President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) promised during a March 5 Senate committee hearing that he would prohibit the use of aborted fetal tissue in NIH-funded grants.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked nominee Jay Bhattacharya during the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing if he backed Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s intention to reinstate a policy from Trump’s first term that severely limited the use of tissue from aborted children in NIH-funded research.
The 2019 policy did not outright ban the use of aborted fetal tissue, but it did prohibit acquiring any “new” aborted fetal tissue for NIH-funded research, according to the NIH grants website. It also required that grant applicants who wanted to experiment on aborted fetal tissue be subject to an Ethics Advisory Board review. In August 2020, the ethics board recommended rejecting 13 of 14 such research applications. Under the Biden administration, the HHS reversed the requirement for an Ethics Advisory Board review in April 2021.
In the March 5 hearing, Hawley asked, “Do you support that policy, will you prohibit the use of aborted fetal tissue in NIH-funded research?”
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In his response, Bhattacharya, who is a Christian and a professor at Stanford University’s medical school, said he will “absolutely follow the lead” of both Kennedy and Trump in this area.
He emphasized that there are available ethical alternatives to aborted fetal tissue for research.
“During the pandemic, I would often be on Catholic radio, and people would ask me whether the mRNA vaccines were made or developed with aborted fetal stem cell lines. And a lot of the folks who were calling in had ethical objections,” Bhattacharya said. “In public health, we need to make sure the products of the science are ethically acceptable to everybody.”
Having an ethical alternative is not only an issue relevant to morality but also to public health, Bhattacharya said.
“We need to make sure that everyone is willing to take the kinds of progress that we make, so I am absolutely committed to that,” he said.
Hawley expressed gratitude for Bhattacharya’s response.
“We think about millions and millions of Americans who are understandably very concerned about the components, if you will, of many of these palliatives and vaccines,” Hawley said, “and we want them to be able to access this on the same basis as others, so thank you for making that point.”
Bhattacharya also spoke about the importance of free speech in the NIH, according to the Associated Press.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya vocally opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, warning that they “were causing irreparable harm,” the Associated Press noted. Bhattacharya was a plaintiff in a lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2023, in which he argued he was censored on social media for his speech on COVID-19 related issues.
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
