President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health sought to reassure senators Wednesday that he would bring stability to an agency that has faced mass terminations and frozen funding of health research since Trump took office.
Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist who faced criticism for his suggested approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, told senators he aims to restore trust in public health and science, bring more transparency to research, entertain diverse ideas in science and focus on chronic diseases.
He dismissed ongoing turmoil at the agency, noting that he did not make the decisions to lay off thousands of staff at NIH or freeze reviews of grant applications that have essentially put the agency in pause.
“I was not involved in those decisions,” Bhattacharya said during a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Still, he did not condemn them and argued he doesn’t believe that Trump intends to slow down science, even though the agency has been criticized for canceling meetings of committees that recommend projects NIH should fund.
“I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH and the scientists that the NIH supports have the resources they need to meet the mission of the NIH, which is to make America do research to make America healthy,” Bhattacharya said.
If confirmed, Bhattacharya would be responsible for leading a $48 billion health agency — the largest funder of health research in the world.
Vaccine debate
His confirmation appears likely. While committee Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., encouraged Bhattacharya not to direct funding to more studies looking at whether vaccines cause autism — research already shows there is no link — Cassidy did not appear to have strong reservations about Bhattacharya as he did for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who he eventually voted to confirm.
“It’s been exhaustively studied, and there’s limited resources … The more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine preventable diseases,” Cassidy said, pointing to a child’s death last month in Texas from measles.
Bhattacharya wouldn’t commit to preventing NIH resources from being used to study links between autism and vaccines, noting there is public distrust and more research could encourage vaccination.
He said he is convinced there is no link between vaccines and autism but “if other people don’t agree with me, and then they don’t vaccinate their children, if I’m confirmed as NIH director, the one lever I’ll have is to give them good data.”
Bhattacharya appears to have gained Trump’s favor during the COVID-19 pandemic in part by questioning former NIH leaders Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins’ recommendations related to school closures and societal lockdowns.
He claimed his authorship of the so-called “Great Barrington Declaration” — which called for letting the virus spread among young, healthy people while protecting the most vulnerable — led to him being maligned by his colleagues and shut out of scientific circles.
Collins, who resigned from the NIH over the weekend, has called it a proposal from “three fringe epidemiologists.”
But Bhattacharya has been heralded by conservatives for breaking with conventional public health advice.
“It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believe during that period,” said Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind.
Bhattacharya stood by his anti-lockdown stance during the hearing, arguing that in California, lockdowns “had tremendous consequences on the well-being of the poor, the working class, on children and the vulnerable.”
“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya said.
NIH uncertainty
The hearing comes amid great uncertainty at the NIH and among researchers that rely on the agency to fund their work advancing the health of Americans.
The agency has canceled grants it deems to violate Trump’s executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion and gender and delayed others by not posting meetings required to approve grants in the Federal Register.
Other researchers have not heard from their project officers, who may have been part of mass terminations rattling the agency.
And the Trump administration is defending in court a policy change that would cap what the NIH pays to universities to support grants’ indirect costs. The 15 percent cap, which a federal judge on Wednesday issued a temporary nationwide injunction against, is far below what some institutions receive to support research through facility upgrades, equipment, staff and other administrative “indirect” costs.
That policy in particular has rattled members of Congress, with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, telling Bhattacharya it is illegal because Congress has passed a rider preventing NIH from changing the indirect rates since 2017.
“I am strongly opposed to the administration’s ill-conceived and completely arbitrary proposal to impose a 15 percent cap on indirect costs for NIH grants,” she told Bhattacharya.
“Research labs and universities across the state of Maine have contacted me to describe the devastating impact that this cap would have on life-saving and life-enhancing biomedical research and ongoing clinical trials,” she said, asking if Bhattacharya would revise the policy.
Bhattacharya said: “I absolutely commit to following the law, to addressing this issue very directly.”
He also said he would ensure canceled scientific meetings that determine what projects get funded would continue.
“My job would be to make sure that those fundamental scientific meetings and other activities happen,” he said. “The purpose of the NIH director is to support the mission of the NIH.”
Agency goals
Bhattacharya laid out several goals he would pursue if confirmed, including funding groundbreaking research at NIH and not incremental research that doesn’t make differences in the lives of Americans, ensuring science funded by NIH is replicable, and creating a “culture of free speech and scientific dissent” at the agency.
“I’ll carry out President Trump’s agenda of making the public science institutions of this country worthy of trust and serve to make America healthy again,” he said, referring to Trump and Kennedy’s platform of addressing chronic disease.
He said he would be “hyper-focused” on ensuring the grants NIH funds are “devoted to the chronic disease problems of this country.”
Increasing rates of diabetes and obesity are an “indictment on how the NIH has functioned,” and the agency will fund the “broadest set of ideas as possible,” he said.
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