Jayanta Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing to lead the National Institutes of Health before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions began with a pointed line of questioning from none other than committee chair Sen. Bill Cassidy.
Cassidy asked Bhattacharya outright if he would invest NIH resources to investigate the debunked link between autism and vaccines. Bhattacharya said that he personally does not believe that there is a link, but he would not fully rule out the possibility of looking into the theory because “there are people who might disagree with me.”
“That’s life,” said Cassidy. “There’s people who disagree that the world is round.”
Bhattacharya did not disagree with Cassidy’s point but still held firm to his opinion that it might be a good use of the NIH’s limited resources to try to mitigate concerns over the perceived dangers of vaccines.
“If those concerns result in parents not wanting to vaccinate their children with a vaccine that is well tested, my inclination is to give people good data,” said Bhattacharya. “That’s how you address those concerns.”
It was a moment that illustrated the exceedingly thin line Bhattacharya has attempted to walk since being nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as NIH director under the purview of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a line that runs between Bhattacharya’s own background as a scientist and doctor and the rising skeptical forces that led to him sitting before the HELP committee as a nominee.
Bhattacharya’s public health pedigree exceeds that of some of Trump’s other health agency nominees: He is a professor of medicine, economics and health policy at Stanford University, and director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. But he attracted criticism from other public health experts during the pandemic after publicly opposing COVID-19 public health interventions like vaccine and mask mandates.
After Kennedy joined forces with Trump’s campaign in 2024, pledging to “Make America Healthy Again” by reshaping the public health agencies, Bhattacharya was one of several critics of the public health establishment nominated by Trump to lead the health agencies in Kennedy’s image. Other nominees include fellow COVID-19 intervention critics Marty A. Makary for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General.
The NIH has a budget of $48 billion and is the largest funder of medical research in the world. But recent personnel cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have drawn criticism from lawmakers and scientists, who say that DOGE runs the risk of “devastating” public health research in the U.S.
Sen. Bernie Sanders used his opening statement to call attention to these cuts, saying that Musk should be coming before the HELP committee for a hearing, not Bhattacharya, because Musk has been given sweeping power to make changes to the NIH.
“All due respect, Dr. Bhattacharya, President Trump will not be giving you that authority,” said Sanders. “That authority will rest with Mr. Elon Musk.”
Sen. Patty Murray asked Bhattacharya if he supported DOGE’s cuts to the NIH.
Bhattacharya said he was not involved in those decisions but that he doesn’t “have any intention to cut anyone at the NIH.”
“I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH have the resources they need to do research to Make America Healthy Again,” said Bhattacharya.
But he later added that his background as an economist “led him to understand that every dollar wasted on a frivolous study is a dollar not spent — every dollar wasted on administrative costs that are not needed, is one dollar not spent on research.”
He added that he would put together a team that is “hyper-focused” on making sure that the grants funded by the NIH are “devoted to the chronic disease problem in this country.”
Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ criticisms of the DOGE cuts by pointing to inefficiencies of agencies like the NIH.
“I’m flabbergasted as I listened to this conversation of people that really have never been involved in the scientific process,” said Sen. Roger Marshall. “When I think of the NIH, the waste that has occurred, and I think of Alzheimer’s, the waste is the path we’ve been on since 2005, 2006.”
Bhattacharya said in an email to NOTUS that he was unable to speak with the press until after the Senate votes on his nomination. In an ethics disclosure, Bhattacharya said if confirmed, he would resign from his post at Stanford, as well as from his roles with four organizations. These include Biosafety Now!, which has advocated for restrictions on so-called “gain-of-function” research into viruses (some scientists say that such restrictions would have a chilling effect on disease research). Bhattacharya also said he would leave Collateral Global Charity, a group he helped found to protest COVID-19 restrictions in the UK.
Some Republicans were eager to praise Bhattacharya’s views on COVID-19 restrictions. Sen. Jim Banks said that Bhattacharya’s nomination was “one of the most exciting picks of the Trump administration.”
“It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believed,” said Banks. He held up a copy of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter criticizing COVID-19 restrictions that Bhattacharya co-authored during the pandemic.
“You were undeniably right about all of it,” said Banks. He asked Bhattacharya what he felt the public health data said about COVID-19 at this point and what he would have done had he been NIH director during the pandemic.
Bhattacharya said that the pandemic lockdowns had negatively impacted students’ learning and led to rates of suicide and depression going “through the roof.”
“In a nutshell, I still would have opposed the lockdowns,” said Bhattacharya. “The kind of thing I would have done is I would allow there to be scientific discussion.”
Bhattacharya’s COVID-19 stance was also applauded by Sen. Ashley Moody, who served as Florida’s attorney general during the pandemic. Florida was one of the first states to drop social distancing protocols.
“I’m tremendously proud to have been involved in advising the Florida response to the pandemic,” Bhattacharya told Moody. “I think Florida’s response to the pandemic was a tremendous success.”
He thanked Moody for highlighting “the role of censorship and restriction of scientific discussion.”
“It was so refreshing to meet up with you and be allowed to speak my scientific views in Florida during the pandemic,” said Bhattacharya.
Since being nominated by Trump in December, Bhattacharya has reportedly considered taking into account whether or not academic institutions support “academic freedom” when awarding NIH grants. Bhattacharya also debuted a new scientific research journal along with several other scientists who opposed the accepted guidance on COVID-19, including Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee for director of the Food and Drug Administration.
In a January article published by that journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, Bhattacharya and a coauthor, Martin Kulldorff, write that during the COVID-19 pandemic, “despite lacking key data, public health agencies made unsubstantiated vaccine claims, published unscientific vaccine recommendations, and imposed unethical vaccine mandates.”
“Public health officials must be scrupulous in not extrapolating far beyond what the randomized trial data say,” Bhattacharya and Kulldorff write in the article’s conclusion. “The public has perceived this disconnect between public health officials’ statements and reality as evidence of incompetence or worse. And now, it will take many years of honesty and hard work for public health officials to regain the public’s trust, ultimately to the detriment of the public’s health.”
During his questioning, Sen. Tommy Tuberville asked Bhattacharya how he would seek to restore trust in public health in the U.S. Bhattacharya said that he would commit the NIH to transparency with “limited obfuscation.”
“As a citizen, I would often look for FOIA responses from the NIH, and they’d be fully redacted during the pandemic,” said Bhattacharya. “You can’t have trust unless you are transparent.”
As the hearing came to a close, Cassidy asked Bhattacharya about his views on the philosophy of scientific research — whether it’s better to advance research in small increments, or to do studies that are far-flung from the current consensus, but if successful have the possibility of pushing the boundaries of science.
Bhattacharya said that science needs a range of approaches, but he feels that the NIH could afford to support more “early career researchers, researchers with non-traditional ideas about hypotheses.”
“Some of those will fail, and some of those will succeed,” said Bhattacharya.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.