Indian American nominee for NIH director Jay Bhattacharya faces Senate confirmation hearing

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Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya began his Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health by pledging to sharpen the agency’s focus on the chronic diseases that have lowered the life expectancy of Americans, restore public trust in science and medicine by encouraging open debate, and demonstrate that scientific findings are reliable and repeatable.

The questioning Wednesday by senators on the panel was split largely along partisan lines as it has been in previous confirmation hearings for Trump administration nominees. Republicans commended the controversial Stanford University doctor and economist for his “courage” in criticizing the country’s handling of the covid-19 pandemic, especially the closing of schools and workplaces. Republicans also urged him to root out “waste” and “frivolous studies.”

On the other hand, Democrats tried to secure commitments that he would be fearless in opposing Trump’s NIH staff firings, research pauses and attempts to erase progress on diversity and equity. They also pressed him to reverse the damage that program pauses and cuts have done to lifesaving research and to America’s standing as a scientific leader.

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“I was not involved in those decisions,” Bhattacharya said of the firings and research pauses. Under questioning from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), he added, “I don’t have any intention to cut anyone at NIH.”

If confirmed later by vote of the full Senate, Bhattacharya would helm a $48 billion arm of Health and Human Services that serves as the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. He would oversee an entity of 27 institutes and centers that employs about 20,000 people – including renowned scientists driving research and discovery.

He would also step in to lead at a time when scientists in and out of NIH are scrambling to understand how recently announced Trump administration policies would impact their work.

Pressed at times to disavow policies of Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bhattacharya declined to take issue with the administration’s actions, repeating his commitment to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

“I love the NIH,” Bhattacharya said, “but post-pandemic, American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads.” He cited a November 2024 Pew study that only 26 percent of the American public had “a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.”

To change this perception, he said he would pursue five goals, including focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, and cancer “that solves the American chronic disease crisis.”

In pledging to make the agency more friendly to dissenting views, Bhattacharya said “over the last few years, top NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs.” He stressed too that the agency must “vigorously regulate risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic,” a reference to studies examining how viruses might evolve to become more deadly.

In the wake of a measles outbreak in Texas that has killed one child so far, Bhattacharya was pressed on his vaccine views. He said he fully supported the vaccination of children for preventable diseases such as measles and he stressed that he does not believe there is any link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.

However, Bhattacharya said “there’s tremendous distrust in science and medicine coming out of the pandemic,” at a time when the United States has seen a rise in autism rates. “I don’t know, and I don’t think any scientist really knows the cause of it, so I would support a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that.”

Panel chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) said the vaccine-autism link has been exhaustively studied and disproven and warned that revisiting the issue could mean “we don’t have the money to go after” the real cause of autism.

The NIH has been deeply rattled in the first weeks of the administration.

NIH advisers have been unable to meet and recommend funding for research grants because the Trump administration blocked the agency’s ability to announce meetings in the Federal Register – notices that are required before advisory councils can meet to approve projects. On Feb. 26, NIH announced it was lifting the block, allowing a limited number of notices to be sent to the Federal Register to advertise meetings of scientific review groups. In February, the administration ordered cuts to federal funding rates that NIH provides to support overhead costs for research at academic institutions. And staff reductions throughout HHS agencies including NIH have shaken staff.

Some of the initiatives have been held up by lawsuits.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) did criticize the Trump administration’s effort to cap at 15 percent indirect costs of research that go to support the facilities and other costs, calling the move “arbitrary” and “ill-conceived.”

In his opening statement as the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said the next NIH director should take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. But Sanders said the real person in charge of federal agencies was Elon Musk, who is leading the U.S. DOGE Service, focused on government efficiency. “The real gentleman we should be having up there is Mr. Elon Musk,” Sanders said.

Bhattacharya was born in 1968 in Kolkata, India, and immigrated to the United States as a child. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received his doctor of medicine and PhD in economics from Stanford, where he has worked for more than 20 years. In the late 1990s, he worked as an economist with Rand.

Leading NIH would be a reversal for Bhattacharya, who in 2020 was lambasted by the agency’s then-director, Francis S. Collins, for “fringe” ideas on covid.

In March 2020, early in the pandemic, Bhattacharya co-wrote a commentary in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the projected fatality rate for the virus had been overblown and speculating that it would probably kill between 20,000 to 40,000 Americans. In October, he and others urged an end to stay-at-home restrictions for millions of schoolchildren and American workers.

Bhattacharya and some like-minded scientists contended that the nation should accept the spread of the virus among the young and healthy to reach herd immunity quickly ― the level at which so many have gained immunity that the virus has difficulty spreading. Instead, they said, the country should focus on protecting the most vulnerable people, including older Americans.

Bhattacharya and two co-authors, Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Sunetra Gupta, a professor at the University of Oxford, laid out this strategy in the Great Barrington Declaration, written in October 2020 at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At the time, about 202,000 Americans had died of the virus.

The authors said locking down schools and workplaces “until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

Two months after the declaration, the first Americans began receiving coronavirus vaccines. Even so, by September 2023, the virus had killed more than 1.1 million Americans.

Although nearly 1 million people signed the declaration, top health officials vigorously disputed its logic. Collins, who left the post of NIH director in December 2021 after 12 years, called the strategy of using natural infection to build up immunity “scientifically very indefensible and, public health wise, irresponsible,” in a Time magazine interview. He added, “This is a proposal that will kill people.” Collins, who continued to conduct lab research at the agency after leaving leadership, announced his retirement last week.

Bhattacharya – who has said it felt as if he was a victim of a “propaganda attack” – and others sued the Biden administration, alleging that officials had pressured social media platforms to suppress contrary views. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Bhattacharya and the other plaintiffs lacked legal grounds for the suit.

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