President-elect Donald Trump nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Tuesday night to be director of the National Institutes of Health.
“Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives,” Trump said in a statement.
Bhattacharya, a physician and professor of medicine, economics and health policy at Stanford University, was critical of COVID-19 restrictions and accused the National Institutes of Health of holding too much power. Now, he’s slated to lead the agency that’s a key source of federal funding for academic research at universities. The position is subject to Senate confirmation.
Trump’s pick as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who would oversee NIH, has said he wants to lay off 600 employees at the agency and shift NIH’s focus away from infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, toward chronic conditions like obesity.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020, that urged officials to lift the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and allow normal activities to resume for all who were not especially vulnerable to complications from the virus.
Bhattacharya said NIH needed to “do more to promote innovative science” and proposed restructuring NIH so that there were “many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats, dominating a field for a very long time,” The Washington Post reported.
Trump touted Bhattacharya’s role in the Great Barrington Declaration in his statement announcing the NIH appointment.
“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. “Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!”
