During a lengthy interview on Face the Nation, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was continually fact checked when he lied and said President Biden was at fault for eroding public trust on vaccines by the public at large during the COVID pandemic.
The debate took off when Bhattacharya discussed honoring Officer Rose, who was killed by a vaccine denier during a shooting at the CDC.
FTN host Margaret Brennan brought up the shooter's father, who said "he was brainwashed about the COVID vaccine and thought it was making him suicidal."
Bhattacharya wanted no part of that discussion. He started blaming Biden when Brennan jumped in.
BRENNAN: The Trump administration officials.
BHATTACHARYA: No, I mean, I mean like Biden. So Biden, uh, for instance,
BRENNAN: It began under the Trump administration.
BHATTACHARYA: The Biden administration censored me, right? They censored, they've sent out, uh, uh, direct attacks on people who disagreed on, on, on the COVID on, on sort of whether the COVID vaccine, uh, stopped him,
BRENNAN: RFK Jr called the COVID vaccine the deadliest vaccine ever made. That is misinformation and we're not being clear about that. And I think that is dangerous.
Later in the interview, Brennan brought up the ridiculous and unfounded claims made by the Trump administration that vaccines cause autism, which lead Bhattacharya back to 2020 and made him look as duplicitous on causing misinformation about vaccines as possible.
BRENNAN: Which is so key for science, which is why I'm asking you why the president putting out an order specifically focused on one, what seems to be preconceived notion.
How that wouldn't be undermining ...
BHATTACHARYA: You're jumping ahead. I don't know exactly the executive order, neither do you, so it's not, yeah.
BRENNAN: Well, it's interesting that you don't. My colleague, Matt Gutman, here at CBS, asked you last week whether you think vaccines cause autism. You said you don't know for certain. You said there isn't evidence that any vaccine causes autism, but you also don't have evidence that vaccines do not.
Parents are preparing to send their kids back to school. Please be clear.
Should parents trust that they can go vaccinate their kids when their doctor tells them to do so for them to go back to school?
BHATTACHARYA: I think that parents, for most kids, especially for the measles vaccines, the DTP, all the standard childhood vaccines, it's very important that parents vaccinate their kids.
Wow, he almost sounds normal at this point, but then he falls back into nonsense.
BHATTACHARYA: As far as can they feel confident sending back to schools, just to push back some, it was a tremendous mistake to cause parents to fear about sending their kids to school during the COVID pandemic. The kids were better off in school.
We shouldn't be scaring public...
BRENNAN: I'm talking about what people do now. It's August, about to be September, kids are going back to school. I'm not talking about 2020. I'm talking about 2026.
BHATTACHARYA: The reason why you have this problem, public trust, because what happened in 2020 has not yet been addressed.
That's false. It has been addressed. Closing the schools was necessary because it was early in the pandemic and too much was unknown.
He keeps blaming the anti-vax insanity and school closings on mistrust of public health officials, which is preposterous.
It was the Republicans and MAGA nutjobs who promoted vaccine lies. It wasn't Biden.
It was Trump who promoted snake oil cures during the pandemic which undermined vaccine credibility.
It was Trump supporters in and out of Congress thatwho radicalized Patrick Joseph White, which led to the shooting at the CDC.
The blame falls squarely on Trump and the crackpots that he supports.
