BACKFIRE: Jay Bhattacharya Just Flipped the Script on Chris Cuomo Over COVID Vaccines

Cuomo tried to corner him on Warp Speed—but the NIH Director exposed how public health lied, censored the truth, and destroyed trust forever.

Chris Cuomo tried to corner Jay Bhattacharya on the COVID vax and Operation Warp Speed.

Instead, the NIH Director flipped the script—EXPOSING the real scandal: Public health lied, CENSORED the truth, and shattered trust forever.

And when Cuomo called COVID vaccine concerns “propaganda,” it blew up in his face.

Chris Cuomo brought NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on to talk COVID, but it quickly turned political.

Right off the bat, Cuomo tried to get him to comment on Trump’s role in Operation Warp Speed—hoping, it seemed, for a headline.

Bhattacharya wasn’t interested in point-scoring. He didn’t fall into the trap.

He brought it back to the bigger issue, which was the total collapse of trust in public health and the need for honesty and transparency moving forward.

“I think it’s really healthy to have transparency about what the drug companies that were involved in Operation Warp Speed know.”

“It’s also really healthy to open up a discussion, an honest scientific discussion, uncensored, on the evidence on the COVID vaccine.”

He said the public had been misled…especially on key claims that didn’t hold up.

“A lot of people have lost trust in all vaccines, as a consequence of essentially—misstatements—including things like, you know, the vaccine stops you from getting and spreading COVID.”

“Remember all the mandates that were in place.”

Bhattacharya admitted that he had never seen anything like it before in his life.

“That kind of level of distrust I’ve never in my long career in public health have seen before.”

But he saw Trump’s call for transparency as a step in the right direction.

“What the president is doing is very, very healthy. Transparency is the way forward.”

It was not going the way Cuomo wanted it to, you could tell by the grim expression painted on his face.

Cuomo didn’t let it go.

He kept trying to get Bhattacharya to take a stand on Trump’s position, asking point-blank if Trump was ‘wrong’ about the vaccine helping during the pandemic.

Again, Bhattacharya didn’t take the bait.

He took a measured approach and doubled down on the importance of looking at the data, honestly and in context.

“Well, what he’s saying is let’s open up and look at the data,” he said, before breaking it down by group.

“For instance, older people—I’m pretty convinced that it did make a positive difference.”

But that wasn’t the whole story. When it came to young men, the risk-benefit balance looked very different. He called out the dangerous effects of the vaccine on national TV.

“If you look at young men who got myocarditis at high rates, but weren’t really dying of COVID at very high rates, it’s less clear.”

He brought up another area where transparency was lacking: pregnancy.

“Pregnant women—there’s a lot of data that the public hasn’t really seen and it’s worth looking at.”

It was a paradigm shift to be openly discussing these topics, the same ones that would lead to censorship during the pandemic.

Instead of giving Cuomo a quote to use against Trump, Bhattacharya laid out the case for why honest, group-specific analysis is essential—and why we still haven’t gotten it.

Eventually, Bhattacharya did give his take on Operation Warp Speed, and it will definitely go down as controversial.

“I think Operation Warp Speed was absolutely the right thing to do in 2020,” he said.

“If you are in the middle of a new novel virus spreading around and you have the capacity to deploy amazing scientists to try to address that at a rapid pace—it was definitely the right call to make in 2020.”

Once again, that was only part of the story. Bhattacharya said the real problems began after the shots were rolled out and the narrative hardened.

“When the data started coming in 2021, and the mandates started going out—well that’s when we started getting into a lot of trouble.”

According to Bhattacharya, Trump’s push for answers now is critical…not just for accountability, but for healing the damage done to public trust, if the damage is even reversible.

“Having an understanding of what was known, at what points in time—and also making sure the people who were injured get an honest take rather than [being] censored, the kind of the way they were in the Biden administration.”

Transparency was important to the NIH Director.

“For me, the most important thing is we need to have public health be honest with the American public. To me that’s [the] upshot of the president’s take, which I really just admire.”

Cuomo ended by bringing up Fauci—but instead of focusing on his record, he took aim at Fauci’s critics.

“I don’t think there’s any proof that Tony Fauci ‘cashed in’ from the pandemic,” Cuomo said, brushing aside a growing list of concerns.

“And yes, I hear that from MAGA-land all the time.”

He turned to Bhattacharya and asked if Fauci had really been a problem during the pandemic. But Bhattacharya wasn’t interested in relitigating personalities.

He zoomed out to the bigger issue—how science itself got politicized.

“I think that science—shouldn’t be political, it’s not political,” he said.

“You know that neither the left nor the right owns science.”

“There’s not Democrat science or Republican science.”

What matters, he said, is whether science can be trusted again by the people it’s supposed to serve.

“I believe very fundamentally that science needs to earn the trust of the people by sticking to what really science is about and what it does best.”

“And sometimes the answers, the left is not going to like, and sometimes the answers, the right is not going to like.”

His bottom line was simple, and probably not what Cuomo wanted or expected to hear.

“To me, the most important thing is to stay focused on the things that I know will work and to help the American people, which is [through] excellent gold-standard science. That’s my focus.”

Cuomo quickly ended the segment. That’s a wrap.

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