‘Science should be an engine for freedom’: NIH nominee Bhattacharya threatens Senate status quo

Written by Greg Piper on . Posted in Current News

WATCH: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya testifies at Senate confirmation hearing for NIH director | PBS NewsSenate Democrats and some Republicans liked the status quo at the National Institutes of Health before the second Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency started closely scrutinizing its grant decisions, headcount and wildly generous reimbursement for “indirect costs” to institutions at the expense of money for their researchers.

That seemed apparent at Wednesday’s Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing for NIH director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya, who faced repeated bipartisan demands to oppose President Trump who nominated him and immediately undo decisions made by agency leaders and the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, especially mass terminations and funding freezes.

Best known for his pioneering research on widespread COVID-19 immunity by April 2020 and vocal opposition to prolonged school closures and vaccine mandates, the Stanford medical professor and health economist barely drew criticism for his own record.

He mentioned just a single vaccine whose safety record troubled him when asked by Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J.: “COVID vaccines for young men causing myocarditis,” which is inflammation of heart muscle.

Like their House colleagues a month earlier, Senate Democrats seem to have thrown in the towel on defending their own COVID record and heroes including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the four-decade director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Instead they assailed Trump and DOGE boss Elon Musk, with ranking member Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, telling Bhattacharya he’d be subservient to the unofficial leader of DOGE and asking Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., to haul billionaire Musk before the committee.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Bhattacharya whether he’d follow the law when Trump gave him an illegal directive. When he rejected the plausibility of the hypothetical, she responded “that strains credulity” and denounced his “disappointing answer.”

Sanders repeatedly cut off Bhattacharya as he tried to answer leading questions about unilaterally capping high prices for drugs developed through NIH research and using his “bully pulpit” to pressure TV stations to ban ads for “unhealthy foods.” \

The nominee barely got to answer that the U.S. could have saved untold spending on drugs by treating serious COVID infections with the “cheap steroid” dexamethasone, as documented in a July 2020 New England Journal of Medicine study.

“A lot can be done through executive orders,” Sanders answered, referring to Trump’s first-month deluge, when Bhattacharya told him that previous NIH directors said only Congress can impose price caps.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called bullplop on Democrats for not cosponsoring his bill to remove junk food from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he said would disproportionately improve health for poor people.

The ophthalmologist cheered Bhattacharya’s tout of steroids that cost “pennies” to treat serious COVID, which he said Fauci rejected in March 2020. Paul called it “the best cure and the cheapest,” and Bhattacharya frowned that the U.K. did that research instead of NIH.

Just as Democrats pivoted to praising COVID vaccines as “life-saving” after the novel therapeutics were found unable to stop transmission, to make infection more likely via the antibody “class switch” and to cause heart inflammation in young people, several used the compound adjective to describe research subject to NIH’s funding pause.

So did Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who also joined Democrats in branding NIH’s new 15% cap on indirect cost recovery – in line with private foundations’ reimbursement ratios – a violation of congressional directives. She called the cap “ill-conceived and completely arbitrary” and a “one-size-fits-all approach,” a jab often applied to federal COVID guidance.

Bhattacharya reminded senators his own research received NIH grants and he served on a standing NIH grant committee for a decade, but said the agency must recover from the cratering public trust in public health leaders due to their pandemic management.

His NIH will “vigorously regulate” research that could cause another pandemic, he said, referring to the theory favored by the FBI, CIA and Department of Energy that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a Chinese lab conducting gain-of-function experiments, indirectly funded by Fauci’s agency.

Bhattacharya promised Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., he’d work with Congress to keep taxpayer money out of foreign biolabs such as Ukraine’s, publish records with “limited obfuscation” and require funding recipients to report “politically inconvenient” results.

Tuberville had asked about an NIH-funded study on youth gender transitions and mental health whose negative findings were intentionally withheld for seven years, helping create a false medical consensus on so-called gender affirming care for young people. He urged Bhattacharya to be “very visual on television” with his transparency message.

Bhattacharya said he’ll prioritize research on chronic diseases including obesity and diabetes and reversing the slide in life expectancy, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and make it “replicable, reproducible and generalizable,” a weakness for the agency.

He noted NIH’s “research integrity scandal” on Alzheimer’s disease, which he has studied, and its devotion to the “amyloid hypothesis,” an explanation for Alzheimer’s that may be based on falsified data and which he said crowded out study of other hypotheses.

There are “very promising potential ways” to treat Alzheimer’s that haven’t received federal support because they don’t “align with a single dominant narrative” on its cause, which Bhattacharya blamed for few “advancements” in relation to spending on the disease.

Unlike the “coverup, obfuscation and lack of tolerance” from previous officials, NIH under Bhattacharya’s leadership will “actively encourage different perspectives,” including from early-career scientists, and promote a culture of free speech and respect for dissent, “the very essence of science,” he said.

His role would be to answer basic questions for policymakers, not tell people they can’t visit grandparents in the hospital or order them to take vaccines “tested for a relatively short period of time,” Bhattacharya said. “Science should be an engine for freedom.”

All this heartened Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, who said the U.S. wasted two decades of Alzheimer’s funding on the amyloid hypothesis.

The obstetrician said 20% of five-year grants should be cut off as a “dead end” each year and called indirect-cost recovery “another grift for universities,” particularly the heavy funding recipients whose alleged indirect costs are inexplicably higher than those in Kansas.

Even as he praised Bhattacharya’s agenda for supporting “younger scientists who have unproven ideas with potential as major medical breakthroughs” and fostering more debate within NIH, Cassidy badgered the nominee to be more close-minded on one debate: a potential connection between MMR vaccination and increasing autism rates.

Bhattacharya mourns the recent death of a Texas child who was reportedly unvaccinated against measles, and “I don’t generally believe there’s a link” between the vaccine and autism, but he supports a “broad scientific agenda” to identify autism’s causes, the nominee said.

“If we keep plowing over ground that has been plowed over,” whether a vaccine-autism link or “Elvis is alive,” NIH will waste its limited resources of $48 billion a year, Cassidy retorted.

These concerns drive some parents to not vaccinate their children, so “my inclination is to give them good data … the one lever I’ll have” as NIH director, Bhattacharya responded.

Sen. Paul said Cassidy should care more about the “frivolous studies” NIH has funded “for decades,” such as whether people will eat food they’ve seen sneezed on, which liquor makes fish the most aggressive and whether “lonely rats use more cocaine than well-liked rats.”

Less senior Republicans gave Bhattacharya unreserved praise.

“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about COVID-19” when it was unpopular and faced persecution from the very leaders Bhattacharya is nominated to replace, said Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., calling him “one of the most exciting picks” by Trump.

The newest committee member, Florida Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, claimed Bhattacharya as the Sunshine State’s own for advising its COVID response. Together they took a “very deliberate, scientific” approach and made decisions that were the “first of their kind.”

Bhattacharya contrasted Florida’s fast reopening of schools with California’s 18 months keeping his kids locked out, while beating the Golden State in all-cause mortality. “It was so refreshing to me to be allowed to speak my scientific views in Florida,” which did so well during COVID because it gave people an “outlet for dissent.”

 

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