Jay Bhattacharya, nominee as NIH director, toes the party line in the Senate

The most telling signal from Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing as nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday lay in what he would not say. He would not say he’d restore funding to grants on LGBTQ issues canceled by the Trump administration — even as he said he didn’t think ideology should determine the direction of science. He would not say that there’s been enough research about the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism, even as a Republican senator declared it would be “pissing away money” on a question that has been extensively studied already. He would not say that he would object if President Trump gave him illegal directives, even as he vowed to follow the law. 

The evasiveness is not expected to matter much when it comes to whether he’ll be confirmed. He’s considered a shoo-in. Bhattacharya is a wonky-economist-turned-Covid-firebrand, enough of the former to appeal to some academics, enough of the latter to appeal to Trump loyalists suspicious of scientific expertise. He spent his hearing before the Senate health committee tiptoeing across that same tightrope, committing to supporting NIH science while refusing to acknowledge harm that liberals — and even some conservatives — say his future bosses have already done to it. 

A number of times, he invoked public distrust in science to avoid directly answering questions that might put him at odds with Trump or health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That was why he would not rule out spending additional money on potentially redundant research on vaccines and autism. It was also why he wanted to audit universities on how they spend “indirect costs” — an institutional tip, of sorts, on top of the amount NIH grants directly to researchers, to help with overhead expenses like keeping lab buildings lit.