President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be his Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is the nation’s leading public research agency. Research supported by the agency has led to more than 100 Nobel Prizes and over 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019. The agency gives out roughly $25 billion in research grants to universities each year. The UW is one of the top recipients of NIH grant funding.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, gained prominence during the pandemic for his criticism of lockdown procedures. According to his Stanford colleagues, Bhattacharya has been described as warm and intellectually curious, and supportive of their pursuits. It wasn’t until the Covid pandemic that Bhattacharya gained national prominence and attracted controversy. During the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya called for “an absolute revamping of the scientific community,” and has promised to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”
In October 2020, along with two fellow academics, he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration called on public health officials to roll back Covid lockdowns. The proposal advocated for “herd immunity” as the most effective way for handling the pandemic and advocated for a new approach that would “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally and build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” The declaration sparked an intense negative reaction from the public health establishment.
Since the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya has often found himself in conflict with many of the organization’s leaders. Following his authoring of the Great Barrington Declaration, he accused the government of working with social media companies to suppress his views, though a recent Supreme Court ruling found that this claim was false. Still, Bhattacharya has argued that his experiences in recent years have taught him that agency officials, notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, have amassed too much power.
He recently told the Washington Post that he would “restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats dominating a field for a very long time.” To do so, he proposed term limits for scientists running various research centers and shrinking the number of institutes from 27 to 15. He also has said that one of his main goals would be working to rebuild public trust in the American public health establishment, which he has lost “almost all confidence in.”
Other potential priorities floated by Bhattacharya include reducing the amount of NIH grant money that pays for publication in journals, funding studies to replicate the work of scientists in order to root out fraud and encouraging a more open discussion of scientific ideas by publishing studies alongside comments by named reviewers.
Bhattacharya will need to be confirmed by the Senate before officially taking the post.