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{shortcode-94eb72a004011d7c49a15590d1d8fe33fbc5a9e2}ational Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya is the face of the agency whose steep funding cuts have put research at Harvard and elsewhere in limbo. But before he was a top Trump administration official, Bhattacharya was friends with Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76.
Garber was Bhattacharya’s undergraduate thesis advisor, mentor, and peer. They traveled in similar academic and social circles, and are among a small, but influential, group of health economists who shaped the field over the last three decades.
“If you have written with somebody for many years, and you have worked down the hall from them in a small building in Palo Alto for many years, and one person has mentored another person, it ends up being pretty personal,” said Brown School of Public Health Dean Ashish K. Jha, who co-authored papers with both Garber and Bhattacharya while all three were at Stanford University.
Like Garber, Bhattacharya — a former professor of medicine at Stanford — has both an economics Ph.D and an M.D., though unlike Garber, Bhattacharya never practiced medicine. They authored nearly a dozen papers together on topics that span Medicare, the economics of aging, and medical innovation.
Together, Garber and Bhattacharya broke down how leading causes of death shift with age among Medicare enrollees, why declining disability among America’s older population is not linked to better prevention of chronic disease, and how lighter treatment for men with localized prostate cancer could be as effective as more aggressive methods.
The two were also heavily involved in Stanford’s Center for Health Policy. Garber founded and served as the center’s director until 2011, when he left to become Harvard’s provost.
Stanford Medicine professor John P.A. Ioannidis, who worked with Garber and Bhattacharya at Stanford in the 2000s, said the two men thought very highly of one another.
“Alan felt that Jay was really wonderful and an embodiment of what Stanford can produce,” he said.
“Jay also has expressed the highest positive opinion to me about Alan. I think he thinks very highly of him, and he cherishes all the interaction that they had had,” he added.
Stanford Medicine professor KT Park, who was mentored by both Garber and Bhattacharya during his graduate studies at Stanford, said that he saw the mutual respect between them when they presented findings to their students.
“They would always defer to one another, show agreement, but also respectful challenge and questioning of certain research assumptions that went into the model,” Park said.
Park said he also saw Bhattacharya, who is Christian, and Garber, who is Jewish, as figures shaped by their religious principles and their commitment to their families. Park said that Bhattacharya’s and Garber’s traditional values “may have served as building blocks for trust outside of their research and outside of their professional lives.”
Garber’s family may have been part of what pulled him away from Stanford. When Garber decided to take the provost position, he told Park he was motivated to make the career shift because the job would help him better provide for his family, Park said.
Bhattacharya took on many of the young researchers that Garber left behind when he departed for Harvard, including Park. The two stayed in touch, according to colleagues who knew them both at the time.
But in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic would place a new strain on their relationship. Bhattacharya became an early critic of pandemic lockdowns, and in October 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration — a manifesto that advocated for societies to lift restrictions and let their populations build up “herd immunity.”
Garber, who was instrumental in shaping Covid-19 policies at Harvard, took a more measured stance than Bhattacharya on the national pandemic response. In March 2020, he advocated for lifting “indiscriminate” social distancing requirements, but he imagined a return-to-work regime that would hinge on widespread testing and the use of protective equipment.
Garber and Bhattacharya communicated about their differing views on Covid-19 responses, according to Ioannidis, who heard about the conversation from Bhattacharya. The two scholars disagreed, Ioannidis said, but remained respectful of each other.
“People who disagreed on pandemic issues — usually, it escalated to be very emotional,” Ioannidis said. “I don’t think that was the case for Jay and Alan.”
The two spoke about their differing opinions on pandemic policy, and after their call, they still maintained a deep respect for one another, according to Ioannidis, who was briefed on the call by Bhattacharya.
It was Bhattacharya’s laissez-faire approach to pandemic regulations — and his willingness to bash establishment scientific views — that led to his embrace by right-wing media and paved the way for his appointment to lead the NIH.
Less than a month after President Donald Trump was elected to his second term, he tapped Bhattacharya as NIH director, placing him within a department soon to be helmed by the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For some of Bhattacharya’s colleagues, the planned appointments made for a strange contrast: an unorthodox scientist, whose views had been rejected as extreme by many of his peers but who still valued scientific processes, working under a conspiracy theorist known for his wholesale rejection of science.
Even early on, it was clear that Bhattacharya could destabilize universities’ access to federal research funding. In December, he proposed tying schools’ likelihood of receiving federal research grants to ratings of academic freedom on their campuses — a move that could put Harvard’s funding on the line.
But Garber, in an interview the same month, praised Trump’s selection of Bhattacharya for the NIH post.
“I know Jay as a serious and dedicated researcher who has always been well-intentioned and is always worth listening to,” he said. “I expect him to aim to serve with distinction.”
Bhattacharya asked Garber to introduce him at his Senate confirmation hearing, and Garber agreed, the Boston Globe reported in August. But the plans did not come to fruition: when the hearing took place in April, Garber did not appear.
Federal research funding had been on the chopping block since days after Trump’s inauguration. But it was in April that the administration’s threats to Harvard materialized.
Just two weeks after Bhattacharya’s confirmation, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in multiyear research commitments to Harvard — including hundreds of millions of NIH dollars. The suspension was only the beginning of a cascade of funding cuts that would halt more than 900 federal grants to the University.
It’s not clear how closely Bhattacharya was involved in the funding cuts. In May testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Bhattacharya acknowledged the decision to cut federal grants to universities, including Harvard, was largely made “joint with the administration.” (An NIH spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his involvement in the decision-making process behind funding cuts to Harvard.)
But Bhattacharya said in the same hearing that he lightened the blow against health research at Harvard, saying he “worked very hard” to ensure grants to affiliated hospitals continued flowing.
Some of Bhattacharya’s former colleagues trusted him to be a moderating voice.
When Harvard Medical School professor Chirag Patel learned in May that he had lost federal support for his research, he called Bhattacharya, his former dissertation advisor at Stanford, to ask why.
“He acknowledged that some of it is not in his control, and that is kind of above his pay grade to a certain degree,” Patel said. “He also was on the side of having some sort of greater conversation with the university and the federal government.”
Bhattacharya also told Patel that federal support for high-impact research at Harvard should continue — but he never said he thought the funding cuts were wrong, according to Patel. Instead, he said that there needed to be more discussion between universities and the federal government on how research funding is administered, according to Patel.
Grants did not start flowing back to Harvard until a federal judge required their restoration in September. And the Department of Health and Human Services took steps on Monday toward declaring Harvard unfit to receive federal grants and contracts in the future.
Harvard Medical School professor Anupam Jena, who continues to keep in touch with Bhattacharya after years of research together at Stanford, said it would be difficult for him to believe that Bhattacharya would support the Trump administration’s wide-ranging funding cuts to NIH research funding.
“That just would be completely inconsistent with his whole career, right?” Jena said. “He was an NIH funded researcher. He’s written about the value of scientific innovation. He clearly knows it.”
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon
