The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Stanford University health economist and physician Jay Bhattacharya as the director of the National Institutes of Health under Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed with a 53-47 Senate vote on party lines.
Jay Bhattacharya rose to prominence with his critical views on pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates during Covid-19. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.
Just before his confirmation, the National Institutes of Health had laid off around 1,000 staff, froze grant activities and imposed a policy to limit the amount of research funding universities can receive for overhead costs.
While the university funding policy has already been challenged in court, the NIH oversees nearly $50 billion in annual research spending, a Bloomberg report said.
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During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Bhattacharya had affirmed that he had no intentions of laying off any more staff. But, he may not have the hold on making the final call on that.
US President Donald Trump, this month, issued an executive order needing federal agencies to submit their plans for further layoffs, before Bhattacharya got his confirmation.
Over time, Bhattacharya has hinted on his plans to alter how federally funded scientific research is conducted. And while he has said that the vaccines for measles do not cause autism, he has not mentioned whether NIH would fund further studies on this unproven theory.
Additionally, Bhattacharya was also a plaintiff in Murthy v Missouri, a Supreme Court case contending that federal officials improperly suppressed conservation views on social media as part of their attempts to tackle misinformation.
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The Indian-origin health economist is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an economist at the RAND corporation. He also directs Stanford’s Centre for Demography and Economics of Health and Ageing, with his research emphasising on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.
In his earlier nomination statement from US President Donald Trump, it was said that Bhattacharya and newly appointed US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr will be working together to restore the NIH to a “Gold Standard of Medical Research”.
