President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s top governmental biomedical research agency said he has no plans to lay off more people at the department that’s already been beset by budget cuts.
“I have no intention to cut anyone,” at the US National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist and doctor, said Wednesday in a confirmation hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “I’m going to understand what resources the whole NIH needs and make sure that the scientists that are working at the NIH have the resources to do the life-saving work they do.”
With close to $50 billion in annual research spending, the NIH has been a focal point of cost-cutting efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. About 1,000 NIH employees were terminated in February amid mass layoffs across the Health and Human Services Department.
Bhattacharya wouldn’t address his plans for another important cost issue: a proposed cap on NIH payments for researcher’s administrative expenses that can include cleaning supplies and security. While these indirect costs can range as high as 80% of the grants they’re linked to, the cap limits them to 15%.
“There’s a lot of distrust about where that money goes, because the trust in the public health establishment has collapsed since the pandemic,” Bhattacharya told the Senate panel.
The proposed cap set off a lawsuit from 22 Democratic attorneys general to block the move. Still, some researchers have said they have yet to receive allocated NIH funding.
Concern about the NIH’s ability to continue its work under the Trump administration is running high. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who chairs the HELP Committee, began the hearing asking about the first US death from measles that was reported last week. Cassidy, who has expressed confidence in vaccines, asked Bhattacharya if he’d fund research to dispute the unproven theory that measles shots cause autism.
“I don’t think there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism,” Bhattacharya said. The nominee refused to say whether the agency would study any potential link between autism and vaccines.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the NIH, has expressed skepticism in the safety of the measles vaccine. During the Texas outbreak that has sickened nearly 160 people in the state, Kennedy wrote an op-ed in Fox News that the vaccine, which also prevents mumps and rubella, is effective, but still the decision of whether to take it is a “personal one.”
Bhattacharya is best known as one of the three authors of a 2020 manifesto that proposed alternatives to Covid lockdowns. The Great Barrington Declaration argued that herd immunity could be achieved through exposure to the virus and a return to normal life while vulnerable populations were protected.
The statement was attacked by public health leaders including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony Fauci, who called it “very dangerous.” Bhattacharya said he was concerned about the side effects of Covid vaccines in young men and that “lockdowns did not save lives” in the Senate hearing.
A HELP Committee vote on whether to recommend Bhattacharya’s nomination to the full Senate has yet to be scheduled.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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