The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Wednesday directed staff to compile a list of grants and contracts related to “fighting misinformation or disinformation,” STAT News reported.
According to STAT, the directive came on the same day that health economics professor Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., took the helm at NIH — STAT dedicated most of its article to criticizing Bhattacharya.
But, Bhattacharya hasn’t been sworn in — he was only confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.
“It’s ironic that STAT’s story on misinformation contained misinformation,” investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker told The Defender.
Thacker posted on X:
EXCLUSIVE: The Senate confirmed @DrJBhattacharya to head the NIH, but today is not his “first day.”
Neither he, nor @MartyMakary for FDA, have been sworn in. There’s a process to how things work.
Don’t expect corrections from STAT News. https://t.co/fljjTNBwGm
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) March 27, 2025
STAT quickly changed the article to reflect the fact that Bhattacharya hadn’t yet been sworn in. However, it kept the rest of the text, which was largely a hit piece on Bhattacharya.
Executive editor Rick Berke told The Defender STAT corrected the story and stands by the corrected version.
NIH asked staffers for information about contracts supporting censorship
STAT News reported that NIH asked staffers to respond by noon Wednesday with information about any contract that “may be related to any form of censorship at all or directing people to believe one idea over another related to health outcomes.”
The email contained examples, including contracts promoting vaccine uptake or public health messages about the “dangers of Covid or not wearing masks.” STAT reported that the email also instructed staff to search for keywords like media literacy, social media, social distancing and lockdowns.
“This should address any contract that could be used to ‘censor Americans,’” the email reportedly said.
Similar requests by top NIH officials in recent weeks have preceded the termination of research funding. The agency informed researchers earlier this month that it would cancel at least 33 vaccine hesitancy grants and reduce or modify nine others.
Experts interviewed by STAT expressed dismay that the agency may want to stop funding censorship or direct people to believe particular ideas over others. Some of these experts directed their criticism toward Bhattacharya.
“For the past couple of years, Jay Bhattacharya has portrayed himself as a victim of censorship,” said Dr. Jonathan Howard, a psychiatrist who made a name for himself in part by criticizing Bhattacharya, implying that Bhattacharya wasn’t censored.
Bhattacharya, a critic of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and co-author of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” is one of the lead plaintiffs in the Murthy v. Missouri censorship case. The case alleges that Biden administration officials colluded with social media companies to censor dissenting views on several issues, including prevailing COVID-19 policies, lockdowns, and mask and vaccine mandates.
In a widely criticized decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2024 remanded the case to the lower court and ruled the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue because they couldn’t point to direct orders the administration gave to censor individual posts.
However, the court did acknowledge that Bhattacharya and the other plaintiffs were censored. Each doctor in the lawsuit, the decision said, “faced his first social media restriction in 2020.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) also filed a similar lawsuit against the Biden administration for censoring speech critical of official public health narratives related to COVID-19 policies.
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Canceling contracts a ‘good start’
“It’s obviously a good thing to everyone in America, except some DNC-aligned reporters, that the federal government stop funding censorship research,” Thacker said.
Brownstone Institute scholar Toby Rogers, Ph.D., who was himself censored on social media for dissenting from the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, told The Defender:
“The Biden administration ran the largest censorship operation in history and they did it to enrich their donors in the pharmaceutical industry and public health insiders who held intellectual property rights to mRNA technology.
“Cancelling contracts is a good start. We also need to fire the people responsible, prosecute any criminal actions, repeal any laws or policies that enabled this to happen and allow the public to access all government records concerning the censorship program.”
In his nomination hearings, Bhattacharya committed to changing the culture of censorship at NIH.
“Over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differ from theirs,” Bhattacharya said. “Dissent is the very essence of science. I’ll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives.”
He said that contrary to pandemic-era guidance to unquestioningly “follow the science,” scientific progress requires tolerance for a broad range of perspectives. “I want to make sure that all the ranges of hypotheses are supported.”
Bhattacharya told committee members that censorship of non-establishment perspectives, including criticism of pandemic-era measures such as lockdowns, caused significant harm.
Since the height of the pandemic period, substantial evidence has emerged that measures promoted by NIH, such as masking, lacked scientific support.
Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted to lawmakers that the guidelines to keep six feet of separation — ostensibly to limit the spread of COVID-19 — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input, The New York Post reported.
Research has also shown that the lockdowns had negative impacts on child development and did little to stop the spread of COVID-19.
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NIH grants targeted ‘vaccine-hesitant’ minority, elderly and other communities
Several investigations by The Defender in 2023 and 2024 revealed the types of grants that may now be on the chopping block.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants, awarded by NIH and HHS, funded research on decreasing so-called “vaccine hesitancy” and increasing vaccine uptake for the COVID-19, flu and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines using social media, provider communication strategies and other means to direct people’s decision-making toward the agency’s desired behaviors.
The Defender obtained the grant information through a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Documents revealed a half-million-dollar NIH grant to create a smartphone tool to push the HPV vaccine among underserved adolescents whose parents are “vaccine-hesitant.”
Another set of documents revealed that NIH issued a $2.2 million grant to test personalized “nudges” to coax elderly people into taking more shots.
The NIH also spent $340,000 to fund a pilot project that would test psychological tactics aimed at persuading South African fifth-graders and parents to accept the controversial HPV vaccine.
One set of documents, obtained in 2023, revealed that the HHS issued a $4.7 million grant to a scientist — and paid consultant for Merck — to research how to increase teen uptake of the HPV vaccine. Merck manufactures Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine available in the U.S.
In 2024, the grant’s principal investigator, Noel Brewer, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine recommendations.
FOIA documents obtained by CHD in 2024 revealed that HHS issued $4 million to fund the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to “inoculate” social media users against HPV vaccine “misinformation” posted on social media.
Other documents CHD received in 2023 revealed that HHS granted $600,000 for research on how to increase HPV vaccine uptake among Black teens.
In 2023, documents showed that the CDC had issued hundreds of millions of dollars in grants since 2021 for the development of “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials and for the training of “influential messengers” to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines to communities of color in each U.S. state.
The CDC also funded “Chair Care,” a New Mexico program that trained and paid hairstylists as “trusted messengers” that would target the state’s Hispanic, Black, Native American and conservative populations, who were shown to have the lowest vaccine uptake and highest “vaccine hesitancy.”
Related articles in The Defender- NIH Pulls Plug on ‘Vaccine Hesitancy’ Research — Will mRNA Products Be Next?
- Exclusive: HHS Funds AI Tool to ‘Inoculate’ Social Media Users Against HPV Vax ‘Misinformation’
- Exclusive: NIH Funds Pilot Project to Push HPV Vaccine on South African Fifth-graders
- ‘Chair Care’: New Mexico Hairstylists Being Trained Under CDC-Funded Program to Push COVID, Flu Shots
- Exclusive: NIH Funds Trial of Smartphone Tool to Push Pro-HPV Vaccine Messages to Parents of Minority, Lower-Income Children
- Can Text Messages Sway More Black Parents to Vaccinate Teens for HPV? Rutgers Gets $600k Grant to Find Out
- Exclusive: Federal Government Funds $4.7 Million Grant — Led by Merck Consultant — to Increase HPV Vaccine Uptake by Improving How Providers ‘Announce’ the Vaccine
- Exclusive: CDC Doled Out Hundreds of Millions in Grants to Push Vaccines, Collect Data in Communities of Color
