemic. But any science that does is going to be subject to this very, very strict regulatory framework. We're on with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is a hero in my book, now the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Is an apology good enough for the National Institute of Health? I mean, should anybody go to jail for what has happened? And what is that like to walk into that building when you were, you know, enemy number one to many in that building, you know, during the pandemic?

You know, it's been interesting. It's certainly a big turn of fate where I was sort of the subject of devastating takedowns and called all kinds of names by folks who were in this building where I now lead. But at the same time, I found many, many excellent scientists, many people devoted to advancing human knowledge for the benefit of all people. I mean, most scientists are like that. They're not trying to create havoc.

And so I've been trying to find allies and I found a lot of allies in the building. You asked what should happen, you know, regarding apologies. I mean, to me, apologies, I mean, I think the key thing, I personally, I'm very, very happy to apologize on behalf of American public health to the American people for the failures during COVID. But the key thing going forward is reform.

How do we change the institution so that it's focused on the health needs of the American people rather than these utopian schemes to like end all pandemics without any heed whatsoever to the risk that they take? Science is very, very powerful

kind of idea and institution, but it needs to be focused on real human needs, particularly for the NIH, real human health needs. And there have to be guardrails so that scientists understand that they operate in the context of

public support. We function on taxpayer money. We have to answer to taxpayers. And so that's been the challenge is trying to keep the light of science alive while still reminding scientists that we are not acting just as if we were like independent actors like God. We are actually beholden to the American people.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, I unfortunately have to take a network break. I would love to have you back for a longer podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you did during the COVID nightmare. And thank you for standing up so strongly now. And congratulations on being our director of the NIH. Thank you, Glenn. So good to talk. God bless you. Bye-bye.