Jay Bhattacharya nominated for NIH director: report

Stanford-educated physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya has been officially nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, writing, “I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya will work in partnership with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s medical research and to make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.”

Bhattacharya met this week with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was nominated by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH and other health agencies, and impressed the former presidential candidate with his ideas for overhauling the NIH. which oversees US biomedical research, according to a report by Washington Post.

The NIH also awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials at its Maryland campus, and supports a variety of efforts to develop drugs and therapeutics.

The nominee for NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January.

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Stanford-educated physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya is reportedly the presumptive favorite to be nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as the next director of the NIH. (Getty Images)

Bhattacharya has called for shifting NIH’s focus toward funding more innovative research and reducing the influence of some of its longest-serving officials.

Kennedy Jr. has played a central role in the selection of top health professionals and surrogates for Trump’s next administration, including Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary, whom Trump selected to lead the Food and Drug Administration, and internal medicine physician and former Republican congressman from Florida Dave Weldon, whom Trump selected to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the report.

FILE: Jay Bhattacharya speaks during the 2023 Forbes Healthcare Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 5, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

Bhattacharya and Makary worked together on a plan for a proposed commission to examine the nation’s response to the coronavirus, the report noted.

Trump’s picks of Makary, Weldon and family and emergency physician Janette Nesheiwat, whom the president-elect nominated to serve as surgeon general, also must be confirmed by the Senate.

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The nominee for NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority starting in January. (Getty Images)

Bhattacharya was a prominent critic of the federal government’s COVID-19 response during the early days of the pandemic. He co-authored an open letter in October 2020, during Trump’s first term, urging the government to roll back pandemic shutdowns but maintain “focused protections” for vulnerable populations, such as the elderly.

The proposal was supported by Republican lawmakers and many Americans who were critical of shutdowns and wanted to return to life before the pandemic. However, public health experts, including then-NIH Director Francis S. Collins, criticized the proposal as premature and dangerous amid the spread of COVID-19 at a time when vaccines were not yet available.

Bhattacharya has also called for rolling back power from some of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH, arguing that some career officials wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and disallowed dissenting perspectives.

The nominee for NIH director is not official until President-elect Donald Trump makes the announcement. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

He, along with other critics of the agency, has criticized former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, who helped shape the nation’s response to the coronavirus under the Trump and Biden administrations before leaving the federal government in December 2022 .

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The NIH has also come under scrutiny from congressional lawmakers over its response to the pandemic, with Republicans accusing agency leaders of mismanaging the response to the virus and calling for an overhaul of the agency.

Current and former NIH officials, including Fauci, have defended the agency’s response, arguing that federal leaders generally did the best they could to address the virus.