President-elect Donald Trump has officially nominated Stanford-trained economist and physician Jay Bhattacharya as the next National Institutes of Health (NIH) director.
The president-elect announced in a Truth Social post: “I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya will work alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research and make crucial discoveries that will improve Health and save lives.”
This week, Bhattacharya met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH and other health agencies. According to a report by The Washington Post, Bhattacharya impressed the former presidential candidate with his ideas to overhaul the NIH, which oversees American biomedical research.
Additionally, the NIH awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers who oversee the clinical trials on its Maryland campus, supporting numerous efforts to develop therapeutics and drugs.
The Senate must confirm the nomination to direct the NIH, which will have a GOP majority starting in January.
Bhattacharya has called for the NIH to focus on reducing the influence of some of its longest-serving officials and funding more innovative research.
According to the report, Kennedy Jr. played a crucial role in choosing top healthcare deputies and staff for Donald Trump’s next administration. These included Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, who Trump chose to lead the Food and Drug Administration, and Dave Weldon, an internal medicine physician and former GOP congressman from Florida, the president-elect selected to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report noted that Makary and Bhattacharya worked together on a blueprint for the proposed commission to probe the nation’s response to Covid-19.
Trump’s choices of Weldon, Makary, and emergency medicine and family physician Janette Nesheiwat, who was nominated to serve as surgeon general, must also be confirmed by the Senate.
Trump’s nominee was a noted critic of the coronavirus response
Bhattacharya was a noted critic of the federal government’s coronavirus response during the early days of the pandemic. During President-elect Trump’s first term, he co-wrote an open letter in October 2020 that called for the government to roll back pandemic shutdowns but continue “focused protections” for vulnerable populations such as older people.
The suggestion was supported by GOP legislators and many Americans who were critical of shutdowns and wanted to return to pre-pandemic life. But, public health experts, including Francis S. Collins, then-NIH Director, criticized the proposal as dangerous and premature amid the spread of Covid-19 during a time when vaccines weren’t yet available.
Bhattacharya has also called for the rollback of the power of some of the 27 centers and institutes that comprise the NIH, arguing that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and didn’t allow dissenting perspectives.
Along with other agency critics, he has criticized Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci helped shape the U.S.’s coronavirus response during the Biden and Trump administrations before leaving the federal government in December 2022.
The NIH has additionally been investigated by congressional legislators over the response to the pandemic, with the GOP charging that leaders of the agency mismanaged the response to the virus and calling for the agency to be overhauled.
Former and current NIH officials, including Fauci, have defended the agency’s response, arguing that federal leaders generally did the best they could to address the virus.
