Trump nominated to direct the National Institutes of Health interviewed on financing cups, vaccines

By Lauran Neergaard

Washington (AP) – A health economist who once clashed with officials of the National Institutes of Health and is now the candidate to lead the questions of the senators of the two parties on drastic funding and research priorities on Wednesday.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at the University of Stanford, was a frank critic of the government’s closings and vaccination policies. Now he is about to become director of NIH, long called the jewel of the government’s crown, while he is facing mass fire and drastic financing cuts.

“I love the NIH but post-countryic, the American biomedical sciences are at the crossroads,” Bhattacharya told senators.

He has established priorities, including a greater accent on chronic diseases, including diabetes and obesity. But he also said that the agency should be more open to scientific dissent, saying that influential NIH leaders at the start of the pandemic closed its own criticisms of COVID-19 responses.

While the Republicans have warmly welcomed Bhattacharya, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate of Health Committee, pressed him on the vaccination skepticism which feeds a large epidemic of measles which has already killed a child in Texas.

Cassidy has intensely urged Bhattacharya not to waste the nih dollars re -examining if there is a link between standard infant vaccines and autism. There is no link – something that has already been proven in several studies involving thousands of children, said the senator.

Bhattacharya qualified the death of measles a tragedy and said that he “fully supported” the vaccinated children, but added that additional research could convince skeptical parents.

“People still think that Elvis is alive,” replied a frustrated cassidy. He told Bhattacharya that any attempt to revisit the demystified issue would deprive the funds to study the true cause of autism.

Some senators, including senator Susan Collins, a Maine republican, and Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, have expressed deep frustration that country disorders to the largest fundaler in the country of medical research – mass fire and financing and gels – threaten the development of healings and new treatments for cancer, vision and host Alzheimer’s other disorders. They pushed Bhattacharya to the way in which these losses would be reversed, including a set of funding reductions – currently interrupted by a federal judge – which, according to them, is prohibited by a Congress Expenditure Act.

Bhattacharya said he had not participated in these cuts and if he was confirmed as director of the NIH, he would carefully examine the concerns to ensure that researchers “have the resources they need”. He also said that some of the Trump administration cuts are a distrust of science.

Until recently, the NIH of $ 48 billion had strong bipartisan support. NIH scientists are carrying out advanced research in its 27 institutes specializing in diseases, including cancer, chronic diseases such as heart, pulmonary and renal diseases, aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Most of the agency’s budget is dispersed to universities, hospitals and other research groups thanks to highly competitive subsidies to conduct everything, from basic research to clinical trials.

NIH-funded research has played a role in developing most of the United States approved treatments in recent years.

Bhattacharya drew public attention as one of the three authors of Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter from October 2020 maintaining that the pandemic closings caused irreparable damage and argued that people at low risk of COVID-19 should normally live while strengthening immunity by infection.

At the time – before the vaccinations started – this point of view was adopted by some in the first Trump administration but was largely denounced by experts in infectious disease. Then, the director of NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, called him dangerous and “non -traditional”.

Bhattacharya has become an applicant in a Supreme Court case, Murthy c. Missouri, arguing that he was “unfairly censored” on social networks in the context of government efforts to combat disinformation. While the case drew national attention, it finally failed in a 6-3 decision.

Bhattacharya, who faces a full senate vote on a later date, has a medical diploma but is not an in -office. His own research on the health care economy was funded by the NIH.

The Department of Health and Sciences of the Associated Press receives the support of the scientific and educational group of the media from the medical institute Howard Hughes and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Originally published: March 5, 2025 at 1:49 p.m. PST