The White House issued a sharp rebuke of CBS News following an interview on "Face the Nation" where National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya debated host Margaret Brennan regarding the erosion of public trust in health institutions. The exchange, which touched on vaccine misinformation and pandemic-era policies, led to a statement from the White House accusing the media of a "continued inability to show an ounce of humility and contrition."
During the interview, Brennan questioned Bhattacharya, who also serves as acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about the public's declining trust in health guidance. Brennan brought up a shooting at a CDC facility in Georgia, where the suspect's father reportedly linked his son's actions to fixation on the COVID-19 vaccine. Bhattacharya, however, pivoted to broader reasons for distrust, citing what he described as a "single point of view" promoted by the media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I think the key thing is there's a loss of public trust in public health that happened in part because of a lot of – frankly, even – even on this network and on other networks, there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic about how, you know, that led to things that really did cause harm to people. The school closures are probably the number one thing that—," Bhattacharya stated.
Brennan interrupted, asserting that the program had extensively covered COVID-19 and that the administration was not doing enough to counter vaccine misinformation. She attributed issues to "misinformation," specifically mentioning Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr.'s past comments about the COVID vaccine being "the deadliest vaccine ever made."
Bhattacharya countered Brennan's focus, arguing that distrust was not solely caused by former President Trump or RFK Jr., but also by actions taken under the Biden administration. "No, I mean, like Biden. So Biden, for instance, censored me," he said. "Just so we're clear, the Biden administration censored me, right? They censored – they sent out direct attacks on people who disagreed on the COVID – on sort of whether the COVID vaccine stopped – "
He further elaborated that policies such as school closures, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates, particularly those that he argued "didn't make any public health sense," contributed to a significant loss of public trust and led to job losses for some individuals. "So, if you want to talk about public trust, you have to embrace that fully, right? You can't just talk about it in a narrow political way," Bhattacharya contended.
Responding to the exchange, White House spokesman Kush Desai told Fox News Digital, "The Fake News media openly supported unscientific lockdowns during the pandemic era and openly supported censoring anyone who dared to question those lockdowns. The Fake News media’s continued inability to show an ounce of humility and contrition is exactly why public trust in the mainstream media is even worse than public trust in public health bodies."
Brennan repeatedly attempted to steer the conversation back to the CDC shooting and Bhattacharya's visit with the victim's family, suggesting he was attempting to blame RFK Jr. for the incident, a characterization Bhattacharya rejected. The interview also touched on a reported executive order concerning vaccines and autism.