In his first week leading two of the nation’s health agencies, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been met with praise and gratitude from federal employees — an unexpected reception for a scientist who spent much of the last few years facing scorn from most other public health experts.
Dr. Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was last week named the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A medical economist and former Stanford University professor, he replaced Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley executive with no medical training.
Like most officials in the Trump administration, Dr. Bhattacharya was staunchly opposed to mandates for Covid vaccines, but unlike many, he has not questioned the safety of childhood vaccines.
In meetings with C.D.C. staff this week, Dr. Bhattacharya offered to publicly endorse immunizations in general and the measles vaccine in particular; extolled the importance of prevention efforts against H.I.V.; and promised to try to extend remote work accommodations, according to several C.D.C. employees with knowledge of the discussions. (The employees asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from the Trump administration.)
Dr. Bhattacharya, too, seemed pleased with his foray into the agency. He did not respond to a request for comment. But in the second agencywide email he has sent in five days, he said, “Quite candidly, I am even more excited to take on this role now than I was when I began.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the C.D.C., said Dr. Bhattacharya “is focused on strengthening infectious disease prevention and response, promoting evidence-based science and restoring public trust in the agency.”
Dr. Bhattacharya’s comments on vaccines were the biggest cause for hope among some agency staff members who have felt stymied by the vaccine skepticism of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials, including President Trump.
At a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, parried questions on whether parents should immunize their children against measles, saying they should consult their doctor.
Mr. Kennedy directed agency staff members to alter the C.D.C. website to say that there was not enough evidence to claim that vaccines did not cause autism, despite decades of studies dismissing such a link. He and his appointees have also rescinded recommendations for several childhood vaccines, reducing the number of diseases that children should be routinely immunized against to 11 from 17.
The White House is said to be pivoting away from focusing on vaccines and toward healthy food ahead of the midterm elections. As acting director, Mr. O’Neill authorized the newly truncated childhood vaccination schedule; he has been nominated to lead the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Ralph Abraham, the agency’s principal deputy director, stepped down within a couple of hours of Dr. Bhattacharya’s arrival at the C.D.C. campus on Monday. It’s unclear if the two events were related.
Some C.D.C. employees noted that Dr. Bhattacharya was among the authors of the memo that had cut down the vaccination schedule, and that the agency still had a number of political appointees who share Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines.
But others said that after a year of being buffeted by the Trump administration’s moves, they were buoyed by Dr. Bhattacharya’s mere presence at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta and his willingness to meet with the staff. The C.D.C. has been without a permanent director for more than a year, and Mr. O’Neill led the agency from Washington, D.C.
Few employees had high hopes for Dr. Bhattacharya when he was appointed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was a fierce critic of the C.D.C., saying the agency had “peddled pseudoscience” in promoting the use of face masks to contain the virus.
In 2021, he criticized Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the lead scientist on the nation’s Covid response, for guiding public health policies while also leading the N.I.H.’s infectious disease institute. As director of both the N.I.H. and the C.D.C., Dr. Bhattacharya is now in that same position.
He was also one of the architects of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for allowing the coronavirus to spread naturally among younger people to achieve herd immunity, directly contradicting the C.D.C.’s recommendations for preventing infections.
The tone in Dr. Bhattacharya’s first email to the agency’s staff, on Friday, was strikingly different. The loss of trust in the C.D.C. because of policy decisions during the pandemic “is not a repudiation of your hard work,” he told them. “Your work over recent years has been heroic, courageous and essential.”
On vaccinations, Dr. Bhattacharya has diverged from Mr. Kennedy’s more equivocal stance. Mr. Kennedy has sometimes supported the use of the measles vaccine while simultaneously deriding it, falsely saying that the shot can be fatal, contains fetal debris and loses effectiveness rapidly.
In a Senate hearing this month, Dr. Bhattacharya was clearer: “I think the best way to address the measles epidemic in this country is by vaccinating your children for measles.”
In meetings at the C.D.C. this week, he offered to publicly encourage parents to immunize their children against the measles vaccine. He said he would try to increase the 80-hour cap on telework by C.D.C. employees to the 240 hours per year afforded to the N.I.H. staff.
He also quickly obtained approval for a stalled C.D.C. effort to hold its annual gathering of Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, the so-called disease detectives who form the backbone of the agency’s outbreak response.
But even with the best of intentions, Dr. Bhattacharya may not be able to accomplish much as a part-time leader of the agency, said Dr. Debra Houry, who served as C.D.C.’s chief medical officer until she resigned in August.
“With so many senior career leaders gone, there is limited experience and continuity, especially in the office of the director, which is critically important for operations across any administration,” she said. “I hope that C.D.C. will have permanent leadership instead of continued rotating leaders.”
Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health for The Times, with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics and the public health agencies that try to manage them.
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