Jay Bhattacharya Takes Office as Director of NIH

Jay Bhattacharya took office today as Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya is President Trump’s nominee to head the agency, and the Senate confirmed the appointment on March 25. He will “oversee the nation’s medical research agency,” playing an “instrumental role in shaping the agency’s activities and ensuring they align with the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.” Bhattacharya and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have stated that one of their focuses will be “tackling the chronic disease epidemic.”

Bhattacharya is a doctor, researcher, and health economist. He authored the “Great Barrington Declaration” earlier in the COVID pandemic, which “called for opening schools and lifting lockdowns while better protecting older populations who were most vulnerable to the disease.” According to the AP, then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called this view “dangerous and ‘not mainstream science.’” Bhattacharya was later a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that claimed he was “’unfairly censored’ on social media,” but the ruling came down against him.

On March 5, the AP reported on Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing. He told U.S. senators at that hearing that “America’s biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” saying that the NIH “needs to be more open to scientific dissent” and that “NIH leaders early in the pandemic shut down his own criticisms about responses to COVID-19.” Senator Bill Cassidy pressed Bhattacharya during the hearing on “vaccine skepticism,” urging him not to “waste NIH dollars reexamining whether there’s a link between standard childhood vaccines and autism.” Multiple studies have already shown no link.

Other senators “pushed Bhattacharya about how he’d reverse” firings and funding cuts at the NIH that threaten “the development of cures and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and a host of other disorders.” Bhattacharya suggested some of those cuts are “a signal of distrust of science.”