Leadership Changes At HHS Agencies

After falsely savaging Dr. Jay Bhattacharya during the pandemic, the health care Deep State is now terrified of him:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5748218-bhattacharya-cdc-nih-leadership-concern/

Bhattacharya’s growing power in Trump’s HHS worries health experts
By Joseph Choi - February 22, 2026

Public health experts and former federal staffers are uneasy over National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya’s rising influence over U.S. health policy as he temporarily takes on the added role of leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Trump administration announced the leadership shake-up this week, with former interim CDC Director Jim O’Neill being moved out of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“Candidly, this is someone who very clearly has an ax to grind with science and the scientific community in general,” Kayla Hancock, director of Protect our Care’s Public Health Watch project, said of Bhattacharya.

“We’ve seen with his record already at NIH and his history of Covid denialism before he even took this office that this is just not the kind of person that we need at the helm of our key public health and medical research institutions.”

Bhattacharya, confirmed as NIH director in March of last year, was a Stanford University professor of medicine before joining the Trump administration. He was also one of the lead authors of “Great Barrington Declaration,” a 2020 open letter calling for COVID-19 lockdowns to be rolled back.

In an email to CDC staff on Friday, Bhattacharya laid out what he said was a plan to restore trust in public health. During the pandemic, he wrote, it was “undeniable that some of the Federal government’s decisions, communications, and processes contributed to confusion, frustration, and a loss of that trust.”

“I also recognize the unique challenges faced by each of you over the past year due to abrupt changes in leadership, the tragic act of violence last summer, and overall uncertainty felt by all of you,” wrote Bhattacharya, referring to the fatal shooting at the CDC’s headquarters last year. “One of my goals is to ensure that you all get the recognition you deserve for your efforts.”

He listed three principles the agency would follow under his rule: updating guidance “transparently” as new data emerges, ensuring every investigation it conducts reflects the “responsibility to the communities we serve” and strengthening internal review processes to enhance “accountability and openness.”

The position of CDC director has been haphazardly filled over the past year. President Trump’s first pick, former Florida Rep. David Weldon (R), failed to gain support in the Senate, leading to longtime federal scientist Susan Monarez, the interim director, receiving the nomination to fill the role permanently.

Monarez was ultimately confirmed by the Senate along party lines, but only weeks later the administration pushed her out, with her claiming it was due to her refusal to give blanket approval of recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had restaffed with ideological allies.

O’Neill, a deputy HHS secretary, was then made the interim director, making Bhattacharya the third acting CDC director in seven months.

Former CDC physician Elizabeth Soda, who resigned late last year, said the American public is suffering because of the lack of stable leadership within the agency.

She noted how Congress had largely maintained funding for the agency, rejecting calls by the administration to deeply cut appropriations, indicating the legislative branch recognizes the importance of a strong CDC.

“How can you even do the work that they’re being given the money to do, right? That’s a big challenge, and without having clear leadership, who can really devote the time and energy and expertise to face these challenges head on?” Soda said.

Former federal staffers and public health voices who spoke with The Hill said the NIH and CDC agencies are too large and distinct from one another to have one individual leading both at the same time.

“I don’t think Jay Bhattacharya can be trusted to lead either. But I think the size of both of these organizations and the missions are different, and I think it takes a specific type of person, a single person, to do each of these jobs,” said James Alwine, coordinating committee member of the nonprofit volunteer network Defend Public Health and professor emeritus of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

The NIH’s primary objective is to support U.S. research infrastructure, while the CDC is largely tasked with surveilling and addressing disease threats.

Alwine began his career at the NIH. He opined that Bhattacharya’s motivations to lead these agencies did not align with their missions of promoting and protecting public health.

“I think some of the things he’s doing certainly look to me like he’s getting back at those who came down on him because they criticized him so much about the Great Barrington Resolution,” Alwine said.

When reached for comment, HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said of Bhattacharya, “The Director has empowered the NIH leadership team to ensure the agency’s priorities continue moving forward until the President nominates and the Senate confirms a permanent CDC director.”

