Jay Bhattacharya, an unofficial Covid adviser in Donald Trump’s first administration, has been selected as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the leading biomedical research institutions in the world.
The choice of Bhattacharya, a Stanford economist whose proposal for widespread Covid-19 infection was backed by the White House, signals a return to controversial and scientifically questionable health policies in the second Trump administration, experts say.
Bhattacharya, an economist who attended medical school, has called for an “an absolute revamping of the scientific community”.
He has questioned the safety of vaccines, testified against the effectiveness of face masks, and argued that NIH officials should not be involved with scientific policy.
Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment.
In early 2020, Bhattacharya downplayed Covid’s deadliness, and he soon joined two other scientists in a recommendation to let Covid spread with “focused protection” – a proposal on the scientific fringes that soon became politically mainstream.
After the Trump administration adopted the strategy of “herd immunity” through infection, millions of Americans were disabled and killed, with a vastly higher mortality rate than peer nations.
In April 2020, Santiago Sanchez, then a first-year student at Stanford Medical School, wanted to do something to help as the novel coronavirus swept the nation and brought the world to a standstill.
That’s how he found himself volunteering in a makeshift laboratory in the ballroom of the Palo Alto Sheraton, carefully squeezing droplets of blood samples into rapid tests for 10 to 12 hours a day.
The research project was an attempt to see how many people had already gotten sick from Covid. If more people than previously known had already gotten sick and recovered, that would mean the virus wasn’t as severe as it seemed, and it might also mean there were enough people out there with immunity to help stop the virus from spreading, Sanchez hoped.
But as he saw negative result after negative result, Sanchez felt his optimism curdle. After two days, the volunteers had conducted more than 3,300 tests, but fewer than two dozen turned positive, as Sanchez remembers it.
That’s why he was puzzled when one of the senior researchers of the study, Jay Bhattacharya, stepped into the ballroom, saw the handful of positive tests alongside stacks of negative tests, and said, “there’s definitely signal here,” according to Sanchez’s recollection.
“That was my first sinking feeling, because I was like, ‘That is not how I am interpreting this experiment,’” Sanchez said.
The ensuing preprint study estimated that between 2.5% to 4% of people in the region had been infected – a rate vastly higher than previously thought, and a figure significantly higher than the number of positive tests Sanchez says he saw.
Bhattacharya became a fixture on Fox News and other networks, proclaiming the opposite of what Sanchez now believed: that many more people had the virus than anyone thought, and that meant the US should reopen.
“He was everywhere during the pandemic except hospitals,” said Jonathan Howard, associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and author of the book We Want Them Infected. “He didn’t treat a single Covid patient himself and became famous despite having no real-world responsibility that way.”
Scientists quickly discovered significant errors in the study: the people who gave blood weren’t a random sample; the positive tests may well have been false positives; and the study was sponsored in part by an airline founder who was an avid proponent of reopening in the midst of Covid’s strongest grip.
Despite criticism, the study results “spiraled out of control”, Sanchez said. “I and many others who worked on this study had this shared feeling of being taken advantage of, like we had been pawns in an obviously ideological project that did not meet scientific muster.”
A few months later, Bhattacharya and other skeptics of Covid precautions met with Trump at the White House, at a time when Trump had stopped speaking with his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci.
Bhattacharya and two other scientists, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, soon unveiled a plan, known as the Great Barrington declaration, to let the virus spread unchecked among the general population while attempting to protect the vulnerable. The authors believed this approach could stop the pandemic within three to six months.
“This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous,” said Francis Collins, then director of the NIH.
Yet the day after the proposal was released, the authors met with Alex Azar, then the secretary of Health and Human Services, who confirmed that the proposal echoed the Trump administration’s policy of reopening.
Within months, the worst wave of deaths of the entire pandemic crashed into the US. The strategy of protecting the vulnerable never materialized; even Trump, perhaps the most protected person in the nation, was hospitalized with Covid.
“He was a pro-infection doctor,” Howard said of Bhattacharya. “He said that parts of the country had reached herd immunity in summer 2020 … He said that one infection led to permanent, robust immunity, and he treated rare vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death.”
In the past four years, Bhattacharya has testified in state and Canadian courts, as well as US congressional hearings. Bhattacharya has said that public health has become a “tool for authoritarian power … a political tool that’s been used to enforce the biosecurity state”, and that the field needs to be rebuilt.
When Sanchez sees patients who say they don’t need a Covid booster, he wonders if they’ve been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Bhattacharya’s messages.
And he sees a direct line from the economist’s Covid advice to his possible appointment at the NIH.
“They handed Trump a huge gift. They gave him a way to talk about the pandemic that obviously reached a lot of people, that let them, in their own minds, compartmentalize what had happened and feel that it was okay to tolerate the amount of disability and death,” Sanchez said of the researchers.
“It totally obfuscated people’s ability to even assess risk, to the point that we have well-established, highly efficacious childhood vaccines that are now being denied – to the point that measles is coming back in some parts of the United States.”
With trust in public health greatly diminished, the repercussions could be long-lasting and tragic in coming years, particularly as Trump’s health nominees erode trust in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other public-health precautions, Howard said.
“Every measles outbreak, every pertussis outbreak, will be on them.”
