National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya will also temporarily become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while the Trump administration looks for a permanent director. Bhattacharya is the third leader of the CDC during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Bhattacharya will oversee the CDC while remaining director of the NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired then-CDC Director Susan Monarez last summer, less than a month after the Senate confirmed her for the job. Monarez, a longtime government scientist, later testified before a Senate committee that her dismissal came after she refused to sign off on Kennedy’s requested changes to the childhood vaccination schedule without data to back them up.
Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a former investor, had been serving as the acting CDC director before his reported departure last week. At a recent Senate hearing, Bhattacharya said childhood measles vaccination was “the best way to address the measles epidemic in this country” and testified that he had seen no evidence linking any single vaccine to autism. Bhattacharya is a health economist who, as a Stanford University professor, was an outspoken critic of the government’s COVID-19 shutdowns and vaccine policies.
Trump administration officials said they plan to find a permanent CDC director, a position that requires Senate confirmation.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/bhattacharya-nih-cdc-trump-administration-a06965