Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was grilled by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee which is considering his nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health. Opposition from Democrats was expected, but hostility to Dr. Bhattacharya from Republican Chairman Willliam M. Cassidy of Louisiana was not expected. Dr. Cassidy is a gastroenterologist whose leading source of political funding since becoming a Senator is "Health Care Professionals":
Jay Bhattacharya Outlines Vision For New NIH Amid Agency Disruptions
NIH Director Nominee Jayanta Bhattacharya Testifies In Senate Hearing
By Emily Kopp - March 5, 2025
Daily Caller News FoundationPresident Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health testified before a Senate committee Wednesday about using taxpayer funding for useful medical research and improving transparency at the National Institutes of Health — but faced bipartisan questions opposed to disruptive change.
Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and outlined his vision for the future of the institutes. The vision called for less waste and fraud, a renewed focus on practical applications for human health and more tolerance for disagreement in order to reestablish trust lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I love the NIH. But post-pandemic, American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” he said.
Bhattacharya stressed five priorities: Focusing on chronic disease; tackling the reproducibility crisis in science; establishing a culture of free speech and diversity of viewpoints; recommitting to innovative breakthroughs over incremental progress by powerful incumbent scientists; and introducing regulation of risky research that poses the risk of a pandemic.
Bhattacharya first rose to prominence with the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, a statement that broke with NIH in calling for “focused protection” against COVID-19 that would allow low-risk individuals to live their lives normally while safeguarding high-risk populations. Former NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for aggressively combatting this stance. Bhattacharya has challenged the U.S. government for its efforts in collaboration with social media companies to throttle alternative points of view during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hearing was not trouble-free for Bhattacharya, who faced terse questions not only from Democrats but also from Republican Chair Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Cassidy was a critic of Bhattacharya’s would-be boss Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s prior statements on the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. His stance on Kennedy’s nomination remained in doubt right up until the committee vote, though he eventually broke in favor of his confirmation.
Cassidy directed pointed questions to Bhattacharya about the MMR vaccine. Cassidy expressed concerns that confidence in the vaccine could be set back by continuing to study it and expressed opposition to applying “precious limited taxpayer dollars” to the matter.
Bhattacharya said that he was convinced that there was no link between autism and the MMR vaccine while emphasizing the need for “good data.”
“As far as research on autism and vaccines, I don’t generally believe there is a link based on my reading of the literature, but what I have seen is that there is tremendous distrust in medicine and science coming out of the pandemic, and we do have, as you know Senator, a sharp rise in autism rates in this country,” Bhattacharya said. “I don’t know, and I don’t think any scientist knows the cause of it. So I would support … a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that.”
“But this has been fairly well, in fact it has been exhaustively studied, and there’s limited resources,” Cassidy retorted. “And if we keep ploughing over ground that has been ploughed over, knowing you can never prove a negative, and since we don’t know the cause [of autism] we still have a problem. We’ve got a responsibility with limited resources.”
The gentlemen did not appear to reach an agreement.
But Cassidy also expressed optimism about Bhattacharya’s ability to reinvigorate NIH research.
“There is concern that the current system incentives established scientists who study already proven concepts rather than younger scientists who have unproven ideas that have potential to be major medical breakthroughs,” said Cassidy.
Bhattacharya also faced heated questions from Democrats and Republicans alike about the recent disruptions at to the institutes, including a new cap on the proportion of funding universities and labs can skim off the top of NIH grants at 15%; the firing of NIH probationary employees; and a pause to NIH study sections, which was partially lifted last week.
Collins expressed strong opposition to the cap on so-called “indirects.”
“I think it’s important that we all acknowledge that a one-sized fits all approach does not make sense. That’s why NIH negotiates with the individual grant recipients on what the indirects should be,” Collins said. “To impose this arbitrary cap makes no sense at all. It’s also important to emphasize that this is illegal. Since 2017 we have had language in the [Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act] that specifically prohibits the indirect cost formula from being changed.”
A U.S. district judge extended a temporary restraining order on the cap in response to lawsuits filed by attorneys general and universities on Feb. 21.
Bhattacharya said he would follow the law but also suggested that universities’ use of indirect funds, which are not publicly reported, should be subject to public scrutiny.
