Amid confusion about cuts affecting the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for NIH director, said on Wednesday that he is committed to ensuring that scientists at the NIH and those who receive NIH grants have the funding to do their work ― but he was vague on how he would accomplish that.

During his confirmation hearing before the US Senate, Bhattacharya, who is a health economist at Stanford University in California, also seemed to distance himself from the recent turmoil at the agency. Grant processing has largely ground to a halt, and roughly 1,200 of the NIH’s 20,000 staff members were fired in mid-February. “I wasn’t involved in the personnel decisions to date,” he said, when asked about the firings. But he did not commit to rehiring those who have lost their jobs.

“I thought that he came across as very reasonable,” said Carole LaBonne, a stem-cell biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The exception, she said, was Bhattacharya’s discussion of COVID-19 ― a topic that has divided him from many scientists because of his views on lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccines.

“What I was most disturbed by during the hearing was that the topic of basic science didn’t come up,” LaBonne added. That omission led her to worry that Bhattacharya does not understand its importance, she said.

Tumultuous times

If confirmed, Bhattacharya will helm an agency with a budget of roughly US$47 billion, making it the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research.

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But since Trump, a Republican, took office for the second timein January, there has been a sharp decline in new research grants awarded, leaving many scientists in limbo. Trump officials have also used procedural manoeuvres to prevent grant-review meetings from taking place, and the agency announced on 7 February that research ‘indirect cost’ funding, which is key to the functioning of universities across the country, would be capped, effective immediately. Courts have put many of these measures on hold.

Bhattacharya gained public prominence after co-authoring an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. Published in October 2020, it argued against COVID-19 lockdowns and in favour of normality to allow ‘herd immunity’ to take hold ― a proposal that was knocked down by numerous scientists and NIH officials. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH at the time, told television broadcaster Fox News in 2021 that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy”. Bhattacharya also opposed vaccine and mask mandates.

Fresh priorities

At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya laid out his five priorities for the NIH: chronic disease research, research reproducibility, encouraging a culture of “scientific dissent”, funding cutting-edge research and regulating “risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic”.

Bhattacharya said that he would make sure that all scientists at the NIH and all those supported by the NIH “have the resources they need to do their research”. Asked whether he would immediately restart grant-review meetings, he responded, “Absolutely. My job would be to ensure that those fundamental scientific meetings and other activities happen.” He also affirmed the need for NIH funding to address the health needs of “minority populations” and for long COVID research.

But he didn’t commit explicitly to allowing new grants to start flowing again, or to rehiring NIH employees who were fired. Both Democratic and Republican senators brought up the 15% indirect-cost cap that the NIH attempted to impose on universities. Bhattacharya agreed that these funds pay for important things. But he also said that “there’s a lot of distrust” about how that money is spent, and he endorsed audits of indirect-cost spending.

Vaccine messaging

Bhattacharya spoke carefully when discussing infectious disease: if he is confirmed, his future boss will be Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, who has a long history of anti-vaccine activism. When asked about Kennedy’s statement at an anti-vaccine conference in 2023 that the NIH should give infectious-disease science “a break for about eight years,” Bhattacharya responded that Kennedy is “fully committed” to addressing the nation’s health needs, “including infectious disease”.

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