In a party-line vote last evening, the U.S. Senate confirmed Stanford professor and medical researcher Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The confirmation of Bhattacharya—an early, prominent skeptic of COVID-era lockdowns and mandates—comes at a pivotal time for the NIH and its oversight of risky pandemic research.

There's been a growing mainstream acceptance that the COVID-19 pandemic did in fact start in a Chinese lab as a result of risky gain-of-function research funded by the NIH. That's fanned concerns that a future pandemic could start in a similar fashion should this kind of research not be brought under tighter control.