Jay Bhattacharya

As the new head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is now in charge of disbursing $35 billion a year, the largest amount of funding for biomedical research in the world. That is, if he continues the NIH’s support of the research that has been behind many medical breakthroughs, including mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Bhattacharya emerged during the pandemic as a critic of the government and its response, and gained notoriety for claiming that federal health officials were assessing the risk of the pandemic all wrong. He argued that masking and lockdowns were misguided policies fueled by a skewed analysis of only the most severe COVID-19 cases among people who were hospitalized or died. As the new head of NIH, it’s likely similar questioning of how data is interpreted will permeate the types of grants the Institutes will fund; the day after he was confirmed as NIH’s new director, according to some NIH employees, they received an email asking for a comprehensive list of contracts exhibiting censorship and misinformation, listing the dangers of COVID-19 and not wearing masks as examples.