WEDNESDAY, Nov. 27, 2024 (HealthDay News) — President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist and critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the nation’s largest medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement late Tuesday, Trump said Bhattacharya will work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., potential head of the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives,” CBS News reported.
“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 wrote.
Bhattacharya was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a paper released in October of 2020 that claimed ongoing public lockdowns were harming Americans.
“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March of 2021. He touted the idea that herd immunity would end up protecting the bulk of people and lockdowns were only essential for those individuals at highest risk from COVID-19, according to CBS News.
But many other scientists disagreed with the Great Barrington Declaration, including Dr. Francis Collins, who was director of the NIH at the time.
Bhattacharya also opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates, claiming that they kept unvaccinated people from working and leisure activities, while eroding trust in the public health system.
Helping Bhattacharya direct the NIH as deputy secretary would be another Trump nominee, Jim O’Neill, a former HHS official. Trump said O’Neill will “oversee all operations and improve Management, Transparency, and Accountability to, Make America Healthy Again.”
The NIH has an annual budget of $48 billion and conducts its own research with a staff of thousands of scientists. It also funds competitive grants for outside research into a myriad of health issues including cancer, vaccines and infectious disease.
O’Neill would be the only health agency nominee with any prior experience working within the massive bureaucracy. His other picks — Kennedy, Dr. Mehmet Oz for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and Dr. Marty Makary for Food and Drug Administration commissioner — are all outsiders.
SOURCE: CBS News
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