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The incoming Trump administration is considering appointing Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a vocal critic of COVID-19 restrictions who has accused the National Institutes of Health of holding too much power, to a major public health role in the government, The Washington Post reported.
The Post cited four anonymous sources who said Bhattacharya’s name is on a list of potential picks that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is compiling to head up the agencies HHS oversees, including NIH.
The NIH is the country’s top source of federal funding for academic research at universities.
Bhattacharya, a physician and professor of medicine, economics and health policy at Stanford University, was one of three authors of an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020, which 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.
Since then, Bhattacharya’s view—that closing schools and businesses was at least as damaging to the U.S. population as the virus itself—has become more widely accepted, especially among conservatives. At the time, then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins privately dismissed the authors as “fringe” and requested a “quick and devastating published take down” of their letter, according to an email that the Post cited.
Bhattacharya had found fault with the NIH well before the pandemic. He co-authored a working paper in 2018 that said the agency’s “propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades” and urged it to “do more to promote innovative science.”
He has also accused the NIH of stifling dissent, based on his experiences during COVID, and of giving its officials too much power. He singled out Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and played a key role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force under the first Trump administration as well as the COVID-19 Response Team under President Biden.
“I would restructure the NIH to allow there to be 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,” Bhattacharya said in a January 2024 interview, according to The Washington Post.
Citing declining trust in public health officials, he has encouraged them to rethink their approach. “Personally, I’ve lost almost all confidence in the American public health establishment,” Bhattacharya told Reason magazine in June.
