President-elect Donald Trump has selected health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation's leading medical research agency.
Trump said in a statement Tuesday evening that Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work collaboratively with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. “To guide the country’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.”
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will work to return NIH to the gold standard of medical research as they study the underlying causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including the chronic disease crisis,” he wrote.
The decision to select Bhattacharya for the position is another reminder of the ongoing impact of the Covid pandemic on policy on public health.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter asserting that lockdowns are causing irreparable harm.
The document — which came before COVID-19 vaccines were available and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building immunity to COVID-19 through infection. The document said protection should instead focus on those most at risk.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharyya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion held by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely condemned by disease experts. The director of the National Institutes of Health at the time, Dr. Francis Collins, called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”
His nomination requires Senate approval.
Trump also announced Tuesday that Jim O'Neill, a former official at the Department of Health and Human Services, will serve as deputy secretary of the sprawling agency. Trump said O'Neill “will oversee all operations and improve governance, transparency and accountability to make America healthy again,” the president-elect announced.
O'Neill is the only one of Trump's healthy picks so far to bring to the job previous experience working within the bureaucracy. Trump's previous picks to lead public health agencies — including Kennedy, Dr. Mehmet Oz to director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Dr. Marty McCurry to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration — were all outsiders in Washington who had pledged to shake up the agencies.
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Bhattacharyya, who has faced restrictions on social media platforms for his views, was also one of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case alleging that federal officials improperly suppressed conservative viewpoints on social media as part of their efforts to combat misinformation. The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in that case.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to the company's headquarters to learn more about how his opinions were restricted on the platform, which Musk renamed to X. Recently, Bhattacharya posted on X about scientists leaving the site and joining alternative site Bluesky, mocking of Bluesky and described it as “their little echo chamber”.
Bhattacharyya argued that vaccine mandates that barred unvaccinated people from activities and workplaces undermined Americans' trust in the public health system.
He is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an economist at the RAND Corporation.
The National Institutes of Health falls within the Department of Health and Human Services, which Trump nominated Kennedy to oversee. The National Institutes of Health's $48 billion budget funds medical research on vaccines, cancer and other diseases through competitive grants to researchers at institutions across the country. The agency also conducts its own research with thousands of scientists working at National Institutes of Health laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.
Among the developments supported by NIH funds are a drug for opioid addiction, a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, several new cancer drugs, and the rapid development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Amanda Seitz contributed to this report.
