Trump nominates critic of COVID-19 lockdowns to reform NIH

SALT LAKE CITY — President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his administration's focus on disruptive reform with the selection of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday.

Trump's choice of Bhattacharya, a professor of economic and health policy at Stanford University, marks a clear rejection of the scientific consensus that led to COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates and censorship.

Bhattacharya drew global attention, and condemnation from the medical establishment, in October 2020 when he co-authored an open letter calling for a targeted approach to pandemic restrictions that allowed young and healthy people to return to normal life.

The proposal earned Bhattacharya public ridicule, social media blacklisting and a private request by then-NIH director Francis Collins for Dr. Anthony Fauci to launch a "quick and devastating ... take down" of Bhattacharya's alternative to school shutdowns and masking requirements.

Bhattacharya, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's pick to head the Health and Human Services Department, who has reportedly been tasked with eliminating corruption in regulatory agencies, enhancing the standard of evidence-based studies and ending the "chronic disease epidemic."

"Together, Jay and RFK 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," Trump said in a post to Truth Social on Tuesday evening. "Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!"

Kennedy has said he intends to replace as many as 600 NIH employees upon entering office. Bhattacharya impressed Kennedy in a meeting last week with his plans to shake up the NIH, The Washington Post reported.

In addition to focusing on the health care costs of obesity, Bhattacharya has also dedicated scholarship on how to improve NIH investments toward more innovative projects. A 2021 report from The Intercept found the NIH had funded "gain-of-function research of concern" at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology through the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

"I am honored and humbled by (Trump's) nomination of me to be the next NIH director," Bhattacharya posted on Tuesday. "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!"

In his own post on X, Kennedy responded to the news by calling Bhattacharya "the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine."

What did Bhattacharya say about COVID-19?

From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya pushed back against other public health officials.

In March 2020, Bhattacharya, who leads Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, co-wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal where he predicted the death rate of COVID-19 in the United States would be roughly one-tenth the estimated figures and would lead to between 20,000-40,000 deaths. The disease ultimately contributed to the deaths of 1.2 million Americans, when taking into account deaths where COVID-19 was listed as a "presumed" or "probable" cause.

In October 2020, Bhattacharya joined two fellow epidemiologists, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, of Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, of Oxford, in penning the Great Barrington Declaration, where they argued that the COVID-19 response recommended by government agencies was disproportionally harming young, healthy people.

"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health," the letter read. "The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health — leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice."

The declaration called for a "focused protection" approach, where high risk individuals, such as those in elderly care centers, receive special protections, while those at less risk are allowed to live normally and achieve herd immunity while waiting for a vaccine. The authors said there should be no kids kept out of school, no children forced to wear masks, and no businesses forced to close.

This approach was the one taken by Sweden, which was tied for the lowest excess-mortality rate among European countries from 2020 to 2022 and experienced no child learning loss and decreased economic impacts.

Bhattacharya's anti-lockdown manifesto received harsh rebuke from many scientific experts in the U.S. Collins — who served as NIH director for over a decade from 2009 to 2021 — dismissed Bhattacharya's proposal as a partisan ploy.

"This is a fringe component of epidemiology," Collins told The Washington Post shortly after The Great Barrington Declaration was released. "This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."

Bhattacharya has said he is not registered with any party to preserve his independence as a scientist.

Earlier this month, Bhattacharya said the COVID-19 pandemic was "the golden age of science denial" because data about masking toddlers and harms from the COVID-19 vaccine were ignored.

As director of NIH, Bhattacharya will oversee the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, with a staff of 18,000 and a budget of $48 billion. The NIH awards around 50,000 grants to more than 300,000 researches at more than 2,500 research institutions every year and also conducts research of its own with thousands of scientists at its labs in Maryland.

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