Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Is Ready for His Close Up

Confirmation Hearings for the NIH Nominee Begin March 5

By Adam Garrie, Breaking News Reporter, The Kennedy Beacon

President Trump's nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has received a great deal of press attention due to Bhattacharya’s role as a leading critic of the Covid-era policies of former NIH director, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

On March 5, 2025, Bhattacharya will testify before the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee beginning at 10 a.m.

The committee then has the opportunity to recommend Bhattacharya for a full vote on the Senate floor. If a simple majority of senators vote to confirm him, Dr. Bhattacharya will become Director of the NIH.

Who is Jay Bhattacharya?

Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine and economics at Stanford University. He is best known for advocating for policies that address income inequality while improving public health for all.

Bhattacharya’s research has drawn causal connections between a lack of economic opportunity and health crises. He has proposed holistic approaches to public health in which improving the economic welfare of traditionally disadvantaged communities becomes a path toward positive social change.

“PH [public health] is about everyone,” Bhattacharya has said. “Any PH policy must first and foremost protect society's most vulnerable, including children, low-income families, persons with disabilities and the elderly. It should never shift the burden of disease from the affluent to the less affluent.”

During Covid, Bhattacharya was a vocal critic of lockdowns.

In addition to questioning the ethics of lockdowns, he said they would only prolong the epidemic by retarding the development of community-derived natural immunity.

During the pandemic, Bhattacharya became one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by multiple doctors and public health officials. It condemned politically-motivated lockdowns, calling them medically ineffective and socially damaging.

Bhattacharya’s research into a wide array of public health issues further led him to conclude that the mRNA Covid vaccines could risk myocarditis, a sometimes deadly inflammation of the heart muscle. . He also said young men who took the mRNA vaccine were particularly vulnerable to the Covid shot, two narratives that ran directly counter to the official lines coming from the White House and legacy media. Bhattacharya further said that the lack of honesty among public health officials during the pandemic contributed to the erosion of public trust in the scientific community.

With over 135 articles published in peer-reviewed journals on topics ranging from preventative medicine to cutting the cost of healthcare for America’s most vulnerable, Bhattacharya brings a formidable resume to the NIH. If confirmed by the senate, he would represent a radical departure from the “I am the science” approach of Fauci and others.

What are people saying?

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, the director of Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, welcomed Bhattacharya’s nomination. “If I was President, I would have picked Jay for this role,” Kheriaty said. He is not only a brilliant and brave scientist, he is a man of enormous integrity, fundamental decency, and sincere humility — one of the finest people I know.”

When President Trump first announced Bhattacharya as his nominee, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. welcomed the news. “I'm so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment,” he said. “Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine.”

Following his nomination, Bhattacharya thanked the president, saying, “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”

What is the NIH?

The NIH is one of the largest public health agencies in the U.S, undertaking research on both major and novel diseases. It also funds numerous studies at universities and private laboratories and conducts clinical trials of new pharmaceutical products.

Controversially, under Fauci, the NIH invested millions of dollars in so-called gain-of-function research – research that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his book The Wuhan Cover-Up, investigated and exposed. Kennedy concluded that the NIH was, in certain labs, developing bioweapons under the guise of public health.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the former director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) condemned gain-of-function research, saying no medicine has ever been successfully developed through the process.

If Dr. Bhattacharya is confirmed, Secretary Kennedy will have an opportunity to work in concert with him to dramatically change the country’s approach to public health – bringing, for one, what Kennedy calls ‘radical transparency’ to the American people by allowing a freer flow of hard scientific data to the public.