President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health policy professor and economist at Stanford University known for his criticism of COVID-19 lockdowns, as his director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya would work alongside vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Both nominations are subject to Senate confirmation. If confirmed, Bhattacharya would oversee a $47.7 billion budget and 27 different institutes and centers at the NIH.
Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic and advocated for allowing the virus to spread naturally to achieve herd immunity. Despite predictions in a March 2020 op-ed that COVID-19 could result in 20,000-40,000 deaths in the U.S., the death toll has exceeded 1.2 million according to CDC data. Dr. Francis Collins, former NIH director, has criticized the declaration as a “fringe component of epidemiology.”
Bhattacharya expressed gratitude for the nomination, stating his commitment to reforming American scientific institutions and making America healthy again. Trump also named Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under Kennedy, a former principal deputy associate secretary at HHS.
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