The Senate voted along party lines Tuesday to confirm Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health. The vote was 53-47.
As director, Bhattacharya would oversee the $48.6 billion agency, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, has been a vocal critic of the NIH.
He gained attention as a co-author and signer of The Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter from scientists issued in October 2020 that expressed concern with restrictive COVID-19 policies and called for a more targeted approach.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee advanced his nomination on party lines earlier this month. The Senate voted to end debate on his nomination earlier Tuesday on a 53-46 party line vote.
During his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya said he would prioritize rebuilding trust in science, increasing overall transparency and seeking new solutions to combat chronic disease.
At that hearing, Democrats criticized the administration’s freezing of NIH grants and workforce reductions, but Bhattacharya deflected, saying he would reexamine those issues after his confirmation.
But he also stopped short of condemning those cuts and argued he doesn’t believe that President Donald Trump intends to slow down science, even though the agency has been criticized for canceling meetings of committees that recommend projects NIH should fund.
“I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH and the scientists that the NIH supports have the resources they need to meet the mission of the NIH, which is to make America do research to make America healthy,” he said then.