It looks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio will not be the only member of the Trump administration who is multitasking.
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been tapped to become the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after the exit of former head Jim O’Neill.
The move appears to be part of personnel reshuffling ahead of the midterms.
Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the National Institutes of Health, will become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention following the dismissal last week of Jim O’Neill, according to a White House official and an administration official.President Donald Trump will name O’Neill to lead the National Science Foundation, one of the officials said.O’Neill, who was also deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, was removed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as part of a broader restructuring that elevated Chris Klomp, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to chief counselor in charge of overseeing all HHS operations.Administration officials framed last week’s restructuring as a way to “muscle up” ahead of a midterm elections cycle that will focus heavily on the Trump administration’s health policy moves, including a push to lower drug prices, which Klomp has overseen.
Bhattacharya will also continue to lead the NIH until another candidate is chosen and approved by the U.S. Senate.
Bhattacharya, a former Stanford Medicine professor, gained notoriety during the Covid pandemic for his opposition to lockdowns. He has led the NIH since April.As director of the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, Bhattacharya has prioritized research on some of Kennedy’s areas of interest, including chronic disease and nutrition. He has also encouraged scientists to pursue “high-risk, high-reward ideas” and called for more replication of studies to validate their results.Dr. Bhattacharya will continue to run the N.I.H., according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to speak about personnel decisions before President Trump announces them. He will serve until Mr. Trump appoints a permanent director — a position that now requires confirmation by the Senate.
While he has headed the NIH, perhaps Bhattacharya’s most significant move has been to cut off the use of foreign subcontracts on NIH grants, forcing foreign partners to contract directly with NIH and effectively ending non‑competing continuations for existing awards that rely on foreign subawardees.
The National Institutes of Health will no longer allow American scientists to direct its funding to research partners overseas, casting doubt on the future of studies on subjects including malaria and childhood cancer.“If you can’t clearly justify why you are doing something overseas, as in it can’t possibly be done anywhere else and it benefits the American people,” Dr. Memoli wrote, “then the project should be closed down.”The new restrictions, which will apply to domestic subawards as well in the future, come amid deep reductions in N.I.H. funding and the freezing of federal grants at many top universities, along with executive orders seeking to reshape the nation’s scientific agenda.
As a reminder, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was such a foreign subawardee. It worked under EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”.
To be fair, though… we all now understand those risks in ways we could not have possibly imagined in 2019.
Bhattacharya’s energy and professionalism should serve the CDC well until another director is appointed. Hopefully, he will steady the helm as the administration sails into a politically-charged midterm-season waters.
His record suggests an emphasis on independence and accountability, which may both benefit the NIH and the CDC as they navigate constrained budgets, new approaches to science, and public expectations related to Making America Healthy Again.
Rubio should be grateful that he isn’t being asked to wear another hat!
I would also like to note O’Neill approved a major overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule and backed limiting covid vaccine recommendations to narrower risk groups rather than universal use, a break from prior CDC guidance. So I am looking forward to see what he does at the NFS.
Given O’Neill’s 2023 post, I think he has his work cut out for him.
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