By Meg Tirrell and Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — Dr. Matthew Memoli, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases researcher focused on flu and other respiratory viruses, has been named acting director of the nearly $50 billion agency.

A confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, hasn’t been scheduled yet.

Though Memoli is an NIH insider, one source familiar with him noted his perspectives —particularly his opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates — make him more of an outsider at the agency.

In July 2021, Memoli wrote in an email to NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci that mandated vaccination for Covid-19 is “extraordinarily problematic,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, noting Memoli had himself declined to be vaccinated.

In a video discussion organized by the NIH later that year, Memoli noted the biggest risk for death from Covid-19 was among people who are elderly or have health conditions, and said requiring vaccination of those under 65 “clearly has diminishing returns.”

“I question the risk/benefit analysis of this,” Memoli continued. “Is it really beneficial for these people to take the risk of the vaccines?”

Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University, has also espoused the view that Covid-19 policies overreached, and should have been targeted to the most vulnerable parts of the population.

Many public health experts supported mandates for Covid-19 vaccination, noting that even though the vaccines don’t stop transmission, they were likely to slow it down, helping protect those most vulnerable.

And Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CNN Friday the mandates were also intended to prevent hospitalizations from Covid-19 during a time when hospitals were overwhelmed — with patients of all ages.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends everyone age 6 months and older receive Covid-19 vaccines.

Though described as an outsider, Memoli’s appointment as acting director made some within NIH hopeful that a colleague knowledgeable of how the agency operates could sort out some of the chaos that has befallen it this week, after the US Department of Health and Human Services implemented a wide-reaching moratorium on external communications, two sources said.

The pause on communications led to the abrupt cancellation of external meetings among researchers who review NIH grant proposals, grinding the process of awarding new researching funding to a halt. The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

The moves have led to a lot of fear within the agency, said several sources who declined to be named because of the communications directive.

“People are really scared at NIH and in the academic and scientific community,” Dr. Ned Sharpless, who served as director of the National Cancer Institute from 2017 to 2022, told CNN in an interview Friday. He said it’s been so unsettling that some at the agency are “thinking about other careers.”

Part of the uncertainty stems from a lack of information about how long the pause will last; though a memo from acting HHS Secretary Dr. Dorothy Fink said many measures will be in place until February 1, directives to the NIH obtained by CNN said all agency-sponsored meetings were canceled until further notice. Certain advisory council meetings were said to be canceled until February 1.

“If it gets ironed out pretty quickly it’ll be OK,” Sharpless said. “But if it goes on for more than a few weeks, it would be bad.”

Restarting the process of reviewing funding applications, he said, “is slower than one would think.”

He estimated the agency, with its budget for external research of about $40 billion, awards about $10 billion in new research grants per year.

“That’s like $200 million a week,” he said. Keeping that on pause “will add up pretty fast.”

Amid the uncertainty, Sharpless also applauded the appointment of an acting director, saying “ideally, they can begin to tell the external community how long this is going to last.”

Other major health agencies are also subject to HHS’s pause on communications, which an agency spokesperson told CNN in a statement is “short” and intended “to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization.” It said there will be case-by-case exceptions for announcements deemed “mission critical.”

The US Food and Drug Administration and CDC have also appointed acting leaders.

At FDA, Dr. Sara Brenner has been named acting commissioner until Trump’s choice to lead the agency, Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins who also opposed vaccine mandates, has a confirmation hearing.

Brenner had previously been the chief medical officer for in vitro diagnostics and associate director for medical affairs at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, a post she assumed just before the pandemic, according to her profile on LinkedIn.

Brenner is also a veteran of the first Trump administration, when she served as the senior policy adviser for health and medical innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

At the CDC in Atlanta, Dr. Susan Monarez has been appointed acting director, pending the confirmation hearing of Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former Florida congressman. Monarez, a veteran of government service, was most recently the deputy director of ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an agency tasked with doing innovative, high-stakes research.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead HHS, has confirmation hearings scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday.

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