Jay Bhattacharya’s NIH: A Retreat from Health Equity Research
📷 Image source: statnews.com
The Scholar Who Turned His Back
From health disparities to dismantling DEI
Jay Bhattacharya wasn’t always the villain in the story of health equity research. A decade ago, the Stanford professor was publishing papers on how poverty and race shaped health outcomes, even co-authoring a study on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latino communities. Fast forward to 2025, and as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he’s presiding over a quiet but deliberate erosion of the very research he once championed.
Under Bhattacharya’s leadership, funding for studies examining racial disparities in health has dropped by nearly 30%, according to internal NIH documents obtained by STAT. Programs focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have been defunded or rebranded as 'merit-based' initiatives. It’s a stark reversal for a man whose early work seemed to argue for the opposite approach.
The DEI Purge
How NIH’s priorities shifted overnight
When Bhattacharya took the helm at NIH in early 2024, few expected him to dismantle DEI efforts with such speed. But by summer, grant applications mentioning 'structural racism' or 'health equity' were being flagged for 'lack of rigor' by review panels stacked with his appointees. The NIH’s Office of Minority Health Research saw its budget slashed by 40%, and longtime staffers were reassigned or pushed out.
Critics point to Bhattacharya’s 2022 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he argued that DEI initiatives 'distract from scientific excellence.' At the time, it seemed like academic posturing. Now, it reads like a blueprint. 'He’s not just skeptical of DEI—he’s actively hostile to it,' says Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, former chair of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. 'And that hostility has consequences.'
The Human Cost
Research gaps and silenced scientists
The fallout isn’t abstract. Take Dr. Alicia Fernandez, a UCSF researcher who’s spent 15 years studying diabetes in Latino communities. Her NIH grant renewal was denied last fall, with reviewers calling her focus on 'cultural barriers to care' 'not sufficiently hypothesis-driven.' Meanwhile, a long-planned study on maternal mortality among Black women in rural Mississippi lost its funding midway through data collection.
Young scientists are getting the message too. 'I scrubbed the word ‘disparities’ from my grant title after seeing what happened to senior researchers,' admits a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation. 'It’s career suicide to pitch equity work now.' The numbers bear this out: Applications for NIH funding mentioning health disparities have plummeted by 52% since 2023.
The Political Play
Bhattacharya’s alignment with the anti-DEI movement
This isn’t just about science—it’s about politics. Bhattacharya’s rise to NIH director came on the heels of his controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed COVID lockdowns and made him a darling of libertarian think tanks. His current stance on DEI mirrors the rhetoric of conservative lawmakers who’ve banned equity programs in 18 states.
But there’s irony here. Bhattacharya’s own research on COVID disparities relied on the very frameworks he now dismisses. 'He used health equity tools to show lockdowns hurt the poor, then discarded those tools when they didn’t serve his new agenda,' says Dr. Utibe Essien, a health equity researcher at UCLA. 'It’s intellectual hypocrisy.'
What’s Lost
The long-term damage to public health
The consequences of this shift will ripple for decades. Diseases like hypertension and asthma—which hit communities of color hardest—won’t get the targeted research they need. The pipeline of diverse scientists is drying up. And without NIH leadership, other agencies like the CDC are already scaling back their own equity work.
Bhattacharya defends his record, telling STAT that 'NIH’s mission is science, not social engineering.' But public health isn’t just pipettes and p-values. It’s about who gets to live, who gets to thrive, and who gets left behind. And right now, under Bhattacharya’s NIH, the answer to those questions is clearer than ever.
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