Stanford-trained physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya has officially been 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 cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct 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 to overhaul the NIH, which oversees U.S. biomedical research, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The NIH also awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials on its Maryland campus and supports a variety of efforts to develop drugs and therapeutics.
The nominee for the NIH director must be confirmed by the Senate, which will have a Republican majority beginning in January.
Bhattacharya has called for moving the NIH's focus toward funding more innovative research and cutting the influence of some of its longest-serving officials.
Kennedy Jr. has played a central role in choosing top health care staff and deputies for Trump's next administration, including Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary, who Trump selected to lead the Food and Drug Administration, and internal medicine physician and former Republican congressman from Florida Dave Weldon, who Trump chose to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the report.
Bhattacharya and Makary worked together on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response, the report noted.
Trump's selections of Makary, Weldon and family and emergency medicine physician Janette Nesheiwat, who the president-elect nominated to serve as surgeon general, also must be confirmed by the Senate.
Bhattacharya was a prominent critic of the federal government's COVID-19 response during the early days of the pandemic. He co-wrote an open letter in October 2020, during Trump's first term, that called for the government to roll back pandemic shutdowns but maintain 'focused protections' for vulnerable populations, such as the elderly.
The suggestion was supported by Republican lawmakers and many Americans who were critical of shutdowns and wanted to return to pre-pandemic life. 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 the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH, arguing that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not allow dissenting perspectives.
He, along with other critics of the agency, have criticized former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, who helped shape the nation’s coronavirus response during the Trump and Biden administrations before leaving the federal government in December 2022.
The NIH has also been investigated by congressional lawmakers over the pandemic response, with Republicans charging that the agency’s leaders mismanaged the response to the virus and calling for the agency to be overhauled.
Current and former NIH officials, including Fauci, have defended the agency’s response, arguing that federal leaders generally did the best that they could to address the virus.