Senate Confirms Bhattacharya and Makary to H.H.S. Posts
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Martin A. Makary as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing two critics of the medical establishment to influential posts amid a Trump administration campaign to cut spending at health agencies.
In a 56-to-44 vote, Dr. Makary was confirmed to lead an agency with broad regulatory authority over products including drugs and vaccines, putting him at the center of debates about the safety of the abortion pill and a wide range of inoculations.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — 53 to 47, on a party-line vote — places him at the head of the world’s premier medical research agency, which lately has been battered by cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.
Dr. Makary, a pancreatic cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, drew attention from the Trump team as a Fox News personality and commentator on Covid who in 2021 incorrectly predicted that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
At a confirmation hearing this month, Dr. Makary signaled that he shared Republican concerns about expanded access to the abortion pill, which the Biden administration made available for people to obtain without an in-person medical appointment.
He also expressed support for vaccines, even as he suggested that the F.D.A. needed to review the role of vaccine experts whom the agency turns to for advice.
Lawmakers have warned that staff cuts and hiring freezes by the Trump administration could weaken F.D.A. efforts to ensure the safety of the food supply.
The N.I.H., which has a $48 billion budget and funds medical research on diseases like cancer and diabetes, has also been whipsawed by layoffs and Trump administration moves to block key parts of its grant-making process and scrap some grants outright.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those decisions at a confirmation hearing in early March.
He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the authors of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.
He has also argued for reforms to scientific funding practices, including applying greater scrutiny to research findings that are not borne out by subsequent studies and directing money toward the most far-reaching and innovative research rather than incremental studies.
Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence showing no link between the two.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees both the F.D.A. and the N.I.H.
