Bhattacharya speaks during a roundtable discussion on the pandemic at the Heritage Foundation in 2022. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
President-elect Trump announced Tuesday he'll nominate Stanford University's Jay Bhattacharya to be the next NIH director, rounding out his health care team with a critic of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why it matters: The pick would put a vocal skeptic of COVID lockdowns in charge of the federal medical research agency, giving a prominent voice to Republicans who thought the strict measures at the height of the pandemic were misguided.
What they're saying: Bhattacharya posted on X that he's "honored and humbled" by the nomination. "We will 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!"
- Trump said in a statement that Bhattacharya and HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy 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."
Zoom in: Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford and one of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 document that called for an end to widespread pre-vaccine lockdowns.
- The document recommended focusing on protecting vulnerable populations like the elderly while letting others resume their lives, saying the goal should be to "minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity."
- The declaration is pinned at the top of Bhattacharya's X feed.
- "The lockdowns ... benefited members of the laptop class who actually had the wherewithal to stay home, stay safe while the rest of the population served them," Bhattacharya said in 2023. "The lockdowns had no chance of actually working."
The declaration drew fire from then-NIH director Francis Collins, who called for a "take down of its premises," according to a Republican-led investigation by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
- Collins called the declaration "scientifically very indefensible and, public health wise, irresponsible. This is a proposal that will kill people."
- Bhattacharya is one of the leaders of a Substack called "Science from the Fringe," a name he says is a reference to Collins calling him and other leaders of the Great Barrington Declaration "fringe epidemiologists."
- The Substack features a conversation between Bhattacharya and Marty Makary — Trump's nominee to head the FDA — about a documentary that criticizes Anthony Fauci's leadership during the pandemic.
This post has been updated with Bhattacharya's statement about his nomination.
