Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the National Institutes of Health, remains a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump announced in a statement Tuesday that he had named Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, to head the nation’s top medical research agency. He said Bhattacharya would work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his successor at the Health Department, “to lead the country’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.”

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will return NIH to a gold standard of medical research by investigating the underlying causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our chronic disease crisis.”

Bhattacharya said he was “honored and honored” by the nomination. “We will reform America’s scientific institutions so that they are trustworthy again and use the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!” Bhattacharya wrote about X.

Bhattacharya was a lead author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published in October 2020 that opposed lockdowns and promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk from infection should be allowed to build up immunity to COVID-19. It was rejected as dangerous by public health officials, including then-NIH Director Francis Collins.

Bhattacharya has accused Fauci and other leaders of marginalizing those like him who opposed lockdown measures. Bhattacharya and Fauci were contacted for comment via email outside regular business hours.

Fauci and Collins “created an illusion of scientific consensus about their ideas and marginalized anyone who disagreed with them, even though there was no scientific consensus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox News last year. “It is a pattern of behavior that reflects an abuse of power by American science bureaucrats at the top of our science bureaucracies.”

Fauci became the face of the government’s response to COVID-19 in early 2020, but later fell out of favor with Trump, then president, as he continued to urge caution while Trump advocated a quicker return to normal life. Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH for nearly 40 years until he retired in 2022.

Fauci has defended decisions made during the pandemic New York Times Magazine last year: “I don’t want to seem preachy, but I don’t want people to suffer and I don’t want people to die.”

In 2021, Bhattacharya said Fauci was “probably the number one anti-vaxxer” because he continued to pressure Americans to take measures to contain COVID-19 even if they were vaccinated.

“Dr. “Fauci is, in some ways, probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country because he has modeled behavior that makes people think the vaccine won’t give you your life back, but it will,” he said on Fox News.

Bhattacharya has also accused Fauci and other leaders of suppressing scientific research and debate during the pandemic.

“The rot that had accumulated over decades was there for all to see,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in early November on UnHerd, a British news and opinion site. “The National Institutes of Health, whose annual budget is $45 billion, under the leadership of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, has orchestrated a massive suppression of scientific debate and research.”

Bhattacharya criticized Fauci’s handling of the pandemic in one Newsweek Editorial co-authored with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, in 2022.

The media and public “naturally” looked to Fauci when COVID-19 broke out, they wrote. “Unfortunately, Dr. “Fauci answered important questions about epidemiology and public health incorrectly.”

In another comment for Newsweek Last year they called for a commission to conduct a “thorough and open-minded” investigation into the pandemic.

“While few public health scientists dared to go against Dr. “To impose COVID restrictions advocated by Anthony Fauci, many of the scientists who spoke out are politically left-wing, including several members of our Norfolk group,” they wrote. “We need to put politics behind us and just figure out what went wrong so that something like this never happens again.”