“If confirmed I absolutely commit to following the law,” he said. “This is one of those issues that, to me, is an indicator of distrust of universities and the scientific process, so I want to address those as well.”
Bhattacharya emphasized that he supports the work of NIH scientists and the mission of improving Americans’ health. But Bhattacharya repeatedly stressed his view that this mission has been adrift in recent years.
Bhattacharya and Republican senators cited the apparent lack of progress on Alzheimer’s disease as an example. A fraudulent 2006 Alzheimer’s research paper that served as a touchstone for the predominant “amyloid cascade” hypothesis of the disease was retracted in 2024 after being cited hundreds of times.
Over the last twenty years, despite a surge in NIH funding, Alzheimer’s deaths have doubled, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Bhattacharya said he plans to introduce regulations of gain-of-function research that generates novel pandemic-capable viruses — something virologists and NIH leadership has resisted for years.
Bhattacharya called the stigmatization of public discussion of NIH-supported coronavirus research conducted in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — aided by Collins and longtime Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease Anthony Fauci via a March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine — a “low point in the history of science.”
“The net effect of this was a tremendous loss in confidence by the American people in NIH and in our public health officials. You and I have talked about the vital need to restore some of that credibility. Talk to us about how you see going about doing that,” said Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
“That episode is a low point in the history of science,” Bhattacharya said. “The top officials at the NIH abused their positions to hide their support for research that may have caused the pandemic. And I am committed to making sure that all of the activities of the NIH, not just backwards but going forward, are transparent and open to the American people and to Congress.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was castigated during COVID for his principled positions expressed in The Great Barrington Declaration, but ultimately was vindicated. Most of the scientific community capitulated to the FDA liars for fear of losing their federal government funding and ruthlessly attacked Dr. Bhattacharya under the instructions of Dr. Fauci. One of Dr. Bhattacharya's most vociferous critics was Dr. David Gorski, a professor of surgery at Wayne State University who practices at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski never apologized, nor corrected, his false attacks upon Dr. Bhattacharya.
Paul Thacker of RealClearInvestigations has posted a long form backgrounder on Dr. Bhattacharya's trials and tribulations:
The COVID-Era Smearing – and Resurrection – of Trump NIH Appointee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
By Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigations
March 04, 2025Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.
Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, dialed up the attacks, dismissing him and his colleagues as what Collins termed “fringe epidemiologists” while their acolytes threw mud from a slew of publications, including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ.
In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Bhattacharya’s path from health policy scholar to NIH director nominee is pockmarked with craters from missiles launched to destroy his scientific credibility by NIH leaders and their minions in academia. Even as he seeks to advance medical research, Bhattacharya’s personal experience will likely inform his pledge to clean up the NIH and clear the agency of some career civil servants who silenced dissenting scientific voices during the pandemic and created national policies that were not always supported by the public.
“Free speech is fundamental for science to function properly,” he notes simply.
Bhattacharya first caught the attention of the nation’s scientific bureaucracy in April 2020 when he reported that the COVID virus was not as dangerous but more widespread than many of his colleagues and government officials were maintaining. This suggested a policy focusing on the most vulnerable populations with fewer restrictions on younger, healthier Americans. The study was discussed at the highest levels of the government and was passed around by Fauci and others in the White House, according to emails made public by a Freedom of Information Act request.
“For anyone with an open mind, the study’s results implied that the lockdown-focused strategy of March 2020 had failed to suppress the spread of the disease,” Bhattacharya wrote in a 2023 essay. But the paper’s other obvious conclusion put Bhattacharya in the crosshairs of Stanford faculty: It suggested that fear-mongering about the fatality rate of the virus was irresponsible.
Bhattacharya’s contrary conclusions generated complaints that the research was unsound, and Stanford put together an ad hoc group to investigate. It directed him to change the study protocols, which would have shut down the research. “They also demanded to review and approve any manuscripts we would write,” Bhattacharya said. But he eventually ignored them and kept publishing.
In April 2020, a series of damaging articles by Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee carried allegations that Bhattacharya and his colleagues failed to disclose funding for their study, even though they had actually already disclosed it to Stanford. Buzzfeed is the now-defunct news site that first published the now much-maligned Steele dossier.
