Senators Challenge Trump’s NIH Pick on Vaccines, Grant Freezes

Senators challenged Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with questions about vaccines, pandemics, and current restrictions on agency funding during his nomination hearing on Wednesday.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee, kicked things off by referencing the recent death of a child from measles amid an outbreak in Texas.

“Senator, it’s a tragedy that a child would die from a vaccine-preventable disease,” said Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University in California. “I fully support children being vaccinated for diseases like measles that can be prevented with the vaccination efforts.”

Pressed on whether he believed more resources need to be poured into investigating a long-disproven link between vaccines and autism, Bhattacharya said, “I don’t generally believe that there is a link, based on my reading of the literature.”

He added that “what I have seen is that there’s tremendous distrust in medicine and science coming out of the pandemic.” For parents who may be hesitant about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, “if I’m confirmed as NIH director, the one lever I’ll have is to give them good data.”

When Cassidy reiterated that “good data already exists,” Bhattacharya said the “vast majority of effort” should go to the “most important childhood health problems,” such as those related to diabetes and obesity, and also infectious diseases.

Several senators referenced the current freeze on grant funding, including Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who also brought up related pauses on advisory meetings and clinical trials, as well as mass firings by the current administration. Murray contended these are “really threatening our ability to treat childhood cancer, to mitigate the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and to better understand and treat women’s health issues.”

Bhattacharya responded that he “was not involved in those decisions. If confirmed as NIH director, I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH, and the scientists that the NIH supports, have the resources they need to meet the mission of the NIH, which is to do research to make America healthy.”

Bhattacharya’s viewpoints on the COVID-19 pandemic, which frequently ran contrary to mainstream science, and his co-authorship of the Great Barrington Declaration, also came up for discussion. The declaration encouraged governments to lift lockdown restrictions on young and healthy people and to focus protection measures on the elderly. The purported aim was to allow COVID-19 to spread in a population in which it was less likely to be deadly, thereby encouraging widespread immunity that was not dependent on a vaccine.

Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), asked Bhattacharya to comment on the “proper role” of the NIH during a pandemic, and on how former NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, “overstepped that role,” according to Banks.

Bhattacharya said scientists should “answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be.”

Their role “isn’t to make decisions to say you shouldn’t be saying goodbye to your grandfather as he’s dying in a hospital,” he said. “It shouldn’t be to say you can’t have a funeral because it’s too dangerous. The scientists should say, here’s what the risks are, and then you decide … whether you take it.”

“Science should be an engine for freedom — knowledge and freedom — not something where it stands on top of society and says you must do this, this, and this, or else,” Bhattacharya added. “It shouldn’t be pushing mandates for vaccines like the COVID vaccines that were tested for a relatively short period of time. I took the COVID vaccine myself. But I think that the mandates that many scientists push have led to the lack of confidence that [much] of the public has in science.”

In answering a question from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about how he would “root out fraud and waste,” Bhattacharya noted that his background as an economist and a physician — albeit, he does not practice — gives him an awareness that “every dollar wasted on a frivolous study” and “every dollar wasted on administrative costs that are not needed” is one “not spent on research.”

“The team I’m going to put together is going to be hyper-focused to make sure that the portfolio of grants that the NIH funds is devoted to the chronic disease problems of this country, is going to be devoted to making sure we have, not just incremental progress, but research projects that have the capacity to make huge advances in treatment for cancer, for diabetes, for obesity,” he said.

The Senate HELP Committee has not yet voted on advancing Bhattacharya’s nomination.

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