US President-elect Donald Trump has Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, was named head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main agency in the United States responsible for public health research.

Bhattacharya is known for his criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the COVID pandemic after taking power in January 2021.

Who is Jay Bhattacharya?

Bhattacharya is a physician, a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research at Stanford.

According to his resume, Bhattacharya received his medical degree from Stanford in 1997 and received his doctorate in health care economics from Stanford University’s Department of Economics in 2000.

In 2020, when the global COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Bhattacharya spoke out against full lockdowns, arguing that they had harmful effects on physical and mental health. He co-authored an open letter, the Great Barrington Declaration, in which he explained this in detail. While his stance on the lockdowns drew criticism then and continues to be criticized today, some of his critics are reconsidering their views.

One of these former critics is Dr. Francis Collins, a former NIH director who called Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists” in 2020. However, in December 2023, Collins told the New York-based nonprofit Braver Angels that in 2020 he and his colleagues were “very closely” focused on saving lives.

Although he did not directly mention Bhattacharya or the declaration, he stated, “They place infinite importance on stopping the disease and saving a life.” They place no value on whether this actually completely disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and keeping many children out of school in ways from which they may never fully recover.”

Experts say that this is exactly what Bhattacharya was talking about. Dr. Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, told Al Jazeera: “With regard to COVID-19 specifically, health policymakers have been cautious given the limited and evolving understanding of the virus.”

“In retrospect, some of the restrictions or their intensity were unnecessary, as Jay and colleagues argued.”

In 2022, independent journalist Bari Weiss cited an investigation based on the social media platform’s internal company documents that occurred before Elon Musk acquired the platform.

When Musk acquired X in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to talk about how his voice was limited by the platform.

Bhattacharya was also a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case alleging that President Joe Biden’s administration improperly suppressed conservative views on social media on issues such as COVID-19. However, in June of this year, the court sided with the Biden administration.

Bhattacharya’s nomination to head NIH must be approved by the Senate.

What does the NIH do?

The NIH oversees medical and public health research in the United States. The committee includes 27 research institutes, each with its own research mission and focus.

The NIH’s annual budget is nearly $48 billion, according to its website, and it employs nearly 18,000 people.

The NIH is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That means if both are appointed, Bhattacharya will work alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump nominated to head HHS on Nov. 14.

Kennedy’s appointment raised some eyebrows in both parties because he took controversial positions on some health issues, including vaccines and COVID-19, while Kennedy also spoke out against lockdowns.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will return the 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 and disease crisis,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

Kennedy wrote on X on Tuesday: “Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore the NIH as the international template for gold standard science and evidence-based medicine.”

I am so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore the NIH as an international model for gold standard science and evidence-based medicine. pic.twitter.com/NakHavsblX

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (@RobertKennedyJr) November 27, 2024

What was Bhattacharya’s stance on the COVID-19 lockdowns?

On October 4, 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University at the time, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, epidemiologist and professor at the University of Oxford, published an open letter entitled “Great Barrington Declaration”.

It was published before the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered on December 14, 2020.

The letter proposed an approach to combating COVID-19 called “Focused Protection” and rejected the prevailing COVID-19 policy.

The letter states: “The current lockdown measures are having a devastating impact on public health in the short and long term.”

Specific health areas highlighted in the letter as areas of concern due to the lockdowns included:

• Lower childhood vaccination rates.
• Worsening outcomes in cardiovascular disease.
• Fewer cancer screenings.
• Deterioration in mental health.

The letter argued that the impact on these health areas would lead to “higher excess mortality” in the coming years. It added that the working class and younger members of society would be most affected. “Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the authors said.

The statement noted that older people are more vulnerable to COVID-19. “For children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other diseases, including the flu.”

Abu-Raddad told Al Jazeera that the question of whether targeted protection is a more viable approach to fighting a pandemic than a full lockdown is complicated because it depends on how serious the infection is and how it affects different age groups. “This also depends on what each society considers to be an acceptable balance between minimizing morbidity and mortality and maintaining economic and social functionality.”

The statement suggested that instead of a complete lockdown against COVID-19, those who are not as vulnerable to the virus should immediately resume normal activities and achieve herd immunity.

“A greater reliance on data from regions outside the United States and Europe would have helped refine restrictions, particularly in areas with younger populations and lower proportions of older people,” Abu-Raddad said. “To Jay’s credit, he recognized and valued such data at the time and advocated for a more personalized approach to restrictions.”

The statement has since been co-signed by 43 additional doctors and health scientists in the US, UK, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, India, Canada and Israel.

Conversely, a few days after the statement was published in 2020, 80 medical experts published the John Snow Memorandum, named after one of the founders of modern epidemiology. That memorandum claimed that the declaration co-authored by Bhattacharya would endanger Americans with underlying health conditions.