The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today named a pediatric neurologist with controversial views on autism and vaccine safety to helm the agency’s child health institute. The pick is stoking worries that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is choosing—or being forced to choose by his boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. —leaders with fringe scientific views and no experience with NIH research funding.
John Gaitanis, who until July 2025 was at Brown University’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital, will become director of the $1.7 billion Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) on 23 August, Bhattacharya announced today. Gaitanis earned an M.D. from Brown and trained at Harvard University-affiliated hospitals. He has headed pediatric neurology divisions at Brown and Tufts University and published research on epilepsy and autism.
But NIH’s Reporter database offers no evidence he has ever received funding from the agency and NIH sources could not find him listed among researchers who served as outside peer reviewers on grants for the agency. Several NICHD staffers told Science they were alarmed at Gaitanis’s appointment.
A former colleague of Gaitanis also expressed “surprise” he was chosen to lead a major government research institute. “He was sought after by patients who were seeking alternative therapies, and he was polarizing as to his views and his beliefs about vaccines and his investment in unconventional approaches,” says physician-scientist Phyllis Dennery, Hasbro’s medical director. “His strengths were clinical and not really research as he had no NIH funding, nor had he worked on research projects in a way that resulted in publications.”
Gaitanis is affiliated with several autism organizations that hold views outside of the mainstream. For example, he serves on the board of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs, which has promoted alternative medicine treatments for autism such as hyperbaric oxygen and leucovorin, a vitamin derivative that Trump administration officials last year promoted based on limited evidence. Gaitanis has also served as a paid expert witness in a federal court where families can claim neurological harm from childhood vaccines.
Gaitanis has seemingly embraced Kennedy’s controversial Make America Healthy Again agenda. In September 2025, he appeared at an autism event held by the MAHA Institute, a group that promotes the movement.
Also last year, Gaitanis was named to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices as part of an overhaul by Kennedy that brought in members who share skepticism of vaccine safety. Gaitanis declined citing “prior professional obligations,” The Washington Post reported.
These and other ties to Kennedy’s positions “are concerning,” says David Mandell, an autism researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “Now he is going to oversee 1100 employees and a $1.7 billion budget for an institute with which he has absolutely no experience.”
Gaitanis’s appointment comes nearly 2 weeks after another physician connected to Kennedy, endocrinologist Dorothy Fink, became deputy director and acting director of NICHD. After Trump took office in January 2025, Fink served as acting HHS secretary, where she oversaw such moves such as a communications pause across the department that caused dozens of NIH grant review meetings to be canceled and the closure of HHS offices overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Bhattacharya has begun to fill the top slots at 15 NIH institutes, most of which became vacant last year after multiple directors were fired or pushed out. Another director, the chief of NIH’s environmental health institute, was reassigned and replaced with a friend of Vice President JD Vance by Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya’s five picks so far this year–some from within NIH, others outside—have been conventional choices.
But Politico reported recently that NIH will soon name biotech executive Steven Quay as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Quay, who Politico reported was not recommended for a finalist interview by NIH staff considering applicants but won Kennedy’s backing, is a proponent of the disputed theory shared by many within the Trump administration that NIAID virology funding contributed to a lab leak in China that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Gaitanis, Quay has never held NIH funding.
The two researchers fit a pattern of having “no evidence of even a rudimentary understanding of how NIH works (at least in the past) and clear evidence consistent with selection based on his political views,” says Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s basic research institute (and a former editor-in-chief at Science.) “I have been worried that this would happen.”