Director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, sat down for an extended interview with ZeroHedge. Bhattacharya, long known as one of the fiercest critics of lockdown orthodoxy, has gone from blacklisted dissenter to running the world's largest biomedical research agency. He carries into his new post a distrust of entrenched power, a skepticism of politicized science, and an insistence that free inquiry—not censorship—must guide American health policy.

What follows is a candid conversation, in Bhattacharya's own words, on censorship, woke politics in research, the threat of bioweapons, and why he believes science cannot exist without free speech.

Fauci's Censorship Apparatus

Bhattacharya did not hesitate to call out what he experienced during the pandemic years:

"It wasn't just ZeroHedge that got subject to this censorship. I did too. I was on the Twitter blacklist. It was all true information that was just found inconvenient. That's what you guys were sharing. That's what I was sharing. And it was a gross violation of the American First Amendment."

The Stanford professor—blacklisted for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration—was among those exposed in the Twitter Files as a target of covert suppression. He says the NIH under his leadership will chart a different course:

"We're no longer in the misinformation detection business. We're no longer in the censorship business."

ZeroHedge itself was deplatformed during that same period for reporting inconvenient facts on the origins of COVID.

A Strong Stance Against "Biodefense"

As documented thoroughly in RFK Jr's book "The Wuhan Coverup", Anthony Fauci played a pivotal role in ballooning the U.S. biowarfare budget following the post-9/11 anthrax scare, an event still riddled with open questions Kennedy himself addresses in the book.