president-elect Donald Trump health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, chosen to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.
Trump said in a statement Tuesday evening that Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to lead the nation’s medical research and make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives.”
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. restoring the NIH to a gold standard for medical research while investigating the root causes and solutions to America’s greatest health challenges, including our crisis of chronic diseases and conditions,” he wrote.
The decision to select Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on public health politics.
Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter from October 2020 that said lockdowns were causing irreparable damage.
The document – which emerged before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration – promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that low-risk people should live normally while gaining immunity through infection build against COVID-19. Protection should instead focus on people at higher risk, the document said.
‘I think the lockdowns were the biggest public health mistake’ said Bhattacharya in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Than- NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and ‘not mainstream science’.
His nomination would have to be approved by the Senate.
Trump also announced this on Tuesday Jim O’Neilla former HHS official and Silicon Valley investor, will serve as deputy secretary of the sprawling agency. Trump said O’Neill will “oversee all operations and improve management, transparency and accountability to make America healthy again,” the president-elect announced.
O’Neill is a longtime employee of a billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thielone of Trump’s biggest backers from the tech industry. Thiel and O’Neill co-founded Mithril Capital Management, a venture capital fund that invests in medical technology and other early-stage companies. O’Neill previously served in HHS under George W Bush and was considered head of the Food and Drug Administration during Trump’s first term. He has expressed disdain for federal regulations, including the FDA’s approach to regulating emerging drugs and other technologies.
O’Neill also worked on some of Thiel’s signature projects, which often reflected his libertarian philosophy.
He served on the board of a Thiel-funded nonprofit whose mission was to develop artificial islands that would float outside U.S. territory, allowing them to experiment with new forms of government. He also helped create and run the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $100,000 to young entrepreneurs who want to leave school to pursue a business or scientific venture.
O’Neill is the only one of Trump’s health picks so far who brings previous experience working within the HHS bureaucracy. Trump’s previous choices to lead public health agencies — including Kennedy, Dr. Mehmed Oz for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and Dr. Marty Makary for FDA Commissioner – have all been Washington outsiders promising to shake up the agencies.
Bhattacharya, who faced restrictions on social media platforms for his views, was also a prosecutor Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case alleging that federal officials improperly suppressed conservative views on social media as part of their efforts to combat misinformation. The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in that case.
After Elon Musk After acquiring Twitter in 2022, he invited Bhattacharya to the company’s headquarters to learn more about how his views were being restricted on the platform, which Musk renamed X. More recently, Bhattacharya has posted on left the site and joined the alternative site Bluesky. , Bluesky mocked as “their own little echo chamber.”
Bhattacharya has argued that vaccine mandates that exclude unvaccinated people from activities and workplaces undermine Americans’ confidence in the public health system.
He is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an economist at the RAND Corporation.
The National Institutes of Health falls under HHS, which Trump nominated Kennedy to oversee. The NIH’s $48 billion budget funds medical research on vaccines, cancer and other diseases through competitive grants to researchers at institutions across the country. The agency also conducts its own research with thousands of scientists working at NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.
Advances supported by NIH money include a drug for opioid addiction, a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, many new cancer drugs, and the rapid development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Amanda Seitz and Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.