From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthit, and this is interesting times.

If you want to understand how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the face of American public health, you have to go back to the COVID era.

In the face of a once in a century, we hope, pandemic, medical authorities clearly felt like they needed to respond with absolute certainty.

Trust the science. Wear a mask. Postpone your wedding. Don't open the schools. And definitely don't listen to the cranks and the skeptics and the purveyors of misinformation. The problem is that those

confident authorities inevitably got some big things wrong, and the outsiders and skeptics

sometimes got things right. And as pandemic-era life got more and more, well, miserable,

big parts of the public simply stopped trusting

the experts entirely. So now, here we are in 2006, and the outsiders are in charge. One of them is

Dr. J. Badacharya, he's in charge of the NIH, tasked with reforming the world's largest biomedical research agency.

But his more important task, at least to my mind, is proving that outsiders can actually rebuild

public trust in science and medicine, as opposed to just undermining that trust even further.

Dr. Batacharya, welcome to interesting times.

Thanks for having you on, Russ.

I want to start with a kind of general diagnosis of the collapse of public trust in the medical

establishment in America and how I think the COVID-19 pandemic

played into it. So to start by talking me through your view of what happened during COVID,

which was also, I should say, when you first became a public controversialist.

Am I that now?

I mean, you've joined our ranks.

I'm sorry to say, you know.

Can I just start with like where I came from into the COVID era?

I mean, I was a professor at Stanford for I think 20 some years up to that point, up to 2020.

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