Covid Lockdown Critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Nominated to Head National Institutes of Health
- If confirmed, the Stanford physician and economist would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $47 billion budget.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen Stanford physician and economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH. If confirmed by the Senate, the 56-year-old Indian American, who opposed covid lockdowns, would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $47 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers
Trump announced Bhattacharya’s nomination on Truth Social. “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.
In a post on X, Bhattacharya said he’d work to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again.”
The New York Times noted that Bhattacharya is “the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream.” He has advocated for a major shakeup of the agency and has “accused former NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of suppressing scientific debate and research during the pandemic,” as reported by Politico.
Bhattacharya is one of the authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which was an open letter signed by thousands of doctors and scientists in 2020 denouncing lockdowns as harmful. He was joined by Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Oxford professor Dr. Sunetra Gupta in co-authoring the document. The declaration was quickly denounced by other health leaders, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who slammed the call for herd immunity in the document as “nonsense and very dangerous,” The New York Post reported at the time.
According to The Washington Post “the rise of Bhattacharya — from being scorned by the nation’s NIH director to possibly occupying his office four years later — reflects how the backlash to coronavirus policies has helped reshape conservative politics and elevate new voices.” He has often described himself as a victim of what felt like a “propaganda attack” led by public health experts after the Great Barrington Declaration. However, despite the criticism the Great Barrington Declaration received, The Post points out that “many Americans have come to believe that school shutdowns and other pandemic-related policies lasted too long.”