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Who is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya? Trump’s pick to lead the NIH faces Senate confirmation hearing

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose opposition to Covid lockdowns made him a polarizing figure during the pandemic, is set to appear at a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday to lead the National Institutes of Health.

As director, Bhattacharya would oversee an agency with a nearly $50 billion budget that’s set to undergo drastic changes, with the Trump administration pushing for job cuts across the federal government and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looking to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease research and toward chronic diseases.

The NIH is made up of 27 research institutes, each focused on their own areas, including cancer, infectious diseases and mental health.

In February, the administration suspended NIH reviews of new grant applications, preventing it from funding new research. The administration is also in a legal battle over an NIH policy that reduced indirect funding to universities — a move, experts say, that could stall progress for developing lifesaving treatments.

Bhattacharya himself is also pushing for reforms, including taking on so-called cancel culture by linking a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some measure of “academic freedom” on their campuses, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“I’m interested in how someone who is seeking to lead an agency feels about the significant dismantling of that agency,” said David Supes, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center who has been following the administration’s move to reorganize the federal government. “I wonder why he would want to lead it.”

A Stanford University professor of medicine, Bhattacharya is an “unusual” choice to run the nation’s top medical research agency, said Jeremy Berg, a former NIH division director who oversaw general medical research.

While Bhattacharya is a physician, he’s never completed any clinical training beyond medical school, nor has he practiced medicine, Berg said. Bhattacharya’s research primarily focuses on health economics and health policy, he added.

“It’s certainly not a typical background for an NIH director,” said Berg, who worked at the agency for almost a decade. “They’re almost always MDs, but they come from either a clinical research background or a basic science research background, and he’s in kind of a different pocket, which isn’t an unnatural fit for NIH. It does do some health economics research, particularly the National Institute on Aging, but the rest of it is not a big part of the NIH portfolio.”

Bhattacharya is more widely known as one of the three lead authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a 2020 open letter that called on public health officials to roll back Covid lockdowns. The letter argued for letting the virus spread among young, healthy individuals at lower risk of severe illness or death, while protecting older people at higher risk, with the goal of reaching herd immunity.

During the pandemic, Bhattacharya also openly criticized how NIH leadership and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022, managed the U.S. response. He’s also been accused by colleagues of misrepresenting findings, including the effects of masking on preventing the spread of Covid.

“Ever since the Covid pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya has expressed hostility to the agency he is slated to run,” said Lawrence Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “I think it is fair game to ask him about his misleading statements on public health, especially related to Covid.”

Bhattacharya and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bhattacharya is expected to tell the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee that he plans to establish a culture of “scientific dissent” at the NIH, where leadership will actively encourage “different perspectives,” according to prepared remarks obtained by Bloomberg News.

Bhattacharya already has the support of Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the chair of the Senate HELP committee. In a post on X on Feb. 20, Cassidy, who is also a physician, said Bhattacharya “has a vision to restore faith in medical research for the American people, protect and improve the institution, and better distribute the benefits.”

Key questions at the hearing may include whether Bhattacharya would support cuts to NIH, Gostin said, and whether he would support dismissals of NIH staff, especially scientists.

“If he does support cutting the agency, which areas would he cut? And would he oppose drastic cuts proposed by DOGE or the White House,” said Gostin, referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. “Dr. Bhattacharya also needs to be clear as to whether he would restructure NIH and what priorities he has for NIH sponsored research. Most importantly, he needs to be asked whether he supports the across the board cuts to NIH indirect funding. That would devastate research institutions, including his own at Stanford University.”

It’s also unclear whether he would support Kennedy’s push for shifting the NIH’s focus away from infectious diseases and toward chronic diseases like obesity. Experts say Kennedy’s assertion that the agency dedicates funding toward infectious diseases at the expense of chronic disease is misleading; more resources are already dedicated to chronic illness — including heart disease, Alzheimer’s and diabetes — than infectious diseases, and the agency is capable of looking at both areas, which are often intertwined.

Supes, the Georgetown professor, questioned the benefits of having the NIH shift focus.

“The traditional mandate of NIH has been to follow the science and allocate their funding in areas where success is most likely,” Supes said. “A lot of chronic disease problems are significant, but based on things where we already have a lot of knowledge.”