Bhattacharya was confused by the articles when they appeared. He later concluded from the intimate details that Stanford faculty were leaking the information to the reporter to harm him, including a false allegation that a “whistleblower” had come forward.
Responding to the Buzzfeed flurry of reports, Stanford announced a fact-finding investigation of Bhattacharya’s research, which he began calling an “inquisition.” The administration later informed him there was no “whistleblower” as Buzzfeed had falsely reported, and they sent a confidential report that found him and his colleagues at no fault.
“I got a letter which basically says we did nothing wrong. But also a condition that I’m not allowed to release the letter,” Bhattacharya explained in a 2023 interview. “This was a low period in my life. I was getting death threats, racist attacks, because the press was attacking me.”
Bhattacharya also suspects that some of the attacks at the time were being generated by Stanford’s major funders in the federal government – the NIH’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. Collins and Fauci orchestrated a campaign against Bhattacharya in earnest in October 2020. Collins resigned from his NIH position last Friday and did not respond to questions sent to him through the NIH communications office nor sent to his NIH contact. Fauci did not respond to questions sent to him through his attorney.
That month, Bhattacharya and professors Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for rejecting harmful COVID lockdowns in favor of “focused protection” for society’s most vulnerable, such as the elderly. With the declaration building support, Collins, four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, sent Fauci an email with the subject line “Great Barrington Declaration.”
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the [Health] Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford,” Collins wrote. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that on line yet – is it underway?”
Some hours later, Fauci forwarded Collins a “refutation” of the Great Barrington Declaration written for The Nation by his friend and advocate Gregg Gonsalves, an AIDS activist who is now a professor at Yale. Fauci rose to prominence in the 1980s as an HIV/AIDS researcher. “Indeed, and well said,” replied Collins. The Gonsalves essay referenced no actual science but denigrated Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff for ignoring what he called “progressive principles of justice and equality” in favor of “survival of the fittest.”
Fauci has praised Gonsalves several times over the years and, in his recent memoir, singles out Gonsalves and a handful of other activists “for their unflinching support over the past few years.”
Four days after Fauci forwarded Collins the Gonsalves essay in The Nation, Collins dismissed the Declaration in public comments as “fringe” politics. “This is not mainstream science,” Collins argued in a public statement. Gonsalves contacted Collins later that same day, emailing him another essay he had written, again vilifying the Great Barrington Declaration, this time in the Washington Post.
“Saw your comments on the ludicrous Great Barrington Declaration and wanted to thank you for speaking out and doing it ‘undiplomatically,’” Gonsalves emailed Collins. “After we saw what you had said about ‘fringe’ epidemiology, we wondered why we were so nice in our op-ed.”
Collins then forwarded Gonsalves’ email to Fauci, who responded with a smiley face emoji.
Several months later, Gonsalves was among those who hosted a surprise birthday greeting for Fauci. “We did it!” tweeted HIV activist Peter Staley. “A small gang of Tony Fauci’s HIV/AIDS comrades managed to surprise him yesterday with an 80th birthday Zoom.” A screenshot of the Zoom shows Gregg Gonsalves beaming into his camera.
Fauci and Collins’ effort to create a “quick and devastating” takedown of the Great Barrington Declaration remained secret until the emails between them and Gonsalves became public in late December 2021. In response, Gonsalves dashed off a Christmas note to Collins and Fauci thanking them for their service and alerting them to their now-public emails “that some on the right have been circulating as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy against the Great Barrington Declaration.”
“It’s interesting that an effort to call out genuinely dangerous recommendations from the GBD is called a conspiracy,” Collins emailed back to Gonsalves. “Truth itself seems to have become a conspiracy in many minds.”
“It’s been a privilege to have you as our leader at the NIH!” Gonsalves replied.
Gonsalves remained a dogged Fauci supporter throughout the pandemic, even attacking former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield when he went public in 2023 that he believed Fauci’s funding for gain-of-function virus research in the Wuhan lab may have led to the pandemic. “Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, has been trashing former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci,” Gonsalves tweeted in March 2023. “Anyone who knows Bob Redfield knows what an unsavory character he is.”
Working in concert with Gonsalves, two other academics were especially active in criticizing Bhattacharya’s COVID work: David Gorski, a Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University, and Gavin Yamey, Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University.
