I spent most of the day in a (probably ill-advised) attempt to provide a service to the online science community. I followed as much of day 2 of the National Academies workshop on research integrity.
Most of the workshop was good, although I wouldn’t have called it a workshop, because I didn’t see any workshopping. I mostly saw people delivering familiar messages that you would expect based on their background. Publishers talked about the efforts that they are taking to try to screen out problem papers. Others said publishers were the problem and that we should walk away from journals. And so on.
But it was generally good, thoughtful stuff, even if the interaction was low. They did have a form to submit questions. Heck, one of mine got asked of a panel! Ironically, the answer came just at a point I couldn’t watch my laptop, so I didn’t get to hear the answer.
Attendance, from what I saw, fluctuated around a hundred. It was below 100 for the segment that attracted the most attention, a “fireside chat” with NIH and acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya, moderated by Emily Oster.
To be clear, this was the worst session by far that I saw during the entire day and a half. I’ve watched a few events hosted by the National Academies, and this was the worst I’ve ever seen.
Oster was not an effective moderator. Oster was far too chummy with Bhattacharya, who started by saying that he agreed to appear because he was going to talk to Oster. She was slightly better at this than I feared. She did press Bhattacharya to answer questions he kept digressing away from. She did try ask one question from the audience. At least I thought it came from the audience. They were talking so far it was hard to keep up as I was typing.
Bhattacharya is not an effective communicator. He has a habit that I often share: he starts a sentence without knowing what he is going to say, so he is constantly backtracking and digressing rather than finishing what he is saying.
I gave this event a chance. Bhattacharya started with some kind of reasonable discussion about replication.
But around the halfway point, his persecution complex started to kick in. And the session just went downhill, picking up speed as it went on.
He started to drop accusations of people having “bad faith” discussions about the NIH, that some information was “fake news,” blamed the Biden administration for... something (I can’t remember what), and near the very end complained about the New York Times and Washington Post of “not telling the truth” about a paper that he blocked the CDC from publishing.
It was about as bad as many critics predicted.
At the end, organizer Katy Milkman seemed to say that she was “dispirited” but that having Bhattacharya on was “the right call.” I disagree. Even though well intentioned, I think it was a very bad call.
I do want to give a nod to earlier participant, Andrew Gelman, who was about the only person I heard who specifically called out the federal government for anti-vaccine disinformation.
I was able to thread all of my comments, which you can read as a single page on Threadsky here: https://tbsky.app/profile/doctorzen.net/post/3mkam24d2vk2y
(Bluesky users: This is a great tool. Copy the link to the first post in a thread. Paste it into a browser. Put a “t” at the start of the URL. That is, “tbsky” instead of “bsky”. And it unrolls the whole thread.
From what I can tell, the only other person posting about the Bhattacharya event as it happened was Jenna Norton. She did not thread her posts, so I am going to do some very fast copy and paste of some of her comments.
Okay, here we go! Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster have started their #NASEM fireside chat.
Bhattacharya noted that seeing Emily Oster is the facilitator cemented his decision to participate.
He has a pattern of only speaking with people who have been publicly sympathetic to his views. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkb7puipys2uBhattacharya is discussing the problem of replication in research. A major source of failure to replicate is lack of diversity in the original study population. Thus his anti “DEI” efforts – which end up excluding already underrepresented people from research – are undermining his stated goal. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkb7xxwhbk2u
Emily Oster asked Bhattacharya: “What metrics is he going to use to measure improvement in replication?”
He’s been talking for several minutes and I’ve not heard an answer to this question. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbaakfxk32uIn the #NASEM fireside chat with Jay Bhattacharya, he says there is no political review of grants.
👀
NIH staff being required to censor grants base on a computational text analysis tool beg to differ. https://www.science.org/pb-assets/PDF/News%20PDFs/final_staff_guidance-1765918233.pdf - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbb2tcskd2uIn the #NASEM fireside chat with Bhattacharya, he says the impact score correlates strongly with methods and not innovation. He neglects entirely the existence of summary statements as a source of information to program staff and IC directors who *used to* be able to inform final funding decisions. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbjf35yt2u
In the #NASEM chat with Bhattacharya, he talks about how supporting innovation will support early career scientists. Meanwhile, under his leadership, early career scientists have disproportionately suffered.
Early career scientists were disproportionately affected by terminations. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbp7voit2uIn the #NASEM chat with Bhattacharya, he suggests that requiring vaccines is “coercive” and undermines trust. He ignores the role concerted vaccine disinformation campaigns have had on trust (and the part he played in them). - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbvd3avo2u
In the #NASEM fireside chat with Bhattacharya, I will give Emily Oster credit on pushing Jay on refusing to publish the CDC study showing covid vaccine reduce hospitalization, especially when CDC just published something with the same methods on flu. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbc3p6gx62u
He lied more than once about the political influence happening inside NIH, where ideas are very clearly being constrained by his own admission to “agency priorities” that have been determined not by scientific or patient communities, but by the White House & Russ Vought’s Project 2025 plan. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbcstwsyc2a
In the #NASEM chat with Jay Bhattacharya, he falsely accusing the Biden admin of censoring social media companies. In the lawsuit he helped bring, he failed to prove that claim. Yet he continues to repeat it. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbxxxjsg2u
Former NIGMS director Jeremy Berg has said he will have a reaction later. I will update this post when he does.
Update, 25 April 2026: Jeremy Berg has, as promised, delivered a thread on Bhattacharya’s chat. As with Jenna Norton’s posts, I will show a few excerpts:
(1) Replication actions
b. NIH starting a journal or something similar for posting replication studies (details unclear).
Most important to me: He seems to see this as a major force in changing academic culture. unless it leads to increased funding chances, I don’t see this.
2. Unified strategy for funding
He made statements that NIH staff just focus on funding papers that are likely to lead to high impact publications and that institutes do not worry about their overall missions, just one grant at a time.
This is ignorant nonsense.
(4) The CDC report on COVID vaccine efficacy
He said that there were clear methodological flaws and the moderator (also an economist) agreed.
If that is the case, then he should have issued a clear statement to that effort with timeline for generating a more methodologically sound paper.
He cannot be so foolish as to not understand that HIS blocking a scheduled report related to COVID is going to be perceived as political given his history of weighing in on the political and policy issues around COVID, rather than purely scientific ones.I was not surprised by his performance. It was largely was could have been anticipated.
I was pleasantly surprised that the moderator did push back on some issues.
But overall I don’t think this provide much useful information to the important topics under discussion.
By including him at this forum in this format, the National Academies of Science provided him a platform without substantial constraints or opportunities for others to fact check him or present other perspectives.
I, among others, would have been glad to do this.
I think the National Academies are damaging their reputation in an attempt to curry favor from political figures or to appease funders.
I am disappointed and hope (and will try to insist) that they will take different approaches in the future.
Update, 26 April 2026: Dorothy Bishop has a blog post about Bhattacharya’s performance as a friendly outsider (i.e., not in the United States). Excerpts:
I think that NASEM was right to include the Bhattacharya/Oster chat in the meeting for two reasons. First, I've attended endless sessions on research integrity with great speakers, but most of us feel powerless to actually do anything, other than call for action from funders and governments. Even if you don’t like what your government is doing, it can be helpful to know what solutions they will consider.
I’m sure the organizers will be criticized for the fact that only one audience question was asked in this session, but I doubt that I could have done any better than Oster... Bhattacharya revealed himself as someone who gets very uncomfortable when confronted with inconsistencies in his behaviour or views.
Bishop also provides a rough transcript of the event. Scroll down to the end of her post.
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