Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee (Help) voted Thursday morning to promote President Donald Trump’s draft pick, responsible for the National Institutes of Health Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
The vote was strictly partisan, with 12 votes in favor and 11 votes against, but Bhattacharya sailed to the finish line only with Republican support. Bhattacharya will now head to the entire Senate for an upcoming confirmation vote, which will be the last hurdle for him to become the next director of the NIH.
Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT. Concerned about Bhattacharya’s confirmation Thursday, saying he was worried that Bhattacharya was not enough to help reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Sanders and other Democrats also expressed concern about how Bhattacharya will conduct medical research at NIH, especially given that Trump only puts a cap on facilities and administrative expenses related to NIH research grants.
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Bhattacharya is a doctor at the University’s Institute of Economic Policy, a professor of medicine and senior fellow at Stanford University, whose mission to oppose lockdown measures and vaccines is the leading voice during the Covid-19-19 pandemic.
President Donald Trump’s nominee as director of the National Institutes of Health, Jayanta Bhattacharya, spoke at a confirmation hearing on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee in Capitol Hill, Washington, DC on March 5, 2025. (Photo taken by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
About a week ago, the Senate Help Committee investigated Bhattacharya, a variety of issues related to his potential role as a director of NIH; however, most of his hearings were forced to defend the president’s decision to defend 15% of the decision. Indirect research cost limit Dispelled by NIH.
Bhattacharya would not explicitly say he disagrees with the cuts, or if confirmed, he would step in to stop them. Instead, he said he would “comply with the law” while also investigating the impact of the cuts and ensuring that every NIH researcher is engaged in the work of promoting American health outcomes with the necessary resources.
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In addition to addressing issues regarding cutting Trump, Batacharia elaborates on what he calls a new, fragmented vision for the future NIH research He said it will aim to embrace dissenting ideas and transparency while focusing on research topics that have the best chance to benefit American health outcomes directly. Bhattacharya added that he wanted to get rid of the agency’s research portfolio to make other “reckless” efforts, which he said were taken with little to no action for direct benefit to health outcomes.
“I think fundamentally, what’s important is: Do scientists have an idea to advance their field of science?” Bhattacharya said in confirmation testimony last week. “They had an idea and finally solved it Health needs American? ”
Jayanta Bhattacharya testified on March 5, 2025 at the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee in Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.
Bhattacharya, in particular, is co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 by a group of scientists advocating another approach to dealing with the Covid-19-19 pandemic. It largely opposed widespread lockdowns and improved the efficacy of natural immunity to the virus on low-risk individuals, suggesting that the vaccine may not be the best action for everyone.
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Before the confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya joined several other scientists, including Trump’s draft pick, in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, New research journal launched Focus on stimulating scientific discourse and cracking down on “gatekeepers” in the medical research community. The journal, titled Journal of the School of Public Health (JAPH), is implementing a novel approach designed to promote scientific discourse that is through publishing peer reviews in other journals that do not publicly obtain peer reviews for other journals.
