Senate confirms Biden’s pick for NIH director over Sanders’ objections
The Senate on Tuesday appointed Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who currently heads the National Cancer Institute, confirmed as the next director of the National Institutes of Health, overruling the objections of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee . Commission.
The vote was 62 to 36. In a statement last monthMr. Sanders said that while Dr. Bertagnolli was an “intelligent and caring person,” he would vote against her because she “has not convinced me that she is willing to take on the greed and power of the pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry.” to take. .”
Dr. Bertagnolli will become only the second woman to lead the NIH on a permanent basis, after Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, who served under President George HW Bush. She will take over an agency that has been the target of political attacks from Republicans, who have accused its scientists of deliberately downplaying the possibility that Covid-19 resulted from a laboratory leak.
“I don’t think anyone wants to know the true origins of the last Covid pandemic more than the biomedical research community,” said Dr. Bertagnolli during her speech against Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the health committee. confirmation hearing last month.
“And how are you going to achieve that?” asked Mr. Cassidy, a doctor. Dr. Bertagnolli pledged to make all data on this subject “available, public, and accountable to the American people.”
President Biden announced in May that he was hiring Dr. Bertagnolli would nominate to lead the NIH, the world’s premier medical research agency, which has an annual budget of more than $47 billion and occupies a sprawling campus in Bethesda, Maryland. director since Dr. Francis S. Collins resigned almost two years ago.
But in an unusual twist, Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, held up Dr. Bertagnolli’s confirmation hearing for months in an effort to push Mr. Biden to take more aggressive action to lower drug prices.
The standoff finally ended in September after the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $326 million contract with Regeneron to develop a new monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid-19. The deal stipulated that if the drug comes to market, the list price must be equal to or lower than the price in other major countries – a provision that led to Mr Sanders announces this he would schedule a hearing for Dr. Bertagnolli.
The hearing went well for Dr. Bertagnolli, who grew up on a farm in southwestern Wyoming and was introduced to the committee by a Republican from that state, Senator John Barrasso. He praised her as someone who understands rural America and said he had talked to her neighbors.