This year I worked as a senior advisor to the NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya. My mission was to build a framework to eliminate ideological bias in NIH-funded research. The Daily Caller has now published my article about my experience.
An example of the biased research: A team of leftist academics conducted an entire study around this tweet from the President:
The idea was that people took COVID less “seriously” after the tweet. I’m sorry for the flashback to when leftists/Dems needed everyone to feel the exact level of panic and doom with COVID they felt (and share their false beliefs on the efficacy of school closures, masks, and COVID vaccines1).
NIH funded that study.
And they just gave the researcher another $651,586 for “misinformation” research in July, including $200,000 from the Office of the Director.
Unfortunately, Jay ghosted me after hiring me. He wouldn’t respond to messages or questions. In the end, it seemed like he didn’t want to eliminate these absurdly biased grants or address the problem in a systematic way – at least not now.
There must be an explanation for Jay’s behavior – I just don’t know what it is. For example, he bizarrely deleted the last couple months of my messages to him (keeping the older ones), including the synopsis of the framework. That’s inexplicable, makes no sense at all.
This was the strangest, most unprofessional experience of my career. For 4½ months, I was building the framework, reading tons of grants, sending Jay questions and examples, and it was dead air – it was like talking to a toaster.
The contractors working in the NIH Office of the Director, myself included, were laid off in late September (≈20 people). No warning or explanation. I only worked for and reported to Jay, so it was very awkward that he didn’t say a word to me when this happened.
The end result is that NIH is still funding invalid, ideologically driven “research” that has no chance to improve Americans’ health. The initial grant cancellations you might have heard about earlier this year just scratched the surface. They were based on a keyword search, probably by DOGE, that was missing lots of keywords. A systematic, rigorous framework is necessary to do the job, especially if we want lasting change, and that’s not happening. It’s what I was trying to implement, but Jay wouldn’t let me.
My framework identified four areas of bias so far:
1. Inherently ideological research, e.g. research based on proprietary and often Orwellian leftist constructs like “microaggressions” and “systemic racism”. Such research is scientifically invalid since these constructs aren’t consensual, objective descriptions of reality.
2. Rigged research. Misinformation and vaccine hesitancy are not inherently leftist constructs and can be defined in neutral, descriptive terms. They might even be worthy of research attention, but in practice this research is always rigged to advance leftist narratives.
Academic “misinformation researchers” invariably treat facts, unsettled claims, and matters of opinion as “misinformation”, and they’re always beliefs associated with conservatives – leftist misinformation is completely ignored (e.g. the COVID shots prevent infection, sterilizing children (puberty blockers + cross-sex hormones) prevents suicides, community mask use (even cloth) definitely reduces COVID spread, Trump suggested that people inject or drink bleach).
For example, NIH funded a misinformation study that treated statements like “Coronavirus is genetically engineered” and “Democrats are using the coronavirus situation to harm President Trump” as misinfo. In fact, this is the same researcher (Sean Young at UC Irvine) who I mentioned above, who conducted the study of the harms of the President’s tweet, and who just got another $651,586 from NIH for “misinformation” research.
3. Suppression of research and data that conflict with leftist ideology. The principal example is denial of race as a health factor and ideological efforts to erase everything we know about race and health. This is driven by the new leftist race ideology that cannot accept race differences on any dimension (even mundane medical realities), unless they’re derogatory claims about white people.
Leftists are fully willing to endanger patients by ignoring scientific evidence about race and health.
4. Missing research. There are vast domains and research questions that NIH completely ignores because of its profound leftist bias. This is likely their most impactful bias, the way in which NIH is most harmful to the American people.
a. Benefits of religious faith, church attendance, prayer, etc. This was an emerging area of research before 2010, and then mostly disappeared, at least at NIH, as the left radicalized. Most such research now is foreign, with some notable work on effects of Islamic prayer (Salat), for example.
b. Male suicide. American men commit suicide at extremely high rates, much higher than any other English-speaking country, especially white and American Indian men (28 and 39 per 100k, respectively), and 4x the rate for women.
Surprisingly, NIH has nothing focused on this. The research community is biased against men, especially white men.
c. Relatively less focus on individual behavior and health outcomes, in favor of “social determinants of health” and leftist dogma like “systemic racism” asserted as causes. There’s little account of human agency, internal locus of control, lifestyle, etc.
It was inevitable that the NYT would publish a piece criticizing the RFK/Hegseth 100-50 challenge, for example, and there’s persistent tension between the MAHA premise of individual agency and the newish leftist embrace of Big Pharma/reflexive defense of arbitrary pharmaceutical products.
Note that all the example grants listed are ACTIVE grants. DOGE didn’t have the right search terms to get most of the ideologically driven research, and a systematic approach – an objective framework – is necessary to root out the bias.
We need to define ideology in a consensual, rigorous way and build tools to help staff understand and detect when ideology has been embedded in research. Keywords aren’t enough.
This should happen at every funding agency, including NIH and NSF. I recommend that the administration deploy an empowered person in each agency who thoroughly understands leftist ideology and can build an objective, rigorous anti-bias framework.
The status quo is basically a lucrative subsidy program for leftist activists/academics, and much of the “research” harms conservatives in particular or Americans as a whole.
And to be clear, Jay was given all of this and more. Every active grant example here is something he was alerted to by July. He had the framework synopsis, including the above four areas of bias and much more, and deleted it (?). I have no idea why.
In the next installment, I’ll dive into the framework and grants. There’s no escaping the question of what’s ideological and what isn’t, and that question needs to be rigorously addressed in any anti-bias framework.
Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. Find him on X here. You can contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.
Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow each claimed that the shots unequivocally prevent infection, which was wildly false and known to be false at the time.
I emailed Jay in March and pitched him on how I could build an anti-bias framework. At the time, we were mutuals on X so I knew that he knew who I was.
He seemed to agree with my analysis, though he wasn't confirmed by the Senate yet. We spoke on the phone in April and I helped him with drafting a new Priorities Directive that month, for free, before I was hired.
He brought me on officially in early May, at which time he ghosted me. It's a hell of a mystery.
This is depressing I had high hopes for that guy after following him on twitter during the pandemic.