NIH Director Bhattacharya Wants to Make Americans Trust Their Government Again

By Adam Garrie, Contributing Writer, The Kennedy Beacon

On Sunday’s edition of Fox & Friends, host Rachel Campos-Duffy praised NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, calling his appointment, along with that of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, “the most exciting things to happen to government in my lifetime.”

According to a recent article in USA Today, Campos-Duffy’s is far from the only one who holds these views. In fact, a growing cohort of Americans, traditional Republicans and Democrats alike, share them, even if the state governments passing MAHA legislation remain overwhelmingly Republican.

Campus-Duffy asked Dr. Bhattacharya how it feels to have been shunned and cancelled by people in his own profession – and then to find himself in his current position. The new NIH director said it feels both “surreal” and “an honor of a lifetime.”

Asked about his top priorities, Bhattacharya said they are the same as those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump: “I want to make the NIH work for the American people. Instead of focusing on politicalized ideology – DEI and what not – instead we should be focused on the conditions that actually afflict Americans.” He referenced the government’s large-scale study of the cause of autism, which he said would be an honest study of the epidemic.

More broadly, he said, “We want to focus on the rise in chronic disease… We want to reverse the flatlining of life-expectancy – Americans should be living longer, not less long. The NIH should play an important role in that.”

Dr. Bhattacharya’s interview on Fox continued going viral on Monday morning due to his announcement that all NIH labs conducting tests on beagles have been ordered to cease live animal testing. As part of Secretary Kennedy’s goal of “dramatically” reducing reliance on controversial animal experiments, Bhattacharya said that the NIH and other public health bodies will pivot to AI modeling and tests on safely developed human genetic materials.

When asked to elaborate on the end of experiments on dogs, Dr. Bhattacharya said, “We got rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus. We've put forward a policy to replace animals in research with other technological advances, AI and other tools that actually translate better to human health. I think there's still a level of distrust that the American people have for the NIH that I'm hoping under President Trump we can reverse.”

Animal welfare advocates, on both sides of the aisle, widely praised Bhattacharya’s move. Thousands of dogs have been killed in labs for over 40 years, lab experiments for which Dr. Anthony Fauci had advocated prior to his retirement during the Biden administration.

On Monday morning, the NIH Director also reiterated the importance of the “epochal study” on environmental factors contributing to the autism epidemic, a report that Secretary Kennedy has said will be published this September.

Kennedy shares Battacharya’s approach to health, promising that, like Kennedy, all public health agencies will work closely together to identify the causes of the nation’s chronic disease epidemic – and help Americas regain their trust in government while becoming healthy again.

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