Dr. Jay Bhattacharya speaks at a roundtable discussion with members of the House Freedom Caucus on the COVID-19 pandemic on Thursday, November 10, 2022, at the Heritage Foundation.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call Inc. | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday asked a Stanford University scholar and U.S. coronavirus policy critic to run the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s largest public funder of medical research with a budget of about $47.3 billion. Mr. Jay Bhattacharya of the house was elected.
The NIH is a target of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President Trump nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the agency.
The NIH director oversees 27 institutes and centers conducting early-stage research on everything from vaccines to new drug targets against emerging pandemic threats.
Days before being named HHS secretary, RFK Jr. said he would move quickly to lay off 600 people at NIH and hire all of them. The agency employs approximately 20,000 people.
In addition to the layoffs, Kennedy said he aims to shift the NIH’s focus from infectious diseases such as COVID-19 to working on potential treatments for chronic diseases such as diabetes.
Bhattacharyya, a physician and professor of health policy at Stanford University, has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. government’s coronavirus response policies during the pandemic. Along with two other academics, he published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, calling for a return to normal life for people who were not vulnerable to the virus.
He later sued the government, accusing it of pressuring social media platforms to censor his opinions.
According to his resume, Mr. Bhattacharyya graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997 and received his doctorate from Stanford University’s School of Economics in 2000.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was part of President Trump’s coronavirus task force during the coronavirus pandemic, has been criticized by Republicans for contradicting some of President Trump’s coronavirus policies and recommendations. It became a frequent target and calls for demands were raised. his dismissal.
Francis Collins, the NIH director and Fauci’s boss, defended Fauci in a July 2020 interview with STAT News and said he would consider firing him, as some Republicans had called for. “I can’t even imagine” doing that, he said. As a career federal employee, Fauci’s job is protected from political firing by federal civil service rules, and President Trump has vowed to revoke that protection.
