Under hostile questions from the senators of both parties, President Jay Batacharya, the candidate for President Trump, who leads President Trump's National Institutes of Health, said on Wednesday that the vaccine “is not causing autism.”
The hearing became the battlefield for early actions on the Trump administration's health, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s unwillingness to explicitly recommend vaccinations during the midst of a fatal measles outbreak in West Texas.
“I fully support my children being vaccinated due to illnesses like measles,” said Dr. Batacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. But to alleviate skeptical parents, he said scientists should do more research into autism and vaccines. The positions pointed to by the senators of both parties were at odds with extensive evidence that showed no connection between them.
If confirmed, Dr. Bhatacharya will lead the world's largest funder for biomedical research, a vast institution with a budget of $48 billion, 27 independent institutions and the centre that has long been praised by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
However, recently, the NIH has been shaken by the Trump administration's move that blocked a critical portion of the grant-making device, resulting in the firing of around 1,200 employees. With other lapses and proposed changes to NIH funding, the administration's actions rattle the biomedical research industry. It drives advances in medicine and generates tens of thousands of dollars of economic activity each year.
Hours before the hearing Wednesday, the government's Efficiency Department, a cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, trumpeted the cancellation of the NIH grant.
Asked about the blockage to NIH fundraising during the hearing, Dr. Bhatacharya repeatedly avoided it, merely ensuring that scientists had the resources they needed. He vowed to direct funding towards the causes of chronic illness, a priority for Mr. Kennedy, and to create a “culture of objection” that encourages the challenge of general views.
He also scrutinised the findings that were not born from subsequent research, funding the most innovative research, and committed to creating “great advancements” rather than “small progressive progress.”
But it was the halt of NIH funding and the resistance of Dr. Bhatacharya to weigh his vague answers to the vaccine that sparked the rage of Democrats and some Republicans.
In one controversial exchange, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican chairman of the committee, lamented that he did not say that the question of whether Dr. Bhattacharya would cause autism has been resolved.
“It's been thoroughly researched,” said Cassidy, a vaccination doctor and fierce supporter. “The more you pretend, the more problems you develop, the more likely your children will die from a vaccine-preventable disease.”
Dr. Bhatacharya responded that as long as American parents are concerned enough to not vaccinate their children, more research is needed. “My trend is to give people good data,” he said.
In response, Cassidy suggested that there was already good data and that “valuable limited taxpayer dollars” could not be dedicated to all the fringe theory at the end.
“There are people who oppose the world's roundness,” he said. “People still think Elvis is alive.”
Dr. Bhattacharya did not say whether he supported the Trump administration's NIH funding changes or whether he told the senators they had nothing to do with them. That didn't stop Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, from attacking the changes, including limiting the overhead cost cap. The judge temporarily blocked the proposal.
“It makes no sense to impose this optional cap at all,” Collins said. “This is against the law.”
Dr. Bhatacharya, with a medical degree and professor of medicine but not practiced, fell into the spotlight in October 2020 when he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown paper. They advocated “focused protection.” This is a strategy to protect the elderly and vulnerable people, while spreading the virus among younger, healthier people.
Many scientists have rebutted that walking through a risky population from other parts of society is a dream dream.
National medical leaders, including Dr. Francis S. Collins, who retired last week, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who was then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denounced the plan. Calling Dr. Bhatacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists,” Dr. Collins wrote in an email that “a quick and devastating takedown of the facility is needed.”
Dr. Bhatacharya told the senator on Wednesday that he was “a subject to censorship due to the actions of the Biden administration.” Previous NIH officials said they “oversidated a culture of concealment, obfuscation and lack of tolerance towards ideas that differ from theirs.”
However, the defenders of Dr. Bhatacharya's “scientific opposition” sometimes clashed with his own actions. He sat on the Biosafety board of directors until he resigned late last year. This is a group that has indicted “being responsible for covering up” the cause of Covid. Advocates of the theory that Covid leaked out of the lab often use that designation to refer to scientists who take different views.
On Wednesday, Dr. Bhatacharya walked again to the issue of leaks in the laboratory. Also, whether NIH-funded research at the Institute of Virology in China led to one.
There is no direct evidence that the coronavirus is running away from the lab. Instead, many published scientific studies have pointed to the virus that appears in the marketplace of Uhan in China, where wildlife was being sold illegally.
But Dr Bhatacharya said the NIH-supported research “may have caused a pandemic.” (The CIA has recently shaking back on the lab leak theory, but there was no new intelligence behind that shift, but the agency has not produced any direct evidence.) And Dr. Bhatacharya has raised questions about the future of American research on dangerous viruses.
There has been a long time energising about which types of research constitute such risks and whether limiting that study would reduce the likelihood of another pandemic or have prepared one instead.
Several senators noted that Dr. Bhatacharya had received NIH funds for his work in the past. Researchers say some of the work is very likely to violate the Trump administration's recent crackdown on certain types of science. The administration, for example, targets research related to climate science, which is exposed to diversity, equity and inclusion.
In the ongoing project, Dr. Batacharya and several collaborators proposed using data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study, a longitudinal study of older Mexicans, to investigate how climate change and workplace environmental exposures are related to Alzheimer's Disease disparities.
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