2026-01-29
1 小时 4 分钟From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat 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 2026, and the outsiders are in charge.
One of them is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
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. Bhattacharya, welcome to Interesting Times.