“CDC Principal Deputy Director Ralph Abraham and other members of the CDC leadership team will work closely with Dr. Bhattacharya during this acting period to continue protecting and serving the American people,” Hilliard added. “The Director is solely focused on ensuring a seamless transition for both agencies while maintaining continuity of leadership and advancing their core public health missions.”

Monarez, the only confirmed CDC director in Trump’s second term, was an outlier when it came to health nominees. She did not come from the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) antiestablishment world that many of Kennedy’s picks came from, having been a government scientist for decades.

Her refusal to bend completely to the MAHA agenda seemingly played a significant part in her termination.

With Bhattacharya’s temporary dual role, public health influence has become further consolidated among ardent Kennedy allies. Whether Trump and Kennedy can find a MAHA ally who can also win Senate confirmation as CDC director remains to be seen.

Soda, the former CDC staffer, was hopeful that compromises could be made for the sake of stable leadership at the agency.

“The optimist in me can hope,” Soda said. “We have to come to some middle ground understanding with one another, where we may not fully agree completely. But wouldn’t it be great if we could try to start moving towards the middle.”

“In some ways, MAHA’s beliefs, I think, are just so contrary to what CDC represents,” Soda added. “It would be difficult, I think, to find someone who’s a true sort of believer in those principles to also then come and successfully lead the agency that is, you know, the agency that is driven by scientific evidence and data.”

😎 Coming to a theater near you: Jay Bhattacharya, the movie!

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/22/the-next-hollywood-hero-jay-bhattacharya-00791313

RFK Jr.’s billionaire running mate is making a comedy about the pandemic
Nicole Shanahan has recruited a top screenwriter and enlisted Covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya.
By Kelly Hooper - February 22, 2026

Covid contrarians tight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pitching Hollywood on an unlikely leading man: National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.

Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign, is searching for investors to fund a movie that pokes fun at the pandemic response with a star based on Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence with his anti-lockdown manifesto and relentless tweets opposing social distancing.

The script for the satirical comedy, “The Rash,” is by renowned author Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel “Up in the Air” that became an Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney. The new Kirn screenplay stars a “no-nonsense” public health professor at a Stanford-like California university — mirroring Bhattacharya — who speaks out against mass hysteria amid a mysterious outbreak of a contagious skin condition.

The story of the pandemic is one “of great heroes who stood up and said no” to “dangerous scientific experiments mixed with misleading propaganda, mass psychosis, and outright lies,” says the Brownstone Institute in a recent appeal sent to potential funders of the film.

The think tank that once counted Bhattacharya as a senior scholar added that “investors are terrified of the topic and Hollywood elites don’t even want it made.”

The push to make the film is among numerous examples, since President Donald Trump returned to office, in which the president or his allies have sought approbation from America’s culture-making institutions. They’ve had some success. Trump allies renamed the Kennedy Center in Washington to honor him in December and Amazon released a film last month about first lady Melania Trump.

Since 2020, a number of figures in Trump’s orbit have been involved in the creation and promotion of films criticizing public officials’ response to the pandemic or pushing fringe theories about it or vaccines.

Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone’s founder and president, didn’t respond to requests for comment. In October 2020, he convened a group of scientists, including Bhattacharya, who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration opposing Covid lockdowns. It set off a vigorous debate about the pandemic response and prompted Bhattacharya’s predecessor at NIH, Francis Collins, to call him a “fringe epidemiologist.”

Bhattacharya, whom Kennedy also named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, is on board with the movie, an NIH spokesperson told POLITICO.

“Dr. Bhattacharya has spoken positively about the work Walter Kirn is doing, noting that the project reflects a strong commitment to free speech and open inquiry, and he welcomes thoughtful creative efforts that engage with these issues,” the spokesperson said.

Bhattacharya declined to comment. He’s spent at least 10 hours speaking to Kirn, who shares his views on the handling of the pandemic, for the film.

