Watch: Margaret Brennan Furious When Trump's NIH Director Exposes the Real Motivation Behind Her Vaccine Hissy Fit
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya was not having it when CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan tried to pin COVID misinformation on the Trump administration.
She used the incident last summer of 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White opening fire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and killing police officer David Rose before taking his own life, to bash the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. specifically.
“The shooter was motivated by misinformation about the COVID vaccine. That is why he shot over 100 bullets into the windows of the CDC. Is enough being done to counter this kind of misinformation?” Brennan asked Bhattacharya.
She added, “His father said he was brainwashed about the COVID vaccine and thought it was making him suicidal.”
First, it should be noted that the Biden administration was the one pushing COVID vaccine mandates. President Joe Biden himself got upset at Facebook, saying it was not doing enough to squelch dissenting views on the efficacy of the vaccine, accusing the company and others of “killing people” through allowing “misinformation” on their platforms.
Bhattacharya responded to Brennan, saying, “The key thing is, there’s a loss of public trust in public health that happened in part because of — frankly even on this network and on other networks, there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic about, you know, that led to things that really did cause harm to people. The school closures are probably the number one thing.”
Brennan interjected, “This is not a productive line of claims. We covered COVID in depth on this program, like no other Sunday show did.”
.@NIHDirector_Jay: The kinds of decisions, and the face of public health during the pandemic led to many people losing trust in public health.
Brennan: The Trump Administration.@NIHDirector_Jay: No, I mean like Biden. Just so we’re clear, the Biden Administration censored ME. pic.twitter.com/TAK9LhkkP0
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 9, 2026
Bhattacharya reasserted, “The kinds of decisions and sort of the face of public health during the pandemic led to many people losing trust in public health.”
“The Trump administration officials?” Brennan asked facetiously, since the COVID vaccine and mandates came into play during the Biden administration.
“No, I mean like Biden,” Bhattacharya made clear.
Brennan countered that COVID began under the Trump administration, and said “we put those officials on our air.”
“Just to be clear, the Biden administration censored me,” the doctor and former Stanford University medical school professor shot back.
“People lost their jobs, Margaret, because the Biden administration censored people and said, ‘Look, you can’t even talk about the COVID vaccine harms,’” he added.
In January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss the pressure Biden officials exerted on his company to censor “misinformation.”
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” he said.
JUST IN: Mark Zuckerberg reveals that officials in the Biden admin called his team at Meta to “scream and curse” at them to take down certain posts during COVID.
One of the posts was this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV with the caption, “Did you or a loved one take… pic.twitter.com/fhpMlXpztN
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 10, 2025
The administration was also pressuring Twitter, Google, and its subsidiary YouTube to censor non-official views. YouTube deplatformed thousands of people, according to the House Judiciary Committee.
A federal appeals court ruled in September 2023 that Biden administration officials from the CDC and FBI “unconstitutionally” coerced and encouraged all of the major social media platforms to take down information the government deemed false.
Brennan next held up a piece of paper saying RFK Jr. called the COVID vaccine “deadliest” ever made in December 2021.
“That is misinformation, and we’re not being clear about that, and I think that is dangerous,” she said. “We’re talking about a shooting.”
Bhattacharya replied, “Yeah, and I’m talking about why we have the kind of distrust that’s led to the kind of problems you were talking about earlier in public health.”
“That distrust was not caused by President Trump. It wasn’t caused by Bobby. It was caused by a lot of sort of misinformation, often spread by the government itself, regarding natural immunity, closure of schools, mask mandates. People lost their jobs because of these vaccine mandates that didn’t make any public health sense,” he continued. “So if you want to talk about public trust, you have to embrace that fully, right? You can’t just talk about it in a narrow political way.”
“What you’re talking about is you’re trying to blame the shooting on Bobby,” Bhattacharya concluded.
Outkick’s Ian Miller responded to the interview, posting on social media, “The good thing about Margaret Brennan is that she’s not even pretending to be unbiased anymore, it’s just openly attacking anyone who isn’t on the left.”
The Daily Wire’s John Bickley wrote, “A shameful, manipulative & unprofessional interview by Margaret Brennan here.”
Brennan clearly is so caught up in her left-wing point of view that she’s not willing to entertain the idea that the Biden administration was responsible for misinformation during COVID, hence Americans’ lack of trust in public health now.
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