Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford doctor who was silenced for challenging the Biden administration’s lockdown policies, to lead the National Institutes of Health.
Trump says Bhattacharya will work with Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he leads the nation’s largest public funder of medical research with a budget of about $47.3 billion dollars.
The president-elect said in a statement: “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. restoring the NIH to a gold standard for medical research as they investigate the root causes of and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our chronic disease crisis. Illness and illness. Together they will work hard to make America healthy again!’
Bhattacharya, a health policy professor and physician at Stanford, has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. government’s COVID-19 policies during the pandemic.
The Stanford-educated physician and economist met with Kennedy this week and impressed him with his ideas to overhaul the NIH.
Bhattacharya has called for shifting the agency’s focus to funding more innovative research and reducing the influence of some of the longest-serving career officials, the report said.
Together with two other academics, he published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.
Trump cited the Great Barrington Declaration as one of the doctor’s credentials to get the job.
Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford doctor who was silenced for challenging the Biden administration’s lockdown policies, to lead the National Institutes of Health
Trump says Bhattacharya will work with Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he leads the nation’s largest public funder of medical research with a budget of about $47.3 billion dollars.
The Great Barrington Declaration called for “targeted protection,” an idea that would mean that the bulk of efforts to boost immunity would focus on the most vulnerable groups – the elderly and those with weakened immune systems – with few restrictions on the general healthy population.
Without those restrictions, more people would develop Covid, which would release antibodies against infections, creating herd immunity.
As more and more people become infected and later become immune over a period of time, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread and infect vulnerable people.
But the idea was rejected by many mainstream scientists, including people like Anthony Fauci and NIH director Frances Collins, who worked in the Biden administration. Many criticized the idea as dangerous and would lead to many avoidable deaths.
Bhattacharya then sued the government, claiming it was pressuring social media platforms to censor his views.
In 2023, a federal court ruled that the Biden administration forced social media sites to censor him and his co-authors.
According to his resume, he graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and received his PhD from the Stanford Department of Economics in 2000.
Just days before his appointment as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. that he would act quickly by firing 600 people at the NIH and replacing them all with new hires.
The Stanford-educated physician and economist met with Kennedy this week and impressed him with his ideas to overhaul the NIH
The agency employs almost 20,000 people.
In addition to the job losses, Kennedy has said he wants to shift the NIH’s focus from infectious diseases like COVID-19 to tackling potential treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes.
During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who served on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, a frequent target of Republicans for contradicting some of Trump’s coronavirus policies and recommendations, leading to calls until his dismissal.
Collins, the NIH director and Fauci’s boss, defended Fauci in a July 2020 interview with STAT News, saying it was “inconceivable” to consider firing Fauci as some Republicans had demanded.
As a federal employee, Fauci’s job was protected from political firing by federal civil service regulations, protections that Trump has vowed to undo.