The Senate voted on gathering lines on Tuesday to elect Jay Bhattacharya as its next chairman of the National Institutes of Health. The voting was 53-47.
The$ 48.6 billion organization, the largest public funder of biomedical research, would be under Bhattacharya’s control as director.
Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University  and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, has been a vociferous critic of the , NIH.
He gained notoriety as the co-author and signatory of The Great , Barrington Declaration, a contentious open notice from scientists published in , October 2020 , which expressed his concern with limiting COVID-19 policies and demanded a more precise approach.
His election was advanced earlier this month on party lines by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. On a 53-46 party line vote, the Senate and the House of Representatives approved to end the debate over his election before on Tuesday.
Bhattacharya stated at his confirmation hearing that he would promote restoring trust in science, increasing transparency, and developing novel ways to treat severe disease.
At the hearing, Democrats and Republicans criticized the president’s freezing of NIH, NIH, grants, and workplace reductions, but Bhattacharya deflected and promised to review those issues once he was confirmed.
He stayed away from those reductions and continued to argue that he doesn’t think President Donald Trump will slow down research, despite the fact that the organization has been criticized for halting committee meetings that committees that would support projects like NIH and NSF funded.
” I totally commit to making sure that all the experts at the , NIH , and the experts that the , NIH , helps have the tools they need to fulfill the goal of the , NIH, which is to make America would research to make America healthy,” he said at the time.
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