Shanahan is an executive producer of “The Rash” along with her partner, Jacob Strumwasser, according to Brownstone. Neither Shanahan nor Strumwasser could be reached for comment. Shanahan, a lawyer and entrepreneur, is reportedly a billionaire following her divorce three years ago from Google founder Sergey Brin. While married to Brin, she founded a philanthropy that focuses on extending women’s fertility.

Funding for “The Rash” nonetheless remains an obstacle. The estimated production budget is close to $6 million, according to a slide deck on Brownstone’s website.

Brownstone “is well-positioned to be a fiscal sponsor of this effort,” and the project “already has a top production company lined up along with some notable talent to make a first-rate film,” the website says.

In September, Kirn released a short teaser trailer for “The Rash” on social platform X, saying the film is in the financing phase and interested investors should contact him.

Kirn did not respond to a request for comment.

He said in the X post that he wrote the film for Shanahan and 0nset Creative, an independent production company founded by Alex Lee Moyer, a filmmaker whose credits include a 2022 documentary on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In September, as a guest on Shanahan’s podcast, Moyer described the Jones documentary as a film about Covid, the “runway to Jan. 6” and “how off the rails the world went during that moment.”

Three pages of the script for “The Rash” are previewed on Brownstone’s website. In one scene, the governor of California and a character named Dr. Roman Fox orchestrate a celebrity singalong amid the outbreak. A “succession of celebs sing lines from the song ‘Aquarius’ by the Fifth Dimension,” the script reads.

“Some sing beautifully, some not,” the screenplay says. “Behind them are their yards and homes. One sings naked with his crotch blurred out, his body gleaming with oil.”

The song, a No. 1 hit in 1969 based on numbers from the musical Hair, previews a time when Jupiter aligns with Mars and “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.”

The scene appears to poke fun at a celebrity singalong of the John Lennon song “Imagine” during the early days of the Covid pandemic, spearheaded by actress Gal Gadot. At the time, the viral video was widely criticized as elitist and out of touch.

0nset Creative was “established in response to a landscape where media has become decentralized and old models are buckling under the weight of the times,” its website says. The studio is working on a handful of other projects in addition to “The Rash,” including “the first in depth documentary about Silicon Valley and its denizens” and another documentary on unidentified flying objects.

During the September podcast interview with Moyer, Shanahan said she and her partner, Strumwasser, had the “stupid idea” for a satire film inspired by the Covid pandemic and decided to run with it.

“We were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just laugh about how ridiculous this all was and how awful it all was?’ But also laugh at it because that means that it’s in the past,” she said.

Moyer said Shanahan approached 0nset Creative with the idea.

“I got to thinking, ‘Well, who’s the best person who can work on this? Who can write a script that’s worthy of this topic?’ And I thought of my good friend, Walter Kirn,” said Moyer.

Shanahan and Strumwasser gave Kirn creative liberty to tell the story in the way he wanted, and he came back with the script for “The Rash,” Moyer added.

Moyer said “The Rash” reminds her of conspiracy thrillers from the ‘60s and ‘70s like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Network,” as well as “some of the lighter influences from films in the ‘90s” like “Wag the Dog” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

“We need to be able to have a sense of humor about our collective trauma,” Moyer told Shanahan.

0nset Creative did not respond to a request for comment, and Moyer could not be reached.

A second scene in the script features a conversation between Fox and “Dr. Neal Chandra,” the character based on Bhattacharya. Fox declares “I’m the science” during the scene — an apparent reference to a 2021 interview in which Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. pandemic response, said his critics were “really criticizing science because I represent science.” Fox encourages Chandra to sign a document supporting that statement. Chandra refuses.

In a description of the film’s cinematography, the slide deck on Brownstone’s website says the movie will “toggle between composed shots that reflect Dr. Chandra’s rational perspective and looser, handheld coverage that captures the surrounding chaos: influencers melting down on livestreams, press conferences spinning off-script, executives high on their own power.”

“The world bends while Chandra stands still,” the description reads.