In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Banks said Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH is the perfect man to turn the embattled agency around.
“President Trump has picked a game changer to lead the NIH, to clean it up,” he told Breitbart News. “I mean, talk about draining the swamp and disrupting Washington. Dr Bhattacharya is the type of figure that’s going to do that.”
Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, “was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.” The document promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection, and the principle that protection should focus instead on people at higher risk.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021.
Bhattacharya received overwhelming knee-jerk backlash from the bureaucracy and scientific community. Then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called the Great Barrington Declaration dangerous and “not mainstream science.”
Banks said the pandemic proved how significant the low-profile NIH is, and why good leadership there is important.
“Ideologues in charge of an agency like the NIH, look how dangerous they can be,” he told Breitbart News.
In 2017 Banks, then a freshman member of the House, said “the very first thing that I ever did as a congressman” was a call to oust Collins from the NIH. Collins had been deceiving the public and lawmakers on Capitol Hill in charge of oversight of the agency over “spending all this money on life-ending research,” Banks said.
“Francis Collins was well known for spending a significant amount of money on embryonic stem cell research, and the pro-life community knew he was deceptive,” Banks said. “He was deceiving a number of people on Capitol Hill, but he professed to be a Christian, so they kept him around, because he was able to convince some people that he wasn’t dangerous.”
Ultimately Collins, who was Dr. Anthony Fauci’s boss during the pandemic, kept his job.
Banks pointed out there was a “lot of attention on Dr Fauci, but at the end of the day, Dr. Fauci reported to Francis Collins. So this is coming full circle with … all the damage those guys did – how corrupt Fauci was, how corrupt Francis Collins was.”
Bhattacharya, who was silenced on social media platforms at the direction of federal officials, credits his Christian faith with sustaining him amidst the abuse he suffered during the pandemic for his refusal to kowtow to Fauci and the coercive “scientific consensus.”
Banks believes that makes him the perfect choice to clean up the discredited agency.
“He was one of the only sane voices, not [only] during COVID, but at the beginning of COVID, saying that lockdowns were bad, they were dangerous for kids, bad for society, unhealthy on many levels, and he deserves a lot of credit for that,” Banks said. “They tried to cancel him and discredit him, and now he’s going to lead the agency.”
Many of the officials who fought Bhattacharya must now either get on board or find new employment.
“They hate his guts exactly because he’s going to disrupt the NIH and return it back to what it’s supposed to do,” Banks told Breitbart News. “It’s just research and study, research and cures, instead of being a political piggy bank for the radical left to be used against the American people, like they did during COVID.”
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are fully deploying Trump’s directive to root out waste, fraud, abuse, and woke throughout the federal government, and Banks says Bhattacharya will be a terrific partner.
“I know that DOGE and Elon will turn their focus to agencies like NIH at some point, but Bhattacharya is going to be a disruptor himself and change … this agency after a couple of decades of corrupt leadership there. He represents truth, and he’s not going to take orders from the bureaucrats, and he understands that the Fauci and Francis Collins types, they report to the people, not the other way around.”
Banks believes Bhattacharya will be confirmed when he comes before the Senate.
“There’s no reason for any Republican to vote against him, and the only reason any Democrat would vote against him is because he’s nominated by Donald Trump,” Banks said. “He’s eminently qualified and proven to be right on everything that he said in 2000, 2001, 2002, and he’s going to be great at this job. I’m as excited about him as I am anybody.”
Banks serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which will vet Bhattacharya’s nomination before it receives a vote in the full Senate.
“I’m going to be in a legislative position to back him up, provide him the backup that he needs in the Senate,” he said.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
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