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?”
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….
From Catholic Vote
Some more good news on the pro-life front from the Trump Administration. Let’s all pray they prohibit the use of aborted tissue in NIH-funded research. End Abortion Now! Adoption is the option.
There have been no successful treatments from using Aborted fetal stem cells in regenerative medicine. But there have been many diseases successfully treated in using non-fetal stem cells (umbilical cord blood, skin, placental fluid). Unfortunately, most of federal funds go to aborted fetal stem cell research.
One of my own close relatives was cured from a walled eye (crossed eye) at Duke University by using her own umbilical cord blood cells that had been stored there. The doctors at Stanford Children’s Hospital told the parents they had never seen such a cure before without surgery.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya MD and Dr. Scott Atlas MD, both of the Stanford School of Medicine, were censured by the Stanford Faculty Senate for not going along with prevailing COVID lock-downs, in spite of them both being respected, professional researchers. Two years ago, Dr. Atlas spoke at St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park. He explained that several other Stanford Medicine professors privately told him that they agree with him and Dr. Bhattacharya, but were afraid to speak out. Stanford has become a woke diploma mill and is no longer a fine university where ideas can be discussed and debated.
Catholic Vote, the original source of this news story, is a good organization. Pres. Trump’s NIH director nominee, Jay Bhattacharya, looks great! Wonderful that he is a Christian and a Stanford Medical School professor! We desperately need traditional, Biblically-based Christians in all of our medical schools and in medical resesrch, too. All human life is sacred, and must be respected. There must be stern laws totally prohibiting use of aborted fetal tissues in medical resesrch. There must be not even one aborted baby in the whole country, to even consider the horrific idea of use in aborted fetal tissue research. And no more $700 million taxpayers’ dollars going each year to Planned Parenthood, to kill nearly 393,000 precious American preborn children — God’s beloved children that He made. DOGE must completely defund Planned Parenthood.
Bravo!
Out with the old, in with the new! Children are especially cute with their little Jack o’ Lantern faces when they are in between sets of teeth. And God bless Professor Bhattacharya for his morally ethical stand.