National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said the Trump administration’s newly announced ban on federally funded gain-of-function research represents a significant shift in federal biomedical policy, adding that the agency is committed to greater transparency, open scientific debate and a new approach to pandemic preparedness.

Speaking in an interview Thursday with the Just the News, No Noise TV program, Bhattacharya called the new approach “an absolutely vital policy.”

“The United States will never again support research that has a chance of causing catastrophic human harm,” he said. “We’ve been working for a year and a half on getting the details right, getting the incentives right. I’m so excited to be able to announce that policy. It’s going to make Americans safer going forward.”

His comments came after the Trump administration announced a government-wide policy banning federal funding for certain high-risk gain-of-function research and expanding oversight of experiments involving dangerous pathogens, such as some research conducted overseas with U.S. taxpayer funding.

Trump administration officials said the policy was intended to reduce the risk of laboratory-related accidents while maintaining support for biomedical research under tighter safeguards.

Many U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that a laboratory-related incident in China, such as a leak, sparked the COVID pandemic. Other entities have argued that the lab leak theory has not yet been fully confirmed.

Bhattacharya said transparency would be central to the NIH under his leadership.

“Science requires you to say, ‘Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s the data. Please check me,’” he said.

“That kind of transparency is absolutely vital to science,” Bhattacharya added. “What I saw during the pandemic was censorship instead of science, and that is the death of any scientific culture.”

He said the agency had turned a page from its previous approach.

“The page is turned,” Bhattacharya said. “The current NIH will not take the Fifth on what we’re doing on science. What we’ll do is we will say clearly, 'here’s what we’ve done. Here are the data. Please come check our work.'"

Bhattacharya also said discussions were underway within the Trump administration about developing a new pandemic response “playbook” going forward.

“What I have seen has filled me with hope that the pandemic playbook that we come out with will be a very different pandemic playbook that led to the lockdowns, the school closures, the vaccine mandates, and all the rest,” he said.

On vaccine safety, Bhattacharya said the NIH was establishing a new research center.

“We are establishing a vaccine injury center, so that we can honestly study vaccine injury instead of gaslighting patients to say that, ‘Oh you don’t have any problems at all,’” he said.

“We have to take the science around vaccines seriously,” he added. “That means honestly looking at the benefits, which are many, many benefits for many, many of the vaccines, but also honestly looking at the harms. And if we don’t do that, then we are not painting a real, true picture.”

Asked about ivermectin, Bhattacharya said he was not taking an official position on the anti-parasite drug that was used to treat COVID, but he thinks that scientific debate should not have been discouraged.

“My mind is open on this,” he said.

“Demonizing the people who liked it never made sense to me,” Bhattacharya said. “It was an open scientific conversation that should have been embraced.”

He added, “The key thing, as NIH director, is to open up the scientific debate. Let scientists have the fights that we always have, so that we can come to better, more rigorous, more certain conclusions."

Bhattacharya also said records documenting former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s thinking during the pandemic should be made public if they were created using government resources.

“It is a document that is a historical document that, for the sake of transparency, belongs to the American people,” he said.

Bhattacharya also criticized Fauci’s public messaging during the COVID pandemic.

“The sin here was that he told the American public things with a degree of confidence that was not justified by the scientific evidence,” he said. “We could have had instead a more humble communication about the scientific uncertainty from a top figure like Tony Fauci, and then what would have happened is a scientific discussion and debate that would have led to better policy.”