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Jay Bhattacharya is poised to become the next director of the US National Institutes of Health.
Stanford University health policy professor and economist Jay Bhattacharya is poised to become the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after testifying before a key US Senate committee on Wednesday.
Bhattacharya says he has no concrete plans for additional layoffs at the organization, should he be confirmed as director. In a hearing before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, better known as the HELP Committee, he said he wants to use the position to restore trust in the NIH, which he called “the crown jewel of American biomedical sciences.”
The HELP Committee appears set to advance Bhattacharya to a vote by the full Senate. No date has been set for that vote yet, but with a Republican majority in the chamber, Bhattacharya—one of President Donald J. Trump’s less-controversial picks to head a federal agency—is almost certain to be confirmed.
Bhattacharya would be tasked with overseeing the nation’s largest biomedical research agency, which has been embattled in recent weeks. Since late January, the NIH has been subjected to a roller coaster of conflicting policies. Grant funding was frozen, then unfrozen. Indirect costs—parts of grant payments that cover administrative and operative expenses—were briefly capped before a federal judge ordered temporary restraining orders stopping that policy. As many as 1,200 NIH employees were fired as part of wide-reaching cuts to the federal workforce that mostly affected probationary employees, who are those who haven’t been in their roles long enough to qualify for civil protections; on March 4, the US Office of Personnel Management issued a revised memo that appeared to walk back those cuts.
Several senators asked Bhattacharya whether he’d take action to reverse the layoffs and funding disruptions that, as Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) put it, “are really putting a lot of lifesaving research at risk.”
Bhattacharya largely deflected, saying that he hadn’t been involved in personnel decisions but that he did not have “any intention to cut anyone at the NIH” as director.
“Day 1, I’m going to understand what resources the whole NIH needs and make sure that the scientists that are working at the NIH have the resources to do the lifesaving work they need to do,” he said.
Bhattacharya said he believed that concerns over what indirect costs are spent on reflect a broader issue of mistrust in scientific institutions.
“There’s a lot of distrust about where the money goes because the trust in the public health establishment collapsed in the pandemic,” Bhattacharya said. “I want to make sure the money goes to the research.”
Bhattacharya is a health economist with both a medical degree and a PhD in economics from Stanford, where he’s been teaching since 2001. He rose to prominence in 2020 as a COVID-19 policy contrarian, criticizing key components of the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including school closures and vaccine mandates.
Before his nomination to lead the NIH, Bhattacharya may have been best known as a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, a policy document that in October 2020 advocated for resuming “life as normal” to build herd immunity to COVID-19, with a carve-out for “vulnerable” people. The document was widely denounced by public health experts and then-NIH director Francis Collins, who has since left the agency.
During the hearing, Bhattacharya stood by the Great Barrington Declaration as well as his prior testimonies against lockdown policies that kept children out of physical schools. “The lockdowns did not save lives but had tremendous consequences on the well-being of the poor, the working class, the children, and the vulnerable,” he said. “[As] NIH director, the kind of thing I would have done is I would have allowed there to be scientific debate and discussion.”
If confirmed, Bhattacharya would report to US Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Bhattacharya has previously distanced himself from some of Kennedy’s more unorthodox views, like the disproven notion that vaccines cause autism. In Wednesday’s hearing, Bhattacharya said that he was "convinced based on the literature” that there’s no link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. But he has otherwise aligned himself fully with the Make America Healthy Again movement that promises to fight the growing prevalence of chronic diseases.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) pointed out that chronic diseases can affect people of varying backgrounds differently. She referred to the NIH’s work on disparities in cognitive aging, citing the higher risks for Alzheimer's disease among African American and Hispanic populations, and she said she feared that “supporting diverse clinical trials will no longer be a priority.”
“The representation of minorities in clinical trials is something I’m fully committed to,” Bhattacharya told her.
He added that he was committed to “making sure that researchers who are addressing the health needs of minority populations, and basically every American, will have the support they need.”
In response to a question from Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), Bhattacharya committed to funding long COVID research that addresses better diagnostics and treatments for the condition. Much NIH-funded research for long COVID has so far been directed toward observational studies, which are designed to help researchers characterize the condition, rather than trials that would test potential interventions to improve symptoms. That’s a point of contention for patient advocates, who say NIH efforts should reflect the urgency of the condition.
Bhattacharya also told senators that there is a place for both chronic disease research and infectious disease research at the NIH, contrary to Kennedy’s 2023 proposal, reported by NBC News, that the organization take a “break” from infectious diseases.
“I think the chronic disease problem is something that the NIH ought to have done a better job at the last several decades,” Bhattacharya said. “The mission of the NIH is to address the health needs of the American people and expand the life expectancy of the American people.”
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