Jay Bhattacharya now top candidate to be Trump’s pick for NIH director

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Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University-trained physician and economist, is now the presumptive favorite to be selected by President-elect Donald Trump as the next director of the National Institutes of Health, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Bhattacharya met this week with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and impressed Kennedy with his ideas to overhaul NIH, a nearly $50 billion agency that oversees the nation’s biomedical research, the people said. Bhattacharya has called for shifting the agency’s focus toward funding more innovative research and reducing the influence of some of its longest-serving career officials, among other ideas.

Trump earlier this month selected Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH and other health agencies. Kennedy has played a central role in choosing top health-care staff and deputies for the next administration, including Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and writer whom Trump announced to lead the Food and Drug Administration, and Dave Weldon, an internal medicine physician and former GOP congressman whom Trump selected to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bhattacharya declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.

The decision of who will lead NIH is not final until Trump himself announces it, the people cautioned, and the president-elect has sometimes rebuffed his advisers’ recommendations. The Trump transition team also has looked at other candidates to lead NIH, which awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials on its Maryland campus, and supports a variety of efforts to develop drugs and therapeutics.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The position of NIH director is subject to Senate confirmation.

Bhattacharya emerged as a prominent critic of the federal government’s covid-19 response, co-writing an October 2020 open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that called for rolling back coronavirus-related shutdowns while keeping “focused protections” for vulnerable populations, such as older Americans. The proposal won support from Republican politicians and some Americans eager to resume daily life but was rebuked by public health experts, including then-NIH Director Francis S. Collins, as premature and dangerous as the covid-19 virus continued to spread and vaccines were not yet available.

Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022.

NIH has also been investigated by lawmakers in the wake of the pandemic, including by Republicans who say the agency’s leaders mismanaged the virus response and have demanded that the agency be overhauled.

Fauci and other current and former NIH officials have defended their pandemic decisions and the agency’s broader response, saying that federal leaders generally did the best that they could to combat a new virus, and that much of the criticism is second-guessing.

Trump on Friday night announced a flurry of other top health-care appointments, including Makary as his planned FDA commissioner, Weldon as his planned CDC director, and Janette Nesheiwat, a family and emergency medicine physician whom he tapped as the next U.S. surgeon general. Those positions are also subject to Senate confirmation.

Bhattacharya and Makary collaborated on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response.