COVID establishment critic and medical expert Jay Bhattacharya told Sen. Josh Hawley that the Trump administration will not allow the use of aborted babies’ tissue in research funded by the National Institutes of Health.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) -- The National Institutes of Health will not use abortion fetal tissue in research, according to President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the agency.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya made the comments on Wednesday during his hearing in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in response to a question from Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
“In public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody,” Bhattacharya said during the hearing. “And so having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with fetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue, but it’s a public health issue.”
Dr. Bhattacharya said it is important to have ethical testing guidelines, sharing his experience answering questions on Catholic radio about the mRNA COVID shots. The jabs are tainted by their development using a fetal cell line derived from an aborted baby that has caused moral concerns for faithful Catholics and also Protestants.
"Looking forward to voting for him to be our next NIH director," Sen. Hawley wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Dr. Bhattacharya is a well-respected medical doctor who gained further fame as a COVID contrarian, rejecting the establishment narrative that widespread lockdowns of the economy and schools were needed to slow the spread of the virus.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported:
Bhattacharya was one of the earliest and most notable critics of the draconian COVID response by most governments around the world. In October 2020 he co-authored The Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized the harmful lockdown policies. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University in California and the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
Bhattacharya is the latest high-ranking public health official to affirm the Trump administration will not allow for the use of aborted fetal tissue in federally funded research.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously assured Sen. Hawley he would prohibit the practice when questioned before his confirmation.
"Will you reinstate President Trump’s policy that ensures that no federal research and no federal tax dollars is conducted on fetal tissue taken from elective abortions," Hawley asked RFK Jr.
"Yes," the nominee said, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
President Trump's administration previously rejected 13 or 14 requests to use aborted fetal tissue, as LifeSiteNews reported in 2020.