“They specifically targeted the scientific community to undermine Jay,” said a Trump transition team member, who is not allowed to speak to the press while shuffling Bhattacharya around the Senate. “There’s a market for hot pieces to attack Bhattacharya, and these academics coordinate on social media, repeating and amplifying the same narrative to dirty him up.”
Gorski is a self-described “misinformation debunker” and runs a website called Science Based Medicine. It doesn’t always get its facts straight. After the European Medicines Agency concluded in April 2021, for example, that unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, Gorski decried the decision on his X account claiming, “Reported blood clots appear to be no higher than background and very likely unrelated to the vaccine.” The UK government eventually stopped offering AstraZeneca’s jab, and the company finally admitted that its COVID vaccine causes harm in what The Telegraph reported could result in millions of dollars in legal claims.
“Gorski is damaging to science,” said Bhattacharya. “He creates an environment where researchers can’t speak their mind if they cross the biopharmaceutical industry.” Bhattacharya described Yamey and Gorski as part of a network that carried out Collins’ devastating takedown. “I’ll never publish in a big mainstream journal,” he said a couple of years ago in an interview.
“Those of us in academic medicine, all we have is our reputation,” former CDC Director Robert Redfield told RealClearInvestigations. “These attacks, it impacts you substantially. You can’t function. You don’t get invited to talks, and groups won’t have anything to do with you."
In late 2021, Gorski partnered with Yamey on a piece for the BMJ falsely charging that Bhattacharya and other Great Barrington Declaration signers were supported by billionaires “aligned with industry.” Bhattacharya and the other signatories met at a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, Yamey and Gorski argued, “has also received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, which was founded and is chaired by the right-wing billionaire industrialist known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business.”
While Gorski and Yamey provided no evidence that Koch money funded the GBD signatories, the BMJ still published their piece. Association with a nonprofit that has distant links to Koch money was apparently enough to carry the whiff of dark money corruption, a charge that still circulates on social media to this day.
“The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication,” wrote Martin Kulldorff in The Spectator. “While the AIER has received only a single $68K (£50,000) Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.”
Contacted by RealClearInvestigations, Gorski did not respond when asked why he had not corrected his allegations against Bhattacharya.
It was later revealed that Bhattacharya’s attackers had even more conflicts. In March 2022, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a trove of documents revealing Yamey’s ties to EcoHealth Alliance, a Fauci-funded organization run by Peter Daszak, which subcontracted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. USAID scientist Dennis Carroll ran a pandemic preparedness program called PREDICT and worked with several researchers, including Daszak and Yamey, documents show, to redirect federal funds from the PREDICT program to set up a nonprofit called the Global Virome Project.
After directing federal funds to create the Global Virome Project, Carroll retired from federal service and became head of the organization, along with Daszak as a board member.
“It would appear that Dennis Carroll violated federal law that prohibits the use of official resources for private gain or for that of persons or organizations with which he is associated personally,” Craig Holman of Public Citizen said when shown emails from the document trove.
In March 2023, CBS News broke a story that EcoHealth Alliance may have double-billed the federal government for research in Wuhan, and the USAID Inspector General launched a criminal probe of the group’s finances. Some days before Trump was sworn into office, HHS excluded EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak from working with the agency in response to congressional investigations that uncovered wrongdoing, including using taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“But the defamatory damage was already done,” Bhattacharya wrote in Newsweek, calling out Yamey and Gorski for their BMJ errors, “and many scientists stayed silent as schools closed and children were harmed, even though they knew better. They did not want to be similarly smeared.”
“Yamey is a narrative enforcer for the pandemic preparedness industry that likely funded the research that caused the pandemic,” Bhattacharya said.
And the smears continue. Referencing the false “dark money” charges by Yamey and Gorski, Lucky Tran, director of communications for Columbia University Irving Medical Center, posted a denunciation of Bhattacharya on the social media platform Bluesky after Trump nominated him. “Bhattacharya has spread disinformation on COVID, fought against lifesaving measures including vaccines, masks, and social distancing, and is backed by dark money groups pushing corporate interests.”
