The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing a contrarian who has pledged to reform scientific funding practices as the leader of the world’s premier medical research agency.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — by a party-line vote of 53 to 47 — comes as the N.I.H., with a $48 billion budget, has been battered by recent cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those cuts at a confirmation hearing in early March.
He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the writers of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.
Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence that shows no link between the two.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees the N.I.H.
The post Senate Confirms Bhattacharya to Lead N.I.H. appeared first on New York Times.
