Do we like Jay Bhattacharya?
Our score: 3 out of 10. His own words on trans youth and the cut LGBTQ+ research grants weigh against him, and the record on the good side is thin.
Jay Bhattacharya runs the National Institutes of Health, the biggest medical research funder on the planet, and for a stretch of 2026 he was running the CDC as well. Both jobs sit under a health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine views have split the public health world. That makes Bhattacharya's choices matter well beyond one bloke's career.
The freshest stoush is a CDC study on COVID vaccine effectiveness. As acting CDC head he withheld publication of the report, and in late April 2026 he wrote an opinion piece defending the decision against criticism. The reporting I could open does not say whether the study has since been published, so that one is unresolved.
On vaccines he is not a straight copy of his boss. At a Senate hearing in February 2026 he said he had not seen a study suggesting any single vaccine causes autism, which differs from Kennedy, who has speculated about a possible link. That's a point in his favour, though critics and fans will both read it differently depending on what else they hold against him.
The harm check is where it gets sticky for us. NIH cancelled or substantially reduced 669 grants, at least 323 of them on sexual and gender minority health, and Bhattacharya is a named defendant in the lawsuit. A Maryland federal judge blocked the terminations in 2025. The report I read does not describe his personal part in the terminations, so I'm not putting them all on him.
What is his own is what he said about trans kids. When HHS released a 409-page review favouring therapy over medical care for young people with gender dysphoria, he said “protect our nation's children” and spoke of “unproven and irreversible medical interventions.” The National Center for Lesbian Rights' legal director called the report politics and ideology injected into medical science, while a psychiatrist said it magnified risks and played down benefits.
He has also defended the Trump administration's DEI orders as “misunderstood”, telling STAT that NIH stays committed to minority health research and that he would not have taken the job otherwise. Staff see it differently: more than 300 NIH employees signed the Bethesda Declaration in June 2025, which accused leadership of politicising research. I found no reported reply from him in the piece I opened.