Roll Call - 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.”...
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.
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