The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) voted Thursday morning to advance President Donald Trump’s pick to head the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
The vote was strictly along party lines, 12 votes in favor and 11 against, but with the committee having one extra Republican member in the majority, Bhattacharya sailed to the finish line with only GOP support. Bhattacharya now heads to the full Senate for an impending confirmation vote that will be the last hurdle before he becomes the next director of the NIH.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., expressed concern Thursday, saying he feared Bhattacharya would not do enough to help lower the cost of prescription drugs. Sanders and other Democrats have also expressed concern over how Bhattacharya will approach medical research at the NIH, especially considering Trump just imposed a cap on facilities and administration costs associated with NIH research grants.
A physician, Stanford professor of medicine and senior fellow at the university’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, Bhattacharya was a leading voice during the COVID-19 pandemic against lockdown measures and vaccine mandates.
Bhattacharya was probed by the Senate HELP Committee roughly a week ago over various issues related to his potential role as NIH director; however, much of the hearing he was forced to defend the president’s decision to put a 15% cap on indirect research costs dispersed by the NIH.
Bhattacharya would not explicitly say he disagreed with the cuts, or that, if confirmed, he would step in to stop them. Rather, he said he would ‘follow the law,’ while also investigating the impact of the cuts and ensuring every NIH researcher doing work that advances the health outcomes of Americans has the resources necessary.
In addition to addressing questions about the Trump cuts, Bhattacharya also laid out what he called a new, decentralized vision for future research at NIH that he said will be aimed at embracing dissenting ideas and transparency, while focusing on research topics that have the best chance at directly benefiting health outcomes of Americans. Bhattacharya added that he wants to rid the agency’s research portfolio of other ‘frivolous’ efforts that he says do little to directly benefit health outcomes.
‘I think fundamentally what matters is: Do scientists have an idea that advances the scientific field they’re in?’ Bhattacharya said last week during his confirmation testimony. ‘Do they have an idea that ends up addressing the health needs of Americans?’
Bhattacharya was notably a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 by a group of scientists advocating for an alternative approach to handling the COVID-19 pandemic. It argued largely against widespread lockdowns and promoted the efficacy of natural immunity to the virus for low-risk individuals, suggesting the vaccine may not be the best course of action for everyone.
Prior to his confirmation hearings, Bhattacharya, alongside several other scientists, including Trump’s pick to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating ‘gatekeeping’ in the medical research community. The journal, titled the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), aims to spur scientific discourse by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available.