{"id":11619,"date":"2026-03-11T17:47:45","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T22:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=11619"},"modified":"2026-03-11T17:47:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T22:47:47","slug":"nih-director-launches-scientific-freedom-lectures-with-non-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2026\/03\/11\/nih-director-launches-scientific-freedom-lectures-with-non-scientist\/","title":{"rendered":"NIH director launches \u201cScientific Freedom\u201d lectures with non-scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2026\/03\/nih-director-launches-scientific-freedom-lectures-with-non-scientist\/\">ARS Technica<\/a> On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it\u2019s calling \u201cScientific Freedom Lectures,\u201d with the first&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/videocast.nih.gov\/watch\/244438a5-0e6b-11f1-9f14-124f0a52e769\">scheduled for March 20<\/a>. The \u201cfreedom\u201d theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2026\/02\/nih-head-still-angry-about-covid-wants-a-second-scientific-revolution\/\">fuel his efforts<\/a>&nbsp;to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2026\/03\/nih-director-launches-scientific-freedom-lectures-with-non-scientist\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" style=\"display: none;\" title=\"lq  rPe nh Gd W k \"><\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ARS Technica On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it\u2019s calling \u201cScientific Freedom Lectures,\u201d with the first&nbsp;scheduled for March 20. The \u201cfreedom\u201d theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11620,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11619\/revisions\/11620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}