Trump nominee to lead National Institutes of Health questioned on funding cuts, vaccines

WASHINGTON (AP) — A health economist who once famously clashed with officials at the National Institutes of Health and now is the nominee to lead the agency faced questions from senators from both parties Wednesday about drastic funding cuts and research priorities.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor, was an outspoken critic of the government’s COVID-19 shutdowns and vaccine policies. Now he’s poised to become director of the NIH, long called the government’s crown jewel, as it faces mass firings and drastic funding cutbacks.

“I love the NIH but post-pandemic, America’s biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” Bhattacharya told senators.

He laid out priorities including a bigger focus on chronic diseases, including diabetes and obesity. But he also said the agency needs to be more open to scientific dissent, saying influential NIH leaders early in the pandemic shut down his own criticisms about responses to COVID-19.

While Republicans warmly welcomed Bhattacharya, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate health committee, pressed him about vaccine skepticism that is fueling a large measles outbreak that already killed a child in Texas.

Cassidy strenuously urged Bhattacharya not to waste NIH dollars reexamining whether there’s a link between standard childhood vaccines and autism. There’s no link — something that’s already been proven in multiple studies involving thousands of children, the senator stressed.

Bhattacharya called the measles death a tragedy and said he “fully supported” children being vaccinated but added that additional research might convince skeptical parents.

“People still think Elvis is alive,” a frustrated Cassidy responded. He told Bhattacharya any attempt to revisit the debunked issue would deprive funds to study autism’s real cause.

Some Senators, including Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, expressed deep frustration that turmoil at the nation’s largest funder of medical research — mass firings and funding cuts and freezes — threatens the development of cures and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and host of other disorders. They pushed Bhattacharya about how he’d reverse those losses, including one set of funding cuts — currently paused by a federal judge — that they said is forbidden by a congressional spending law.