Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is now also the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an unusual arrangement that has drawn swift criticism from researchers and public health experts.
Bhattacharya’s new role comes amid a leadership shakeup in the Department of Health and Human Services under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also marks the third leader for the beleaguered public health agency under Kennedy.
Susan Monarez, a microbiologist and long-time federal health official, held the position of acting director before becoming the first Senate-confirmed CDC director at the end of July. But she was in the role just shy of a month before Kennedy ousted her for—according to Monarez—refusing to rubber-stamp changes to vaccine recommendations made by Kennedy’s hand-picked advisors, who are overwhelmingly anti-vaccine themselves.
Jim O’Neill was then named acting director. At the time, O’Neill was the deputy secretary of HHS but had previously worked as a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur who became a close ally of Peter Thiel. As acting director of the CDC, he signed off on a dramatic overhaul of the CDC’s childhood vaccine recommendations.
Now, amid Kennedy’s shake-up, O’Neill is out of the CDC and, according to media reports, will be nominated to run the National Science Foundation, which is currently without a director or deputy director. As a health economist with a medical degree, Bhattacharya has more qualifications to temporarily run the CDC than O’Neill, but researchers and public health experts were quick to blast his apparent lack of leadership skills.
Under Bhattacharya’s watch, the NIH terminated or froze hundreds of millions of dollars for research grants, including $561 million in grants to research the four leading causes of death in America, according to a Senate report released earlier this month. At least 304 clinical trials were defunded. Of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, 16 are currently without directors, an unprecedented number of vacancies.