President-elect Donald Trump late Tuesday said he plans to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician known for his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading public health agency.
Trump said Bhattacharya would work in concert with Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “make America healthy again.”
“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 statement.
Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, according to a biography posted on the Stanford University website.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was one of the leading critics of the NIH. But now, if confirmed by the Senate, he would lead the very office he once criticized. The NIH pays for more biomedical research than any other public institution in the world, allocating more than 90 percent of its roughly $49 billion budget to research.
Bhattacharya co-authored “The Great Barrington Declaration,” a prominent open letter published in October 2020 in response to COVID-19 lockdowns. The declaration advocated against virus prevention measures with the hopes of quickly obtaining herd immunity. It was widely criticized, including by the World Health Organization.
The Stanford physician will take the helm of the NIH at a time when the agency is under intense scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have held multiple hearings investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigated instances of sexual harassment among the agency’s research grantees.
In recent years. House and Senate Republicans have floated separate plans to reorganize the agency. A proposal from retiring House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., would consolidate the agency’s current 27 institutes and centers into 15, initiate a congressionally mandated review of the agency’s performance and enforce financial disclosures, among other proposals.
Incoming chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Bill Cassidy, R-La., has also been looking into ways to overhaul the agency and will likely continue that investigation as part of his tenure at the helm of the committee.
Trump also announced Tuesday that he planned to nominate Jim O’Neill to serve as the deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, with a focus on overseeing operations and improving management, transparency and accountability. O’Neill previously served as principal associate deputy secretary of HHS under then-President George W. Bush.
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