Only a transparent, evidence-based reckoning led by the US’s own research institutions—not a political narrative from the White House—can restore public trust and generate the impetus needed to finally end dangerous gain-of-function experiments.
When Jay Bhattacharya took office as director of the National Institutes of Health in April 2025, opponents of the disastrous Covid pandemic response felt, for the first time since 2020, that meaningful change to public health policy might finally be within reach. Someone who had publicly challenged the Fauci-era dogma was now in charge of the very institution that shaped federal policy. Those committed to biosafety reform expected above all an end to gain-of-function research—the deliberate enhancement of viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal.
Jay Bhattacharya, someone who had publicly challenged the Fauci-era dogma, was now in charge of the very institution that shaped federal policy.
Yet the NIH has appeared to be slow and cautious. And the disappointment has been loud. Some of Bhattacharya’s former allies and friends, journalist Emily Kopp, scientists Richard Ebright and Bryce Nickels of Biosafety Now, and most recently Bret Weinstein on the Joe Rogan Experience, now imply he has betrayed their shared ideals.
Their alarm grew when Bhattacharya appointed Jeffrey Taubenberger, long a defender of gain-of-function research and a close Fauci collaborator, as acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Taubenberger’s proudest scientific achievement is the experimental reconstruction of the 1918 influenza virus—a virus whose per-capita death toll is estimated as several times that of Covid. Taubenberger’s is not the kind of accomplishment that reassures a public already anxious about laboratory risks.
This squabble is more than personal; it matters because of the enormity of the issue at stake. Lab leaks, as Richard Ebright reminds us, happen several times a week across American, British, and Canadian labs. President Obama paused federal gain-of-function research in 2014 precisely because anthrax, H5N1, and smallpox (a noteworthy trio, to put it mildly) had leaked from US labs in quick succession. And the escape of a still-in-development deadly pathogen, for which no countermeasure yet exists, is a particularly alarming prospect.
Almost a year ago, when Bhattacharya was first tapped for office, Toby Green and Thomas Fazi published an essay whose tone was already uneasy. What looked like a triumph, the authors suggested, might already contain the seeds of defeat. They warned that any reformer stepping into the NIH would confront a system structured to absorb or neutralize dissent; this bureaucracy was capable of smothering reform through sheer inertia. Rereading the piece now, one is struck by how prescient it was articulating the fear that Bhattacharya might be overwhelmed, isolated, or quietly constrained by the very forces that he was appointed to confront. It was a celebration, but also perhaps, the authors hinted, a pre-emptive obituary for the reforms Bhattacharya would seek to bring.
I share this combination of nervousness, impatience, and circumspection. But I’m also sympathetic to Bhattacharya’s position. As a historian of communist Central Europe, I have, since the 1990s, interviewed many citizens who sincerely tried to reform the regime from within. They joined the Communist party not out of conviction, but because change was not coming on its own, and they hoped to steer the system in a more humane direction. They failed, but not for lack of personal integrity: rather because the system was structurally designed to crush initiative. When the Soviet Union withdrew its support and communism collapsed, they additionally bore the blame of having been on the “wrong” side. Their experience taught me that institutions rarely reward good faith; idealists are punished more often than honored, and purity becomes a weapon used against them from both sides. Naturally, the NIH is not coercive in the same way as Eastern bloc communist parties, but any entrenched system displays a comparable inertia, protecting orthodoxy and punishing dissent.
When the Soviet Union withdrew its support and communism collapsed, reformists additionally bore the blame of having been on the “wrong” side. Their experience taught me that institutions rarely reward good faith; idealists are punished more often than honored.
This is why I am wary of judging Jay Bhattacharya too harshly. His position inside the NIH must be unimaginably difficult. He faces a bureaucracy that never wanted him and associates him with Trump and RFK Jr, who are widely detested in those circles; a bureaucracy which moreover spent decades justifying gain-of-function work and is allergic to admitting error—especially catastrophic error. In that environment, perhaps what Bhattacharya needs is not more condemnation, but a bit of oxygen.
