Senators question NIH nominee Bhattacharya about funding cuts

Key takeaways:

• Senators from both parties were concerned about a proposed 15% cap on indirect costs.
• Bhattacharya has been nominated to be the next director of the NIH.

Senators questioned Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, about proposed NIH cuts to biomedical research, the safety of vaccines, and government transparency during his nomination hearing Wednesday to be the next director of the NIH.

President Donald J. Trump has tapped the Stanford University professor of health policy to lead the NIH.

Bhattacharya told members of the Senate’s Heath, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that as NIH director he would focus on addressing chronic diseases, echoing what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during his confirmation hearings. Bhattacharya also said he would foster an environment of free speech — including dissent — within the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

Key moments

• Senators from both parties expressed concerns about the NIH’s plan to cap indirect costs for research at 15%. Many institutions have indirect cost rates far higher than that, including Stanford, which Bhattacharya said had a rate of 55% last year. Experts have told Healio that the cuts could disrupt trials and force labs to lay off workers or close entirely. A federal judge temporarily blocked the proposed cuts after 22 state attorneys general filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, NIH and HHS.
• Maine Republican Susan Collins said the one-size-fits-all approach to the proposed cuts was “ill-conceived” and “arbitrary,” and asked what Bhattacharya would do to rectify the situation. He said he was committed to following the law, but also noted there is a lack of trust among the public about how institutions are spending tax money. He said institutions should strive to be more transparent about how the money is spent.
• Washington Democrat Patty Murray asked about Bhattacharya’s plan for his first day as NIH director and whether he would make more staffing cuts. He said he has no intention to cut any NIH staff and plans to assess the staffing situation on his first day. “If confirmed as NIH director, I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH and the scientists that the NIH supports have the resources need to meet the mission of the NIH, which is to make America healthy,” Bhattacharya said.
• Republican Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy, MD, a physician from Louisiana, asked if Bhattacharya would use NIH resources to investigate the scientifically disproven link between measles vaccination and autism. Cassidy, a vocal supporter of vaccines, noted the recent death of an unvaccinated child due to measles. Bhattacharya said he “fully” supports vaccinating children against vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. “I don’t generally believe that there is a link [between vaccines and autism] based on my reading of the literature, but what I have seen is that there’s tremendous distrust in medicine and science coming out of the [COVID-19] pandemic,” he said. Bhattacharya said more research is needed to determine why rates of autism have gone up. Cassidy said plenty of research has disproven that autism was linked to vaccines: “The more we pretend this is an issue, the more children we will have dying from vaccine-preventable diseases,” he said.
• Cassidy, who said he supported Bhattacharya’s desire to address chronic diseases, said the NIH should not use any resources to study vaccines in the context of autism. Bhattacharya replied that “the only reason” he was not “wholeheartedly” agreeing with Cassidy in the discussion of vaccines and autism is that “there are people who might disagree with me.”
• New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan asked Bhattacharya if he would follow an unlawful request from President Trump, to which he responded, “I don’t believe the president will ever ask me to break the law.”
• Josh Hawley, Republican from Missouri, brought up a paper published in 2020 about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, which stated the virus did not originate in a lab. Hawley called it a piece of propaganda that was used by the government to censor people in the scientific community. “That episode is a low point in the history of science,” Bhattacharya responded. “The top officials of the NIH abused their position to hide support for research that may have caused the pandemic.” Several studies have concluded that the virus likely originated in a seafood market in China, a conclusion also reached by WHO. The accidental introduction of the virus due to a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained support from the CIA, according to multiple outlets.

What’s next?

Cassidy gave senators until 5 p.m. ET on Thursday to submit questions for Bhattacharya.

Republicans control the Senate and have a one-seat majority on the committee. Nominees need only a simple majority to be approved by the committee or confirmed by the Senate.

Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary, MD, MPH, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, will speak in front of the committee on Thursday.

Diagnosis

Amesh A. Adalja, MD, an infectious disease, bioterrorism and emergency medicine specialist and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said the theme that struck him during the hearing was Bhattacharya’s discomfort with people disagreeing with him.

“His statement that he does not see a linkage between vaccines and autism but was tempering his voicing of that sentiment because ‘people disagree with him’ really underscores the fact that he wants to placate anti-vaccine forces — in exchange for their support — even though he knows they are wrong,” Adalja told Healio.“That’s illustrative of a major lack of integrity.”