We are only one week into Trump’s second term and the new administration is already delivering on their promise to undermine or dismantle large swaths of the federal government. In the last few days, federal science and health agencies have been ordered to halt all external communications. This unprecedented and allegedly temporary measure has prevented the CDC from releasing its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for the first time in sixty years; indefinitely canceled travel, meetings, and study sections at the NIH, effectively freezing the process which leads to the allocation of extramural research funds to the more than 2,500 institutions and 300,000 people who depend on them; effectively halted intramural research — research done at the NIH itself by its 20,000 employees — as researchers have been prevented from purchasing new supplies, a situation which any bench scientist reading this will recognize as a slow-moving catastrophe for research progress.
Unfortunately, one Stanford researcher who has never spent any meaningful time at the bench is unlikely to grasp how irresponsible and damaging this pause will be for American science even if it does prove to be short-lived: Professor Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s hand-picked nominee to lead the most impactful biomedical research institution on Earth. Despite attending Stanford for his M.D, Bhattacharya never completed residency — a period of intensive clinical training required to practice medicine as an independent physician in the U.S. Instead, he chose to continue applying the skills he learned during his Ph.D. in economics as a health economics and policy researcher. He has been working at Stanford ever since.
Bhattacharya rose to infamy in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the lead architects of the Santa Clara seroprevalence study, which originally claimed that the fatality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than initially estimated in the spring 2020. I first became acquainted with Bhattacharya as a volunteer in the seroprevalence study’s “lab” (i.e., the ballroom of the Palo Alto Sheraton) when he strutted into the room on the last day of the study, glanced at a handful of positive results stuffed into a glove box tallied against hundreds of negative results and declared “there’s definitely signal here.” That was not the conclusion I had come to by the end of that weekend, nor was it the broader scientific community’s as the study’s preprint was roundly criticized for inaccurately estimating the number of false positives the test we used could have plausibly produced and for failing to recruit a genuinely random sample of the Santa Clara population.
Additional reporting subsequently revealed that Bhattacharya failed to disclose that the study now being used to argue that pandemic precautions ought to be lifted was secretly funded by a billionaire airline owner who corresponded with Bhattacharya and the other lead authors on study design while the study was ongoing. A whistleblower complaint sent to Stanford detailed extensive ethical concerns regarding the premature reporting of results with an antibody test that failed to be validated in the hands of other Stanford researchers and the pre-meditated coordination of the preprint and various media appearances and press releases by Bhattacharya and his collaborator, Professor John Ioannidis, preaching the “good news” of the study’s unsupported conclusions. I and many of the students who volunteered for his study were gutted that our efforts had been exploited in someone else’s unscientific political project. I live with the guilt and accept the responsibility of the role I played in it.
Nevertheless, Bhattacharya’s ascent continued unabated as he became an increasingly central figure on the right-wing of the pandemic political culture war, frequently appearing on Fox news or conservative podcasts as an opponent of pandemic emergency measures despite once acknowledging the role of interventions aimed at minimizing the spread of infections in lowering pandemic morbidity and mortality. He served as an expert witness in court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging pandemic mitigation measures, although his testimony was frequently ignored by judges given his tendency for deliberately misinterpreting the scientific literature. Even though several years have passed since his entry into the limelight, Professor Bhattacharya remains laser-focused on grinding his axe against accepted medical science. Just this week, an Alberta government task-force published a 269-page report calling for a halt to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and defending the use of ivermectin for treating COVID-19 based on a pandemic data review by a panel containing — you guessed it — Jay Bhattacharya.
Bhattacharya spent much of last year failing upwards on the coattails of Republican presidential hopefuls, first appearing at Ron DeSantis’ campaign kickoff after dutifully serving a year on Florida’s “Public Health Integrity Committee” alongside AIDS denialist Bret Weinstein before joining AIDS denialist’s RFK Jr.’s short-lived campaign (I am not accusing Bhattacharya of being an AIDS denialist; I am accusing him of being someone who doesn’t care that his comrades and patrons are) until finally landing a nomination he has long coveted from Trump, the man he secretly advised during his first term to lift pandemic restrictions and pursue maximal levels of infections in the population in order to achieve herd immunity months before a single person would be vaccinated.
Since receiving the nomination, Bhattacharya has signaled that he would consider tying NIH funding to poorly-defined “academic freedom” metrics, providing the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s rankings as an example (Stanford scores very poorly here, coming in at 218th in the nation). He has not shied away from calling for defunding work he has a personal grievance against; for example, by advocating for federal funding to be pulled from the now defunct Stanford Internet Observatory whose reputation was unfairly smeared by Bhattacharya’s enormous platform to the point that the center’s tech manager was told by her bosses not to publicly refute his claims, presaging the literal gagging of federal scientific agencies by Bhattacharya’s political patrons.
I fear that as NIH director, Bhattacharya would interpret “academic freedom” with the same laxity as he does “lockdowns”, a term he has used to apply to anything from “panic-mongering” online to employer-mandated vaccination for healthcare staff (“vaccine segregation” or “lockdown-by-stealth”, in his words). Or, perhaps more frightening is the possibility that it will become another term weaponized to defund ideologically inconvenient research or programs in much the same way that “DEI” has; indeed, the NIH’s diversity programs have already disappeared from their webpages, and the future of funding aimed at increasing the diversity of the biomedical research workforce — such as the F31 grant supporting graduate training and diversity supplements for early career researchers — appears grim.
The highest levels of Stanford’s administration have already signaled that there is likely to be little appetite for an institutional disavowal of Bhattacharya’s ascension to the NIH directorship — and I get it, for he is a petty man being recruited into a highly vindictive administration. When I did as much as ask him to explain why he thought Dr. Fauci asking people to be vaccinated was more dangerous than Joe Rogan using racial slurs on his podcast, he challenged me to a livestream debate for his hundreds of thousands of followers, who subsequently drowned my DMs in slurs.
That said, this is the moment for courage — while there is still a chance Bhattacharya’s ascension can be prevented. I urge every member of our community, faculty and students alike, to take every action to let their senators and the nation know that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is not only wholly unqualified for the role for which he has been nominated, but that he has also demonstrated that he is willing to abandon scientific rigor and professional credibility for the sake of his ideological aims and personal ambition. Stanford, in particular, owes this debt to the country as Bhattacharya has traded on the prestige of our institution in his quest for administrative power and many of its faculty enabled him to launder his political organizing as serious academic work. We must do what we can to prevent him from hijacking the most important biomedical research institution in the country, arguably the world, for political ends.
Santiago E. Sanchez is a 6th year joint M.D. and Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford Medical School and an interdisciplinary graduate Fellow of the Sarafan Chem-H institute.
This article was updated to reflect the accurate name of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.