Trump selects Jay Bhattacharya, a COVID lockdown critic, as the new NIH director

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health policy professor known for criticizing COVID-19 lockdowns, as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Bhattacharya will work alongside vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump has nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Both nominations are subject to Senate confirmation. Bhattacharya is known for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdown measures and advocated for achieving herd immunity through natural spread of the virus among younger Americans. Despite predictions in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that COVID-19 would result in 20,000-40,000 deaths in the U.S., over 1.2 million Americans have died from the virus. Dr. Francis Collins, former NIH director, has criticized the Great Barrington Declaration as a fringe component of epidemiology. Bhattacharya, who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, is honored by the nomination and aims to reform American scientific institutions and make America healthy again. Trump also named Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of HHS under Kennedy. Bhattacharya and Kennedy have pledged to work together to address America’s biggest health challenges.

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