Action Item! Demand Congress Oppose Jay Bhattacharya as Director of NIH
Urgent! Oppose Jay Bhattacharya Nomination as Director of NIH before US Senate HELP Committee Hearing on March 5, 2025
Jayanta Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, nominated for Director of the National Institutes of Health by the Trump administration, supports nationwide spread of infectious disease such as COVID-19 and potentially other infectious diseases. His approach to public health relies solely on natural infection-induced immunity, putting millions of lives at risk from infectious diseases. The US Senate HELP Committee will have a confirmation hearing on his nomination on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. We need your voice opposing this candidate as the potential next director of America’s leading agency in medical and health sciences research. We must ask Senators to oppose this nominee in order to protect the future of medicine and health sciences.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a health economist with a medical degree but no further medical training or practice. He endorsed and promoted mass COVID-19 infections to pursue an impossible to achieve infection-driven herd immunity. His policies such as mass infections relying on natural immunity would have led to even more illness, Long COVID, and deaths across the US. His extraordinarily wrong views on the pandemic include predicting, even late in 2020, that US COVID deaths would not reach 50,000, and assuring Floridians in mid-2021 that enough had been vaccinated – though far more have died since then. Videos from as recent as 2024 continue to show him advocate ineffective treatments for COVID-19 such as ivermectin, opposing layered protections against COVID-19, and belittling the value of important tools such as masking and vaccines.
Instead of focusing on advancing the medical sciences, Bhattacharya wants to intertwine politics and policies at NIH and prioritize funding based on academic freedom instead of innovative and impactful medical and health sciences research. If confirmed as the director of NIH, he will continue to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 and potentially other infectious diseases, and steer NIH towards investment in ineffective treatments for diseases such as focusing on seroprevalence studies. Ultimately, this will harm and reverse the already monumental discoveries at NIH. He will likely assist Secretary Kennedy’s current efforts to delay and even prevent the development of effective therapeutics for infectious diseases, including COVID-19 – and for Long COVID. Finally, there is no reason to think he will fight this administration’s attacks on NIH staffing and cuts in research funding. If selected as NIH director, he will likely slow and possibly reverse advancements in the medical and health sciences.
You can submit a letter to your Senators (and House members, who can urge Senate “No” votes), via our Action Network or speak with or send a message to your senators using their contact information. We need to push both Democratic and Republican senators to vote NO. You are welcome to edit the letter as you wish.
We recommend personalizing your letter if you have time, ideally starting with a sentence or two about why and how this nominee matters to you or could impact you, your loved ones, and/or your community. Aim to keep your letter under 2000 characters, including spaces.
Especially for those living in Alaska (Murkowski), Alabama (Tuberville), Florida (Moody) Indiana (Banks), Kansas (Marshall), Kentucky (Paul), Louisiana (Cassidy), Maine (Collins), Missouri (Hawley), Ohio (Husted) Oklahoma (Mullin), or South Carolina (Scott). Your senator has a major voice in this nomination process and the senators mentioned above are members of the HELP committee that have the initial decision on the progression of this nomination. Please call their office using the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and express your opposition.
Letter Template
Dear Representative:
As your constituent, I urge you to oppose the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the National Institutes of Health. I have many grave concerns with him in this role. This is a bipartisan issue.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist who has not practiced medicine despite his degree, lacks the knowledge required to lead America’s unparalleled source of medical sciences research. Nor does he have the management expertise needed to oversee NIH’s complex array of agencies and billions in funding. Ultimately, he will stifle advancements in research and progress in the medical sciences because he elevates academic freedom over scientific soundness.
His judgment and analyses have been extraordinarily wrong on vital public health matters of this country and the world. He based policy recommendations even in late 2020 on his prediction that US COVID deaths would not reach 50,000, a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million toll to date. For example, he assured Florida residents in mid-2021 that enough had already gotten COVID vaccines -- yet most Florida COVID deaths were still to come. He ignores the millions of Americans developing Long COVID and many more worldwide
He has continually deceived the public on important health information by promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines and endorsing ineffective medicines for COVID-19. His promotion of pseudoscience makes him inappropriate for this crucial role and would undermine NIH’s decades of leadership and breakthroughs in health research.
I respectfully ask you to oppose his nomination as Director of NIH. We need someone who will advance science and medicine with science-based approaches and not an economist who leads campaigns to deceive the public with false information.
Thank you for your consideration.