Let me speculate that one of the main obstacles Bhattacharya faces lies in the defense and intelligence ecosystem that has been intertwined with risky coronavirus manipulation for years. Senator Rand Paul recently revealed, for instance, that Ralph Baric—America’s leading coronavirus expert and a collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Zhengli Shi—had been in regular communication with the CIA and ODNI since 2015. Their discussions concerned coronavirus evolution and possible human adaptation. In 2018, Baric and Shi were named in a proposal submitted to DARPA, the research agency of the Pentagon, to create chimeric bat coronaviruses featuring a furin cleavage site—a feature unprecedented in this viral family until it appeared on SARS-CoV-2. DARPA actually rejected the proposal, but this research was not necessarily therefore cancelled. In January 2020, just as Covid was emerging, Baric shared with ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group his concerns that Covid might be a Wuhan lab accident. As for Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control when Covid broke out, he states openly that the virus came from a lab, but adds that he cannot disclose anything else, as the intelligence community still keeps the relevant evidence under seal. He has urged that it be declassified.
It is clear that no NIH director can easily declassify intelligence-linked material, and no typical US administration would find it easy to admit that an American-funded program may have contributed to what is seen as the deadliest pandemic in a century. It might thus come as a surprise that the White House already has a glossy webpage, “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19”. However, the page is light on evidence and went correspondingly unnoticed. It cites no laboratory records, funding trails, biosafety audits, or sequence logs—the materials that matter. Instead, it frames the issue as a political score-settling in Trumpian style: a gesture of defiance, not of disclosure.
The White House already has a glossy webpage, “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19”. However, it is light on evidence and went correspondingly unnoticed. It cites no laboratory records, funding trails, biosafety audits, or sequence logs—the materials that matter. This is precisely where Bhattacharya’s chance lies.
This is precisely where Bhattacharya’s chance—and his challenge—lies: to turn what has so far been a partisan slogan into an institutional act of truth-telling. President Trump’s political rhetoric, however flawed, has created a narrow space of permission in which the intelligence community may be pressed not only to disclose what it knows, but to lift the classification that still prevents the NIH from releasing its own evidence. If Bhattacharya is able—or allowed—to use this opportunity, he may yet turn the White House’s appetite for vindication into a lever for transparency. The NIH’s underlying evidence, such as grant files, contracts, subcontracting trails, audit reports, emails, or peer-review notes, can show who funded what, who knew what, and when they knew it. A White House narrative convinces only partisans; an NIH disclosure would convince the world.
This admission is what is required if the US truly wants to stop gain-of-function research. It must begin by acknowledging the likely fact that Covid-19 was the first, world-wide demonstration of gain-of-function’s catastrophic potential. This admission would not only restore public faith in the system’s capacity to reckon with its own mistakes; it would supply the strongest political argument against gain-of-function that reformers will ever be granted. Without it, on the other hand, gain-of-function bans will remain a symbolic gesture—reversible, porous, and destined to fail. We cannot prevent what we refuse to diagnose.
If Bhattacharya leads this transparent release, he will not simply publish documents; he will restore a standard of scientific integrity that vanished during the pandemic years. He and Matthew Memoli have already taken a significant step: on November 13, they published an essay titled “NIH Directors: The World Needs a New Pandemic Playbook”, with the caption “The old one failed to cope with Covid and may even have caused it”. One step remains: acknowledge the truth fully and unambiguously and release the documentation backing it.
Right now, the biosafety movement feels betrayed, while Bhattacharya presumably feels besieged. Yet they are natural allies, trapped in an unfortunate standstill. Both sides in fact need the same thing: an institutional disclosure and reckoning that forces the machinery to bend. But only the NIH director can deliver it. If decisive evidence exists, it must be published. If no decisive evidence exists, the NIH must publish the record showing why it has at least strong suspicions. Either way, the public deserves what it has lacked since 2020: a clear, documented account of what happened. That is what good faith looks like. That is how trust is rebuilt. And that is how the world will see that, this time, those inside the machine chose transparency over secrecy.
The question that haunts every reformer—especially those inside unyielding institutions—is immemorial: can truth survive contact with power? Sometimes yes. But only when the people inside carry through the difficult decision to let the truth surface.
