NIH director Bhattacharya’s views on health disparities contradict, experts say
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has stated in the media that the agency supports the health and well-being of minority groups—but the NIH has terminated many grants funding health disparities research, contradicting his words, experts say.
According to an August 1 STAT News article, Bhattacharya—himself a former racial health disparities researcher—has stated that while race can be included in health studies in some contexts, studying structural racism is “ideological” and “unscientific.” Under his leadership, the NIH has canceled funding for projects about the impact of structural racism on diseases such as kidney failure and cancer.
“Dr. Bhattacharya describes himself as an epidemiologist. It’s a core part of our field that we study groups with higher rates of disease,” said Mary Bassett, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in the STAT article. “There hasn’t been a single year since Colonial America that the population of Black America hasn’t died younger and died sicker than white America.”
Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard Chan School, added that researchers use scientific methods to study health disparities. “These are testable ideas,” she said. “You actually have to come up with specific hypotheses about how health care systems are structured in ways that do or don’t help the health outcomes.”
Read the STAT News article: Jay Bhattacharya once studied health disparities. As NIH director, he’s allowed such research to wither
