WASHINGTON (AP) — National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya will also temporarily become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an administration official said Wednesday.
The change was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the appointment hadn’t been made public.
Bhattacharya will be the third leader of the embattled CDC, the nation’s top public health agency, during President Donald Trump’s second term. 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 and overseeing those vaccine changes before his reported departure last week.
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. At the NIH, he oversees the largest public funder of biomedical research.
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’d seen no evidence linking any single vaccine to autism.
Trump administration officials have said they planned to find a permanent CDC director, a job that requires confirmation by the Senate.
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