A sharp confrontation erupted on CBS’s “Face the Nation” between Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health, and host Margaret Brennan. Bhattacharya, a physician and health economist who spent years as a prominent critic of parts of COVID policy, rejected attempts to link the shooting to the current Trump administration’s policies. Instead, he pointed the finger at policies enacted during former President Joe Biden’s administration. “No, I mean, like Biden. For example, Biden censored me,” he said during the confrontation.
3+Bhattacharya heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the central federal body in the United States responsible for funding and advancing medical and biomedical research. The NIH is one of the world’s most important institutions for medical research, diseases, drugs, and vaccines. At the same time, Bhattacharya also served as acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal body responsible for tracking diseases and outbreaks, issuing public health guidelines, and managing pandemics.
Brennan opened the discussion with the shooting that occurred in August 2025 at the CDC complex in Atlanta, Georgia. During the incident, suspect Patrick White fired about 200 rounds at six buildings in the CDC complex. DeKalb County police officer David Rose was killed during the incident. The suspect himself later died. According to authorities, White’s father said his son was obsessively preoccupied with the COVID vaccine and believed the vaccine caused him depression and suicidal thoughts.
3+Brennan asked Bhattacharya whether the Trump administration is doing enough to fight vaccine misinformation. But Bhattacharya refused to accept that framing. According to him, the shooter shouldn’t be the focus of the discussion—instead, the deeper reason why large segments of the American public lost trust in the health system should be examined.
According to him, “I think the central thing is that there’s a loss of public trust in public health, which happened in part because of a lot of things—honestly, even on this network and other networks, during the COVID pandemic a certain single viewpoint was presented, which led to things that really harmed people. School closures are probably the number one thing.”
Brennan stopped him and responded: “That’s not a productive line of argument. We covered COVID extensively on this program, like no other Sunday show.” When Brennan said the responsibility he’s talking about actually belongs to “Trump administration officials,” Bhattacharya interrupted her and pointed the finger at the previous Democratic administration: “No, I mean, like Biden. So Biden, for example, censored me, right? The Biden administration censored me. They sent direct attacks against people who disagreed with them about COVID—about whether the COVID vaccine stopped…”
3+Brennan cut him off and moved to address HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently leads the Trump administration’s health policy. According to her, Kennedy previously called the COVID vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” and she argued this is inaccurate information. Bhattacharya responded that the central question isn’t just who is spreading misinformation now, but why the crisis of trust in the health system was created in the first place: “I’m talking about the reason you have the distrust that led to the kind of problems we talked about earlier in public health. That distrust wasn’t caused by President Trump, it wasn’t caused by Bobby. It was caused by a lot of fundamental things.”
Brennan responded with one word: “Misinformation.” Bhattacharya answered: “Yes, but it was often spread by the government itself regarding natural immunity, school closures, mask closures. People lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates that didn’t make sense from a public health perspective. So if you want to talk about public trust, you need to embrace the whole picture. You can’t talk about it only in a narrow political way.”
3+Brennan tried again to bring the conversation back to the CDC shooting and Bhattacharya’s visit with the family of the slain officer. Bhattacharya claimed she was trying to link the incident to Kennedy’s policies. “What you’re talking about is an attempt to blame the shooting on Bobby.” Brennan responded that she’s not blaming Kennedy, but presenting the words of the shooter’s father.