Trump picks COVID lockdown critic Jay Bhattacharya as NIH director

WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he is appointing Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health policy professor and economist at Stanford University known for his criticism of COVID-19 lockdowns, as director of the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya would work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic whom Trump appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Both nominations are subject to Senate confirmation.

“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 said in a statement. “Together they will work hard to make America healthy again!”

If confirmed, Bhattacharya would take over the world’s largest biomedical agency with a budget of $47.7 billion and 27 different institutes and centers.

Bhattacharya is co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 manifesto in which he and other health experts spoke out against lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. They argued that the virus should be allowed to spread naturally among younger Americans, who are at lower risk of severe harm from COVID-19, to achieve “herd immunity” while older Americans take stronger protective measures.

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“As immunity increases in the population, the risk of infection decreases for everyone – even the weak,” the paper says. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be supported by (but not dependent on) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we achieve herd immunity.

In a March 2020 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, Bhattacharya argued that COVID-19 could be a “20,000 or 40,000 death epidemic” in the United States. Four years later, more than 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19, according to current numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One of Bhattacharya’s biggest critics is Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009 to 2021, who called the Great Barrington Declaration “a fringe component of epidemiology” designed to fit “the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.”

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Trump picks COVID lockdown critic Jay Bhattacharya as NIH director

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