RealClearInvestigations contacted Columbia’s vice president of communications, Vanita Gowda, to ask if Lucky Tran’s post was Columbia’s official position on Trump’s NIH choice. Gowda was also asked whether the university could provide any evidence that Bhattacharya was funded by “dark money.” Gowda did not respond to multiple requests to explain these charges.
USAID’s criminal investigation began with subpoenas sent to several concerned parties. Duke University’s Yamey did not respond to repeated inquires on whether he had received a subpoeana. .
“I am honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump’s nomination of me to be the next @NIH director,” Bhattacharya posted on X. “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”
Redfield said that Collins, Fauci, and other critics should apologize to Bhattacharya for the years of harassment and actions that were both wrong and unprofessional. “If you survive these attacks, and you have a resurrection, you do very well,” Redfield said. “You now have a reputation for substance and standing up for what you believe is true. Not everyone has that. I’m pretty confident he’ll do well, move forward, and do the right thing.”
Editor's note: In 2023, Dr. Bhattacharya was named the first recipient of the Samizdat Prize, an annual award sponsored by the RealClear Media Fund to recognize standout foes of censorship.
Phil Kerpen says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya's background is uniquely suited to the challenges that NIH faces.
Dr. Jay Will Restore Credibility and Integrity to the NIH
By Phil Kerpen - March 05, 2025The Nationals Institutes for Health, once the crown jewel of the American medical research system, fell into well-earned disrepute in the COVID era.
Disgraced former director Francis Collins frankly confessed: "If you're a public health person and you're trying to make a decision... you attach infinite value to stopping the disease... You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered."
Consider that the NIH hitting rock bottom.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's nominee to take the helm at NIH, has his confirmation hearing today before the Senate HELP Committee. I expect him to shine.
There is poetic justice in this selection, because Dr. Jay (as he is affectionately known by his friends and supporters) was targeted by Collins for his role in co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected the Collins "zero value" approach in favor of a traditional public health paradigm of protecting the vulnerable to the extent possible while minimizing overreactions and keeping society well-functioning.
Early on, Dr. Jay also brought critical data to the pandemic debate by conducting serological surveys designed to improve estimates of morbidity and mortality and dispel undue fears based on miscalibrated computer models. On one of the most important aspects of lockdown - the school closures Dr. Collins cheered while Dr. Jay opposed - we are still grappling with the devastating consequences of society following Collins.
But despite the fact that prolonged lockdowns and school closures were horribly damaging - and were never part of pandemic plans -- Dr. Jay was smeared by Collins as a "fringe epidemiologist," against whom Collins directed what he described as a "devastating takedown" via a cabal of "mainstream" experts, the media, and after Biden was elected, an official censorship regime.
Dr. Jay co-authored a key amicus brief with my organization that helped defeat Biden's vaccine mandates at the Supreme Court and he has been a plaintiff in First Amendment litigation against the Biden censorship regime. He testified as an expert witness against forced child-masking, a practice that never had any strong evidentiary basis but nonetheless disrupted years of schooling even after closures eased.
Most remarkably, despite being the target of endless personal smears and attacks, Dr. Jay stayed calm and focused on data and evidence, almost never responding in-kind to the ad hominem attacks furiously lobbed at him. He understands that science is a process of accumulating and integrating evidence, openly and from a wide array of sources, not of centralized authorities issuing proclamations and dictates.
Dr. Jay's background is also uniquely suited to the challenges that NIH faces. He is one of the only scholars to be published in both top medical and economics journals, and his expertise in health economics assures that the Collins "infinite value" blunder will not only be avoided but that due consideration to trade-offs will be woven into the fabric of the agency's reforms. He has impeccable teaching credentials and is clearly a gifted public communicator.
Dr. Jay is a reliable, steady hand that will restore credibility and transparency to NIH outputs, speed up grant review timelines, support diverse scientific views and speech, and tackle our country's chronic disease epidemic.
One of the greatest risks to the health of Americans and all people is the risk of more lockdowns to combat viruses or climate change. A smart, principled, data-driven leader like Dr. Jay at NIH is perhaps our best protection from that happening.
In better times Dr. Jay would be confirmed unanimously; I hope that even in our divided country he will receive well-deserved bipartisan support.
Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
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