Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has revealed the five ways he will revamp the agency if confirmed in the role.
Stanford physician Dr Jay Bhattacharya appears headed for confirmation after a much more subdued Senate hearing compared to Robert F Kennedy Junior’s fiery session in January.
While many of Trump’s picks for top jobs have been seen as outsiders and disruptors, Dr Bhattacharya heralded the NIH as the ‘crown jewel’ of US biomedical science and said he had ‘great respect’ for its researchers.
He also distanced himself from the antivaccine movement, saying he did not believe that childhood vaccines were linked to autism.
But the top medical expert and Stanford professor also warned that the NIH must go through serious reform in order to regain the public’s trust which was lost during the Covid pandemic.
For this reason, he did not rule out reinvestigating the link between autism and vaccines, saying the public was not satisfied with the explanations given for the sharp rise in autism cases.
Dr Bhattacharya was cast out by the medical establishment, including by former NIH head Francis Collins, for his anti-lockdown stance and for criticizing vaccine mandates.
His five-step plan to restore the agency to its former glory included focusing research on chronic diseases and establishing a culture that promotes free speech and scientific dissent.
Pictured above is Dr Jay Bhattacharya at his confirmation hearing with the Senate today
Dr Bhattacharya also pledged to fund the most innovative biomedical research possible and aggressively regulate high-risk virus research that could cause another pandemic.
He also said he would make scientific data more transparent.
The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research globally, with a budget of $48billion annually and a team of some 20,000 staff and scientists.
It is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by longtime vaccine skeptic RFK Jr.
Dr Bhattacharya, who is also a father-of-three, has previously had grants approved by the NIH for his own research and was on a committee reviewing grant applications for more than a decade.
But he became a pariah during the Covid pandemic after he suggested in the Great Barrington declaration that lockdowns were causing untold harm to the public.
At the time, the then-NIH director — Dr Francis Collins — called him a ‘fringe epidemiologist’ and called for a ‘quick and devastating’ public takedown of his comments.
Dr Bhattacharya was attending his confirmation hearing with the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
The atmosphere was mostly cordial with many praising his appointment, although some Democrats raised concerns over cuts to the agency and limits set to be placed on spending in contracts.
The senate committee will also review Dr Marty Makary’s nomination to head up the Food and Drug Administration tomorrow, before voting on the appointments in the coming weeks.
Below, are Dr Bhattacharya’s five goals for the agency:
Solve the chronic diseases crisis
About 42 percent of Americans are now considered obese, while life expectancy remains below pre-pandemic levels and 20million are suffering from long Covid.
In line with the Make America Healthy Again movement, Dr Bhattacharya said he was aiming to pour more funding into researching cures for this crisis.
‘NIH research should focus on research that solves the American chronic disease crisis,’ he said.
The above graph shows life expectancy in the US by year from 1980 to 2022. There has been a slight rise in the most recent year that data is available, from a study out of the National Vital Statistics System and population estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics
‘American health is going backward, life expectancy flatlined between 2012 and 2019, plummeted during the pandemic, and still has not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels.
‘The chronic disease crisis is severe with hundreds of millions of Americans, children and adults, suffering from obesity, heart disease, cancer and more.
‘If confirmed, I will carry out President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s agenda to address the dire chronic health needs of the country with gold-standard science and innovation.’
Prioritize ‘good science’
Part of good science is to produce studies with which the results can be replicated by other researchers, to advance understanding.
But at the NIH, Dr Bhattacharya says it has recently funded many papers where this is not possible — raising concerns over the work.
He said: ‘Second, science should be replicable, reproducible and generalizable. Unfortunately, much modern bioscience fails this test.
‘The NIH itself just last year faced an integrity scandal involving research on Alzheimer’s disease that throws into question hundreds of research papers.
‘If the data generated by scientists is not reliable, the products of such science cannot help anyone.’
He added: ‘It is not stretch to think that the slow progress in treatments for Alzheimer’s disease is linked to this problem.
‘The NIH can and must solve the crisis of scientific data reliability. Under my leadership, if confirmed, it will do so.’
The integrity scandal refers to research by the former University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher Sylvain Lesne, which was published in 2006 and suggested that the build-up of amyloid-beta protein led to memory loss in rats.
The paper buoyed confidence in the theory that Alzheimer’s is caused by protein clumps in the brain, leading to funding for drugs to clear these. It also became the most cited Alzheimer’s paper of this century.
But in 2024, the paper was retracted at the request of all the authors, except Lesne, after it emerged that images in the study appeared to have been digitally doctored.
The study, however, led to trouble securing funding for researchers working on alternative theories for the causes of Alzheimer’s, such as the suggestion that the disease may be caused by damage to blood vessels in the brain.
Dr Bhattacharya says he plans to now fund research into these alternative theories and treatments, potentially breaking the deadlock in finding a cure for the disease.
Senator Bernie Sanders quizzed Dr Bhattacharya at the confirmation hearing, getting a commitment from him to work together on asking food companies not to advertize unhealthy foods
Dr Bhattacharya (right) is pictured above with Senators Rand Paul, Kentucky (left), and Tommy Tuberville
Return of free speech
Dr Bhattacharya told the Senate committee he would seek to allow a broader range of opinions in the NIH, including views that disagree with him.
‘If confirmed, I will establish a culture of respect for free speech in scientists in the NIH,’ he said.
‘In the last few years, top scientists and NIH officials oversaw a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs.
‘Dissent is the very essence of science. I will foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists including early career scientists and scientists that disagree with me can express their views.’
Dr Bhattacharya was targeted by many scientists, including the former NIH head, after he suggested that lockdowns would needlessly cause avoidable deaths.
Fund cutting-edge research
He also said he would aim to ensure that the NIH was funding cutting-edge research, and investigating potential cheaper treatments.
He said: ‘The NIH must recommit to its mission to fund the most innovative biomedical research agenda possible to improve American health.
‘My plan is to ensure that the NIH invests in cutting edge research in every field to make big advances rather than just small incremental progress over years.’
He pointed to research early in the pandemic done in the UK which recognized that dexamethasone — which costs about $7 per patient — could help Covid patients, saying this is the sort of research the NIH should do more of.
The above is a stock image of scientists carrying out research funded by the NIH
Avoid risky pandemic research
Dr Bhattacharya also said he would move the NIH away from funding any research that could ’cause the next pandemic’.
He said: ‘The NIH must… vigorously regulate risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic. It should embrace transparency in all its operations.
‘While the vast majority of biomedical research poses no risk of harm to biomedical researchers or the public, the NIH must ensure that it never supports work that might cause harm.’
He added: ‘If confirmed, I will work with Congress and the administration to guarantee that happens.’
Both the CIA and FBI have now concluded that the Covid pandemic may have been caused by a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China — the FBI doing so with ‘medium confidence’.
It has also emerged that the NIH was funding research into coronaviruses at the Institute, which was conducting risky experiments.
